[Skam]

Before Autechre were Autechre, they were, for the briefest of moments, Lego Feet. Rob Brown and Sean Booth’s 1991 LP under the moniker came and very quickly went on Manchester’s Skam label, where another purported Autechre offshoot, Gescom, put forth its peculiar discography. In the more than 20 years that have passed since it dropped, it’s developed the kind of mythic aura (and Discogs prices) that such prequels occasionally emanate. Having been far, far too young to experience Lego Feet the first time around (and too poor, or at least not desperately curious enough, to seek out the original vinyl release), I was thrilled to see Skam’s expanded CD reissue in my local record shop this winter. Skam’s website reports that, “due to the amount of death threats, begging letters, and ransom notes,” Lego Feet will once again be available on vinyl soon. And I’m genuinely thrilled to report it offers more than just a curio collection for Autechre completists: while the aforementioned will undoubtedly appreciate a window into Brown and Booth before they’d fully come into their Autechreness, students of dance music in general will enjoy hearing the gamut of 1980s dance music tropes cracking at their foundations.

To speak of Lego Feet as anything but a single work is basically pointless: as on the original, where the usual visual delineations between cuts were absent, the CD contains no individual tracks, just four lengthy CD skip points packed sardine-like with shorter pieces. Start the thing up and you’re quickly caught in a web of punchy 303 lines, turntable cuts, noisy drum machines, and ever-present tape hiss — at its release, a kind of textbook summation of electronic dance music thus far. But Lego Feet’s soundworld hardly sounds like the work of producers content to merely report on a decade of musical trends and technologies. DJs will find no bangers here, just the stuff of bangers past pushed to the limits of genre-recognition. To my ears, Lego Feet is the sound of the 80s beset with scowl and acne, an agitated and deeply angsty iteration of musics embracing their awesomely awkward adolescence. Autechre fans will certainly draw parallels with Incunabula, the duo’s debut-in-earnest, and legions of outspoken Discogs doubters may find it their most easily digestible record save Amber. But the essence of what made Autechre Autechre — that willingness to let the bugs in your code evolve into complex organisms, no matter how sinister their machinations — is only suggested here. If Warp’s massive (and essential) EPS 1991 – 2002 reissue brought that essence into focus like no other single Autechre missive could, then Lego Feet shows where the group began carving out its singular niche — not to mention whence came some of the weirdest electronic excursions of the 1990s.

[Dial]

Phillip Sollmann might be the most impeccably dressed guy in dance music, but his music isn’t nearly as flashy. Sure, the tailoring on his stately and reduced but ultimately floor-ready house and techno is impeccable (and, should you care to take the metaphor further, a gander at his Discogs page shows he only dresses his stuff in the finest labels), but it’s hardly flashy. I sense the man you know and love as Efdemin still subscribes to the belief that dance tracks ought to be judged by the work they do, not the attention they draw to their creator. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Chicago, Efdemin’s 2010 sophomore effort, found itself overshadowed on many a year-end list, perhaps most notably by a record on the same label that owed more than a thing or two to Efdemin’s signature soft touch. Luckily, a squadron of remixers have been coaxing Chicago out of its black turtlenecks and into some brasher duds ever since. And while this latest batch of remixes — featuring Deadbeat, Fred P, Rndm, and Efdemin himself at the controls — doesn’t exactly reimagine the material as a Tavi Gevinson ensemble, at least one of the inclusions may turn some heads.

First up on the A-side is Deadbeat, the dub practitioner whose recent Drawn And Quartered took black many orders of magnitude darker than Efdemin deigns to go. His remix of “Shoeshine,” though, doesn’t so much dip the original in ink as it muddies things up, throwing knots into the bass line and potholes into the percussion. Efdemin’s mulligan of “There Will Be Singing” makes for a relatively drastic realization: the deep chords remain intact, but layers of pitchy drums recast the original’s chilled-backness as a sweaty haze quickly burning off; “Flügelization” might have been a more appropriate tag than “Future Edit.” The flip features the cut most are likely here for, and Fred P’s “Nighttrain” reshape absolutely lives up to the expectations such a meeting of deep house minds drums up. Mr. Peterkin has already gotten a fair amount of mileage out of precisely this sort of zoned-in, circular sound, but until someone else takes house as far down the rabbit hole as he routinely does, I’m not sure it’ll get old. And though Fred has only shaved 40 seconds or so off the original, it makes for one of the briefer nine-minute intervals you’re likely to experience. Oliver Kargl, who shares Pigon duties with Efdemin and appears here under his Rndm guise, doesn’t do much more than streamline and shorten “There Will Be Singing.” But given the three refixes that precede it, dance music fans should find plenty to enjoy, if not (in Fred P’s case) positively slobber over.

[Cómeme]

It’s been a few years since Cómeme, Matias Aguayo’s boombox-centric label/lifestyle/philosophy-of-sorts, sent ripples out from the normally placid-ish Kompakt family. Though the tunes (Aguayo’s “Bo Jack” led the charge) certainly had an impact in dance music, you sensed they weren’t so much the stuff of pitch-black clubs as they were of city streets, of the urban outdoors on long, sweltering summer afternoons. Rather than sound labored over, these often split-sided 12″s felt like they’d been thrown together over a few ice-cold beers, which is in no way a slight. After a relatively slow 2010, the label has been picking up steam again this year, and Cómeme staple Rebolledo’s debut LP, Super Vato, is the centerpiece of the uptick. Once again, it’s a deeply collaborative work emphasizing a certain laid-backness we don’t find very often in club music.

On the one hand, keeping things this loose for nearly a full hour is a good thing. Super Vato always has a smile on its face, with none of its 10 driving grooves taking itself very seriously. Artists often seem to approach albums as forums for solidifying their sound or advancing their aesthetic, but Super Vato doesn’t exactly have those concerns. Instead, the Mexican-born producer makes a techno album of sorts intent on drawing our attention to the stick so much of the stuff has up its ass by comparison. The album opens with “Canivalón,” a track combining the drive and ‘tude of rock with a club-indebted emphasis on atmospherics, and it sets the tone for the remainder of the record; nearly every track, in fact, could be described in much the same way.

That emphasis on mood, though, is also Super Vato‘s main pitfall: the tracks each stake out very specific territory but don’t really do much else. Once Rebolledo settles into a chord progression, as he does on the utterly and aptly feel-good “Positivísimo feat. Raquel Wolff,” you’ll have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers. Sometimes, like with less-than-melodic numbers “Steady Gear Rebo Maschine” and “La Pena feat. Matias Aguayo & Diegors,” the monolithic approach really works; slinky album highlight “Meet Me At TOPAZdeluxe” evokes driving big-room beats with a straight-faced silliness that’s truly contagious. Tracks with more color, though, like “Corvette Ninja” or “Super Vatos,” start to feel a bit like half-formed jams. It’d be great to hear these ideas developed a bit further, maybe even molded into legitimate songs (as Aguayo often manages to do with his own material), but I may be missing the point: I’m not sure these tracks are trying to create club vibes so much as channel them through Rebolledo and company’s own idiosyncratic means. So while you may not find straightforward floor fodder here, you’ll surely find something relatable, maybe even downright poignant.

[Novel Sound]

While the problem isn’t nearly as acute in dance music as in other hype machines — this is, after all, still more or less a singles game, where an artist tends to release multiple records year — there’s still a good deal of heart-racing and bated breath that precedes a high-profile release. But since the re-emergence of his Novel Sound label this summer, Levon Vincent has pretty well snipped hype out of the formula. With Man Or Mistress and now Impression Of A Rainstorm, the mercurial Vincent’s latest, I read no RA or FACT news briefs informing me a new Novel Sound transmission was imminent, nor did I receive a Boomkat blast urging me to act now while they still had a few of the precious, hand-stamped items in stock. Rather, I’d get a text from LWE’s Chris Miller with the news that there’d be a Levon Vincent 12″ on the shelves within a week, one expressing as much incredulity as I experienced reading it. And sure enough, within a week, I’d be at Halcyon (the Brooklyn record store where Vincent once arranged his shifts so that he’d be working the counter on the nights Jus-Ed broadcasted his radio show out of the shop’s DJ booth) picking up my copy. The kind of hyperventilating I do when I place one of these 12″s on my turntable is a vastly different experience from what it could have been: I’m genuinely excited to hear what form Vincent’s inimitable sound will take, not expecting to have my life changed or whole concept of music altered, or whatever experience X press release or Y tweet or Z podcast might normally be corralling me into.

Best of all, I really doubt this is some kind of strategy on Vincent’s part: he’s truly one of the most humble individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and it’s of a piece with everything I know about him. And to say his music — razor-sharp house and techno (but never tech-house) with an unmatched fearlessness about sound — can speak for itself puts it rather lightly. I sense an understatedness in everything Vincent releases (even “Man Or Mistress,” a track as gargantuan as any put forth this year), but Impression Of A Rainstorm is low-key even by Vincent’s standards. Though it follows the banger/banger/less-than-banger formula now familiar to Novel Sound completists, the record is, as the title implies, as right for gray skies as for pitch-black clubs. On “Impression Of A Rainstorm,” Vincent’s minor-key melody is barely visible through sheets of noisy percussion; like your reflection in a puddle, it takes shape only for fleeting moments, only to be obscured by more bluster. Tenser but no more boisterous than the title cut, “Revs/Cost” recalls a less expansive “Double Jointed Sex Freak” in its dissonance and sharp edges. “Pivotal Moments In Life,” which, falling in the B2 slot, means it’s the collection’s least peaktime-oriented cut, actually defies expectations a bit: lighter (as the spot dictates) despite its minor key, it’s the track here most likely to set the floor on fire. Now six releases into the Novel Sound experience, Levon Vincent hasn’t let up. And while we already know he doesn’t need buzz to sell records, he doesn’t necessarily need huge sounds for a big release, either.

[Aus Music]

Minor-key Rhodes stabs and k-holes aside, I’m really not sure what “deep” means in dance music. Like the divide between house and techno itself, we know it when we hear it, and what it means to me isn’t necessarily what it means to you. One would be hard pressed, though, to listen to the music of Paul Cottam — known simply as Cottam to those lucky enough to have snagged one of his elusive, untitled 12″s from the last few years — and not comment on its deepness: slow, syrupy, and supple, his records sound like what Radio Slave might make if you put him up at a mansion in Maui and superglued a bong to his face. Cottam wouldn’t be so effectively hotboxing parties worldwide, though, if it weren’t for the top-shelf quality of his productions and the fullness of the aesthetic he inhabits, and one wouldn’t expect a producer making music at this level to stay more or less anonymous forever. He couldn’t have picked a better place to raise his profile than Aus Music, a label that’s having as good a 2011 as any. To say that Cottam has risen to the occasion with his biggest 12″ yet honestly might be something of an understatement.

Feel how you will about the producer’s embrace of his own pigeonholing: “Deep Deep Down” owns its title and truly sends you somewhere you’ll have to claw your way back from. Where the humidity of Cottam’s earlier work seems to derive from the tropics, the sweatbox that is the first two minutes or so of “Deep Deep Down” sounds like the result of an utter lack of ventilation at the world’s most subterranean basement rave. But as the sun rises inch by inch (in the form of one of the more soaring yet tasteful sax licks in house music in a minute) over a paranoid 303 pattern and prickly sub-bass, we’re whipped into a most transcendent of hysteria. While the tempo, at about 118 BPM, is slow by many producers’ standards, it’s not for Cottam, and it feels like he’s gearing up for a gallop with each unfolding of his beat. Luckily, our producer never breaks a sweat, though we on the floor sure do.

Vakula, truly one of the most interesting house producers working at the moment, seems on paper like a brilliant addition to the package, though his pairing with Cottam makes for something a bit less than the sum of its parts. His re-envisioning of “Deep Deep Down” is nearly Villalobosian in its strangeness — not necessarily a bad thing, but when one of the pleasures of the original is its sheer directness, you may feel like something important is missing here. On the flip, “Twang” hits all of Cottam’s right notes: snidely catchy bass line, fleeting vocal sample, perfectly placed everything. If it doesn’t excite quite like the main event, it’s because few tracks manage to be epic (and, it must be said, deep) in such a singular and confident way. It’s 6 a.m. somewhere, and like some kind of after-hours superhero, Cottam is fast assuming the title of ultimate mind-warper, here to keep late nights pure and safe from the menace of tomorrow.

[Rush Hour Direct Current]

With dubstep, the conversation always begins in the UK, and no matter how far afield you take it — Brooklyn, Poland, Japan, even Arkansas or Iowa or wherever else Skrillex is playing eight shows in a row tonight — it inevitably ends up back there. But it’s not like these so-called provincial scenes lack any of the passion or innovativeness of their spiritual homeland. San Francisco, where South London’s signature low-end co-mingles with the Bay’s fluorescent hip-hop, has certainly produced some of the genre’s most distinctive sounds, with producers like Salva, DJG, and Lazer Sword pushing a vibe all their own. Antaeus Roy, one half of the latter who now resides in Berlin, produces solo as Lando Kal (which, it must be said, is one of the great aliases of our or any time); and with releases on Numbers and Hotflush, he’s established a name for himself in his own right. Since his Numbers split, wherein Lando Kal got an entire career’s worth of squelching and side-chaining out of his system in one side of wax, he’s simmered down considerably, coming off as the less doe-eyed big brother of Sepalcure’s lovestep: where his pals in Brooklyn heat their arrangements up until everything melts together, Lando Kal can be as chilly as one of his hometown’s martinis, though you’re similarly flushed the moment you get a little inside you.

On “Maneuver,” his inevitable inclusion in Rush Hour’s Direct Current series, Lando Kal continues to come into his own, ramping up the energy from his Hotflush release while sounding dapper as ever. Kicking off with desert-dry cymbals and syncopated, business-minded kick, “Maneuver” feels more Hotflush than any Hotflush has felt in quite some time. Once those diamond-cut synths cut through the initial tension, though, the producer’s Bay Area provenance shines through, both in its energy and general aesthetic. As with Direct Current’s other releases, the A-side genuinely aims at being a house track, despite jumping through the hoops of bass music to get there. On the flip, “Run It” would have sounded at home on Frite Nite’s recent Surreal Estate compilation, all irregular rhythms and energetically intricate synth design. It’s not necessarily Lando Kal’s nor Direct Current’s freshest work (his Hotflush release and BNJMN’s Black Square foot those bills, respectively), but it’s difficult to deny the craft that went into these tracks (a craft that’s certainly improved since his last outing). Not to mention that they’re carrying the banner of dubstep at least as well as anything directly UK-related has in awhile. I sense Lando Kal is a name we’re not through hearing.

[Clone Basement Series]

Full disclosure: I have been somewhat impervious to Untold’s charms since his 2009 heyday, in which his Hessle Audio classic I Can’t Stop This Feeling/Anaconda, the gargantuan “Gonna Work Out Fine” doublepack on his own Hemlock label, and “Just For Me” on Hotflush basically flooded the market with insanity. Where those releases featured some of the most elastic, freewheeling party music I’ve encountered since starting to follow the stuff, so much of his material since hasn’t been nearly as innovative. Instead, he’s been getting tougher — certainly not Skrillex tough, but definitely something like 40-breakdowns-per-track-plus-no-more-than-trace-amounts-of-melody tough. (See “Stereo Freeze,” his club-footed (I mean that in a bad way) 2010 single for R&S.) Which is fine and everything: parties need party tunes and not every party needs to be pushing parties forward. I guess I just heard in the man like Jack Dunning the ability to be bold, to freak people out in freaky new ways, to make us maybe think about moshing a little bit but also catching us in way too stoned a state to ever do so. Did he not sense in us that same willingness to get weird?

Untold on Clone, though, was a tasty prospect, maybe even a chance for a fresh start: on a label untethered to post-whatever, Dunning might have the space to branch out again, to wild out on a label with a very different definition of tough. Instead, I hear Untold doubling down on this tenth installment of the Clone Basement Series. “Little Things Like That” certainly sounds of a piece with the sort of techno Mike Dehnert and Levon Vincent (remixing Mike Dehnert) have contributed to the sublabel — menacing dub chords, thumping low end, general vibe of illegality — but stripped of its soul. While driving, “Little Things Like That” isn’t really driving anywhere, relying instead on cheap zaps to remind us we’re reaching a new stretch of highway. The first 15 seconds or so of “Bachelor’s Delight” interestingly suggest the techno of a few waves back, but we quickly get sucked into the kind of whirlpooling synth lines and lacerating percussion that all too often signify Untold these days. He certainly deserves credit for his sound design here — as ugly as his sounds get on “Bachelor’s Delight,” he always finds room for them in the mix — but otherwise, I find very little to revel in. If what I’ve been sensing for the last few years is a shrinking of Untold’s range, then “Little Things Like That” is unfortunately another contraction. I look forward to him getting his groove back.

[Dial]

If you follow dance music as obsessively as I do, you’re likely to feel like there’s something at stake with every 12″ and MP3 that flows your way. Between the eternally forward motion of the UK scene, the endless refining of the Berliners, the fervent keeping of the flame by those in Chicago and Detroit, and the producers worldwide caught in the spiral of any and all of the above, dance music can be surprisingly serious business. But when you’re Roman Flügel — a multi-decade veteran of house, techno, electro, and probably a dozen other microgenre tags whose influence drips off plenty of the producers currently caught in the fray — your seriousness about this stuff doesn’t really need restating. Indeed, as Dial started disseminating new Flügel material late last year in advance of a new full-length, it was clear this godfather wouldn’t be playing kick-drum politics in 2011. But on some of the better 12″s from the last 12 months, both for Dial and for Live at Robert Johnson, and now with the new LP, Flügel showed that he’s not disengaging either.

So what’s utterly current about Fatty Folders? Honestly, not all that much. As it turns out, that all-bleep mix Flügel did for our feature on Live At Robert Johnson a few months back was a pretty good indicator of what his latest full-length would offer: just as on the singles, there’s a subtle wistfulness here for the trends Flügel had a pretty big stake in that don’t get much attention anymore (microhouse, anyone?). But more than a paean to long-lost subgenres or a play at shifting the conversation back in a particular direction, Fatty Folders is a celebration of having an inimitable voice. That these tracks sound lovely mixed with whatever we’re supposed to be calling the newest of the new these days shows that originality — or at the very least owning your sound — can translate into freshness.

Though it lacks Flügel’s best tune from this era (“Brasil,” released in May, is about as sublimely unhinged a track as anyone’s making in house music right now), the CD version of Fatty Folders leads off with the close second, the truly gorgeous “How To Spread Lies.” It’s an auspicious start to a full-length, but Flügel doesn’t sound terribly concerned with topping it, or even with structuring the record to flow out from there. He covers quite a lot of ground, taking us from atmospheric minimal (“Lush Life Libido”) to luxurious synth-pop (“Deo”), from a nightclub going off (“Rude Awakening”) to a series of rainy afternoons (“Song With Blue” and “Softice”). But even at its most disjointed, Fatty Folders is curiously consistent: truly a genius of sound design, Flügel builds all of these tunes out of the same soft and surprisingly pliable materials. Where much of the album could have easily sounded dated, he imbues even his least trendy reference points with something like that new car smell.

But this album isn’t just a matter of a seasoned producer reselling us a decade or more of refurbished trends; that said, he’s not exactly cutting a new highway through the forest, either. I hear Fatty Folders as a good deal more personal than either of these options: it’s Roman Flügel making dance music as only he can. And if it’s quietly making an argument for anything in contemporary electronic music, it’s that we should all strive to just be ourselves.

[Drumpoet Community]

What is one deep house record too many? Is there a point at which we reach some kind of critical mass of deepness? These are the unfortunate thoughts I find myself having each time I set Cavalier’s A Million Horses on the platter. Why unfortunate? Because rarely do I come across a record whose quality is belied by its sheer lack of necessity in most record bags; rarely does something so well produced — so well intentioned — do itself such few favors. Cavalier is the Drumpoet Community-centric alias of Agnès, the seasoned minimal house producer and the force behind Swiss label Sthlmaudio. Cavalier represents Agnès at his housiest, which is to say Agnès has one of hell of a house impulse: over 80 minutes, he inhabits a warm, vintage, and unabashedly soulful pocket with a fervor few can match. When paired with his considerable production experience, this fervor becomes a kind of crusade. Whether putting bottoms into motion swiftly (opener-in-earnest “Kabardin”) or at a slinkier pace (mid-album stretch highlight “Yonaguni feat. Torpedoman”), Agnès handles these sounds confidently and with great care: his vintage drum machines sound dusted off, his keyboards purr and swell, and all his sounds sit together like soulmates.

This would all be fantastic if the very roll Agnès is on weren’t the same roll a lot of other producers have been on for a few years. But while these Cavalier tracks can go toe to toe with so much of the Moodymann-derived material on the market today, they don’t go so far as to exceed them. Even when the tracks are really fantastic — the Nino Rota-vibin’ “Uzunyayla (Hallucinatory Narcosis),” the Isolee-esque “Napoletano” — they curiously don’t draw much attention to themselves; pretty much all they’re doing to differentiate themselves from everything else in your record bag is that they’re well-produced. When the tracks aren’t so great, like the “E2-E4″-reverent “Yonaguni,” you’re likely to yawn more than grimace. And in the context of an album, this lack of sonic individuality coaxes you into a kind of time warp: short tracks (and many of the CD version’s 19 cuts are under the five minute mark) feel remarkably long, and just when the album starts to get into a groove, Agnès drops another slamming hi-hat for what feels like a reset. Even when I divorce myself from all the deep house I’ve been inundated with, I feel fatigued by the halfway mark; when I listen to this album as part of the continuum of deep house obsessiveness, that fatigue sets in almost immediately.

It feels sort of unfair to knock an album because of forces acting outside the album itself, but albums don’t exist in a vacuum. Between Sascha Dive, Brothers’ Vibe and the bulk of the Drumpoet Community roster, this material has been done to death at this point. And producers who release on labels like Laid, Workshop, or even Rush Hour show us that house music doesn’t have to tread water just yet. Cavalier has an ethic, but the project hasn’t yet found that thing that makes this house different from every other house on the block. Until Agnès finds it, I’d wade in cautiously.

[Circus Company]

“Minimal” — in its kinda-organic, vaguely tropical, hinting-at-house iteration — doesn’t get much coverage around these parts anymore. There was a brief moment a few years back, though, when it was on the tip of everyone’s tongues — when each Oslo release was awaited with baited breath, when “Mumbling Yeah” was “Hyph Mngo,” when it was only a matter of time before a new Villalobos stepped in from the wings (that person probably being Romanian, or at least sporting an Onur Özer haircut). And then — blame Berghain, blame 130 being the new 140, blame Luciano (via Carl Craig’s ultimate shame-face) — it was wiped from our nerdspeak, and it’s never really returned.

Sometimes I wonder if we critics messed up, like we tossed this stuff to the side before it had really had a chance to be more than lightweight Villalobos or the soundtrack to a fantastically angular and age-inappropriate haircut. Guillaume Coutu Dumont seems like a good place to start. This Canadian’s tracks (for labels-of-that-moment like Musique Risquée, Hartchef Discos, and, yes, Oslo) didn’t seem like the work of a bandwagoneer so much as a skilled sound designer who happened to find a voice in the form of the moment. Yet so many of those mid-decade clichés never really fit this guy: he looked east, not south, with a sultriness emanating not from a beach bar but through the door of a tobacco-choked jazz club. And his two albums, Face À L’Est and Breaking The Fourth Wall, displayed artistic depth beyond a desire to crank out 13-minute, Ricardo-baiting tools. Why exactly are we content — thrilled, even — to talk about Roland-driven tracks that could have been made in 1986 instead of turning our full attention to someone who’s really making a go at creating his own sounds? Did we fall prey to toxic associations?

I’m not sure “Ubiquitous Gaze,” Coutu Dumont’s latest for Circus Company, will be the release that brings him or any of these guys back to frontrunner status, because trends or no trends, these tracks just don’t sound all that fresh. Opening with a vocal sample that asserts “this music thing” is “the only thing for me,” Coutu Dumont spends nearly nine and a half minutes riding slamming disco drums, twinkling piano licks, and warm, gritty strings. Though pretty, it’s mostly just pleasant — Moodymann-lite, maybe — and there’s not much here to justify its considerable length. A “Stringapella” version basically tweaks the original into a hefty intro, which depending on your DJ style could be a good thing. “You’re The One,” a more claustrophobic take on Coutu Dumont’s sound design (and an infinitely less obnoxious use of 20th Century Steel Band’s “Heaven And Hell Is On Earth” than that Dances With White Girls song), has real promise. But compositionally, he’s treading water here, neither building nor switching up the flow enough to support the extended runtime. Trends and affiliations are meaningless if the tunes are compelling enough to reach the sorts of DJs who could give a shit about petty music journo banter. These are probably not those tunes.