[Vizual Records]

There is a long tradition in aesthetics presupposing that art should aspire to resemble nature. Art’s artifice, all the craft and design, should disappear from view, leaving behind only a surface on which elements seem to move with natural necessity. The enjoyment of art stems in part from experiencing something that seems almost like nature, while all along still knowing somehow that it’s artificial, shaped by the hands of man. The chance of enjoying the four tracks offered up by Joshua Iz for his second release on his own Vizual Records thus seems summed up by the title. “Flower Sparks” reflects how these numbers seem to unfold organically, yet also use a distinctly synthetic sound palette that reminds you of the electrical energy whirring through machines that makes it possible. What’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Flower Sparks” was the name of the VST plug-in Joshua used to generate the synth lines that take center stage throughout — buzzing with electric warmth, they wind through twisting melodies in fluid undulation.

This synth style is in full effect on “Rydim Culture” lending the track a breezy, effervescent air, snaking over a series of brisk, bright synth stabs. Like its three kin, “Rydim Culture” has a glitzy, uptempo house vibe well-suited for Friday night at a high-rise bar in midtown, white leather sofas, high heels, and an expansive terrace view of city lights glowing through the rain. It’s futurist-escapist, soundtracking a pleasure-centric throwdown hidden far away from the stress, anxieties and lurking paranoias of the urban jungle. The EP’s titular opener derives its enthralling, bouncy momentum from the gloriously wild throbs of an acid-y synth riff. Even though all the filters and distortions on the synth have a distinctly digital sheen to them, their rich tonal variety would support the idea that digital is at times just as capable of sounding alive as analog is.

While Joshua’s tunes are in the pocket, the result of more than ten years in the house music game, a number of vocal sentiments here appear a bit tacked on. “Rydim Culture” includes a rasta shouting the title over a house groove that has ostensibly little to do with “rydim,” while “Alpha & Omega” touts a diva asserting “I am the alpha of kinky hair… and the omega of your dreams… gaze upon me.” Such new age mythologizing seems more appropriate for some psychedelic disco than chic house. That’s to say, while Joshua’s production style tastes like champagne, his vocal samples smell like weed. Not a contradiction, perhaps; what’s deep house after all but regular house just more stoned?

The Result have fashioned a 12″ whose delirious stereo carnival antics finds it closest analog in the deep-end productions Matt John cultivated while after-after-hoursing at Bar 25. Catenaccio label owner Benjamin Fehr has a track record of dense and weird productions, like “Better Thrill” and “My Favorite Shop Is Me,” and here his first collab with Falko Brocksieper effectively doubles the trouble. It’s a case of minimal gone maximal, flush with dizzying layers of atmosphere, utilizing the broad ranges of the stereo field, placing sounds everywhere from the most intimate interior to the most unfathomable distance.

Don’t let the light, uptempo groove of “Niagara” give you a false sense of security, as its title should warn you of a perilous descent: buried in the middle of the track is a queasy, warbly sound of human voices in wordless exclamation, as if going over a waterfall only to have their cries echo infinitely in the space of some unholy cavern. The cry disappears for a spell, then resurfaces, tossed back into the foamy churn by some merciless counter-current. There’s enough space and variation in effect each time the cry reappears that you’re left with a disorienting, spectral experience of sound: did I just hear that? Did it come and go or was it always there, first menacing me, then setting me free?

At least “Niagara” is still held together with some semblance of a straight-ahead groove. The flip “Give Up” is even more spaced-out. The spine of the thing is fastened to grinding bass, a rough and undulating snake, and a bit of wooden tribal clang. Overhead, disconnected forest of sounds hang together in vertiginous array, expanding and contracting, flying in and out of mutual orbits with enough force that one expects the sounds to lose cohesion altogether and go spiraling off in a multitude of directions, like a star disintegrating into the endless abyss. Sense of order comes and goes. You give up, moving with abandon through a whirlwind of blips and shimmering noise at high speed. Then at the very end, it sounds like someone engaged the warp drive, only to find themselves shooting through a wormhole gone black. “Give Up” doesn’t end so much as recede into oblivion. It’s a powerful effect that recalls films like “Alien” or the recent “Moon” which contend with the psychedelic vastness of space. Two challenging, engaging tracks that deserve repeated listening in order to fully taken in the pleasures of navigating their mysterious microcosms.

One thing about the whole general Crosstown/Wolf + Lamb tech-housey sound, on display here in the Jamie Jones and Lee Foss duo Hot Natured, is that it’s often at its best when it’s got balls. I don’t mean balls like courage, I mean balls, like stanky, swaggering balls. The way that Prince and Rick James and all those other synth-funk deities whose influence you can feel in Jamie’s poppier productions, the way those guys have balls. When it comes to Jamie, Lee and their extended LA/Detroit/Brooklyn buds, Prince is all over the place, most notably through the effects of his club classic “Erotic City,” which you can for example feel shining through in JJ’s omnipresent “Summertime.” The name “Nikki Norris” even sounds like a Prince B-side, or maybe a forgotten member of his extended lace & leather-draped harem.

Rowdy house grooves and pelvic-pushing beats abound on the three tunes of “h.e.a.d.s,” more than enough for a pole dance and a few minutes in the back room. “Heads” is lead by a vocal sample that evokes the sound you’d blurt if someone rudely grabbed your junk and twisted. Like the tracks that follow it, “Heads” works by way of dynamic interplay between a hypnotic buoyancy and straight-ahead 4/4 groove. Hot Natured’s see-saw bounce is the secret passkey to a world of woofer funk, not only Prince and Rick but anything sleazy that sounds good in full trunk-rattle bass blasts. “Nikki Norris” is sparer, deriving its energy from cut-up samples and plonky synth splinters. A cluster of girl vocals, perhaps a minor multitude of Nikki herself, stay lurking underneath — guess this time it’s not girls on top. Jamie & Lee close out with a bang: “Turning Tricks” takes an 80s funk jam and wrings it into sweaty piston-thrusts and guitar-scratch loops, punctuating them with echoey exclamations of “nasty freak (freak freak freak freak…)!” The kicks ebb and flow with force, utilizing the sea-saw bounce/house groove dynamic to maximum effect: it’s serious Rick James cocaine-house. Small wonder the title invokes the world’s oldest profession, because its relentless grooves are doggystyle rowdy. “Turning Tricks” almost makes the other tracks here look tame by comparison, which is no small feat, as it’s clear that Jamie and Lee aren’t wasting any of the steam they’ve been building over the past couple of years.

[Cityfox]

The young Lee, long-time Detroiter, Seth Troxler’s former roommate, last seen trafficking in a loose cabal made of Wolves, Lambs and Crosstown Rebels, kick starts a new label by the Zürich-based Cityfox crew. In case you were curious about Lee’s agenda, the opening vocals should fill you in: “I’m only here for one night, but I’m playing for keeps. Sex, drugs and magic, baby, no time for sleep. ” A hard-hitting DJ’s creed for sure. The sparse, wired-tight rolling beats and insistent horndog bass line underneath leave little room for doubt that the man means what he says. Like “Mantra,” the vocals on “Vibrant Member” are breathy and down-pitched, perhaps after-effects of Wolf + Lamb’s patented Angelizer software. But now there’s an edgy uncertainty in the track’s monologue, which could be taken as a raw confession, or a huge piss-take. “I said I’d take care of you. What I meant is, I’d ask my dad for the money.” But wait, how much can you trust a guy who just told you he was in town only for one night? This guy who would love to be there but “plane tickets are expensive right now”? What went down in that interstitial space between A1 and A2? When the sun came up in a strange town, did some poor girl find herself bearing more of Lee than just a handsome memory?

After two tracks of restrained, intimidating techno laced with psycho-sexual subterfuge, side B gets down to hand-waving and the ass-shaking, making for a nicely diverse release. “Whatcha Need” has in title and sound all the rollicking, uptempo soulful energy you’d expect from a early 80s South Bronx street party. Looped slivers of funk guitar scratch anchor what’s in essence a ketamine-friendly version of filter house. Finally, “Reverse Caress” charms and disarms with a bouncing bed of congas and a mutilated saxophone that sounds like it was sampled from a cassette tape found mangled in the street. The sax’s serious tape flutter fuels a drunken delirium, perhaps a sign that you might want to call it a night already, unless you want to hear Lee on the phone in a few weeks…”Ok I got two-fifty….because I think you’re worth it..”

[Macro]

If Salazar turned in his needles today he’d leave sporting a first-class resume: member of the legendary Underground Resistance, core contributor to live acts like Los Hermanos, and steady recording mercenary for Carl Craig’s Planet E. So it’s not like S2′s aching for a new belt-notch. If anything, his latest on Macro proves that he’s still out busting his hump like the rest of them to turn out quality music. “Arcade” is gorgeous, emotive techno, an exemplary scene of machines catching feelings: the bleedings of a robot heart. The track is propelled by moody saw-wave synths and a sense of near-balearic drift teased out by the snakings of vaguely Oriental leads. A balance of a restrained, yet bright tonal palette together with a general sinusoidal expressiveness lands it not far from being a Gui Boratto jam. If the tune’s in fact meant as an arcade experience, think Tron-style rabbit hole immersion, a hallucinatory symbiosis of player and game, the fleeting transports offered by a roll of quarters and an overactive imagination.

Riding momentum from his killer “Art of Sorrow,” Macro master Stefan Goldmann turns in a fluid and patient remix that’s double the length, in which elements of Salazar’s original now pass like strands in a growing quilt. The first half is fairly straightforward; it’s the mutations in the second half that will command your attention. From the halfway point on, enjoyment of this track will largely be contingent on your stance towards the uses and abuses of traditional Asian instruments in dance music — koto and flute, specifically. Their deployment in this context is a careful balancing act: done well, they lace a track with an air of elegant mystery; done poorly, they invoke any number of kitsch-tastic images: cheapo samurai flicks, take-out restaurant muzak, the pre-recorded backing tracks favored by subway buskers. In other words, Goldmann can be lauded not only for turning in the sort of monster re-work you thought he would, but also for swerving to avoid pan-flute hell. He pulls this off by eschewing the dangers of sugary melodies and concentrating, with all the micro-finesse of a watchmaker, on allowing the instruments to deftly chime across the 4/4 rhythm — operatic to be sure. You get the pounding of the heart, and above it, the soaring of the soul. Goldmann’s upped the passion considerably from S2′s already-swooning original, and when it comes time to land the remix, he decides to take it all the way into a super-long symphonic splashdown. Killer on the dance floor? To be sure. I imagine it also goes great with sweet and sour chicken.

[Connaisseur Supérieur]

Moeller’s latest takes the echoey atmospheres from last year’s “Electricity” EP and injects them with some big-room steroidal girth, resulting in muscular late-night dub techno. Besides flushed and sweeping filters, the means to providing the “Big Thrill” in question seems to be a very prominently mixed low end, particularly the bass, a face-slapper rough with grizzly saturation. It’s thunderous bass that yearns to be free, a brown-note floor-rattler so forceful home listeners (who will doubtlessly enjoy “The Big Thrill” there as well) will have to acknowledge they’re missing the full experience imparted in a club. Above the low-end rumble, filters arc and pop in unexpected cadence, and there’s a disorienting whiplash noise that sounds like laser zippers being unfastened at lightning speed. On headphones there are traces of a slightly murky fidelity working in the track’s favor, as if the sounds on display are merely inadequate vessels for its surging energy. This minor imperfection adds to the thrill, giving it an organic liveliness that sometimes falls by the wayside during a quest for absolute aural cleanliness.

Supposedly there’s a “dub” version in the A-2 slot, but its lack of distinction from the A-1 incarnation underlines terminological inconsistencies in the world of electronic music: when do you call it a dub, when it is a mix, a remix, an edit, or a re-edit, etc? Is there an Academie de Techno that can be appealed to here? In this case, the “dub” of “The Big Thrill” has nothing to do with King Tubby or Echocord. The peaks of the original have been sanded down and murky interlude spaces have been extended. The intro relies more on bubbly percolation, and more gaseous effervescence sprayed across the course of things. Greece house producer Lemos turns a proper remix on the flip, screwing and tightening the bolts on Moeller’s big-boned, mac-truck original, producing a more spare, tightly-wound, more housier incarnation. The filtered elements are less chaotically submerged, their delay effects pared down to faster, rubber-band like echoes. It makes one wonder again what the A2 is doing here, as it seems to interrupt the nice balance between the barreling opener and the stripped-down remix, which taken together form a nice pair and an unexpected addition to Moeller’s discography.

[BBE]

We were always minimal. This seems to be the learned lesson of the Innervision team’s stunning 2-disc comp The Grandfather Paradox. Their laser-focused curatorial skills deftly traverse a musical history so broad that we’re left with a series of epiphanies about form and genre that taken together read: we were minimal, even when we didn’t know it. In their liner notes Henrik Schwarz, Âme and Dixon write the compilation title stemmed from the feeling they were “traveling back in time and manipulating the old music with modern knowledge.” Except things are in truth a bit more complicated than that. The paradox, in case you were never a high school science nerd, goes like this: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, which in turn means you could never be born, and thus never go back and kill him, and so on. As far as this compilation is concerned, the translation of this problem into music-historical terms might be: if you start screwing around with your own predecessors, what becomes of your identity as an artist, and thus what in turn happens to all the screwing around you’re doing? The result of this abyssal probing is the opening up of an infinite conversation between past and present, in which each iteration binds the two more inextricably together.

On the first disc, past and present are cross-wired from the start. The mix opens with a linchpin track in minimal music: Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint,” famously sampled by The Orb for “Little Fluffy Clouds.” The transition from here through Liquid Liquid’s steely street grooves is a tour de force. The rest of the mix is as well deployed with the trio’s characteristic effervescence and elegance, a seamless and dynamic metamorphosis of genres: Balearic into funk into acid into house into techno. On full display here is the sheer elasticity of the term minimal; it is fundamentally a vibrantly trans-genre category, and as such its musical value can never be subsumed within what we know as minimal techno. The second disc provides some mix highlights in full with a few other key gems thrown in for good measure, including tracks by Arthur Russell and Young Marble Giants. Neither disc assumes a comprehensive or defining posture towards minimal music, preferring instead to revel in the term’s fertile open-endedness.

The movement of history is always about reinterpretation, and as the Innervisions crew points out, minimal is a highly suitable genre for such a DJ time warp: “In minimal music there is so much in between the sounds and the space, which gives you a lot of opportunities for your own interpretation.” Brimming with insight, The Grandfather Paradox not only takes the spaces of minimal as the grounds for its creative interventions, it leaves these spaces still fascinatingly exposed and open, as if sending them into the future, prepared be born again once more.

[Wolf + Lamb Music]

Raise your hand if you saw this one coming: a tech-house appropriation of Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Phenomenal Woman.” Oh, nobody? In the long run, however, it’s not much of a surprise given Seth Troxler’s predilection for 12″ curveballs. If his output in the past twelve months is any indication, picking up a Troxler cut without peeping it first is a bit like playing one of those mechanical claw games at the state fair — you had the same odds of taking home the elegant sensuality of “Love Never Sleeps” as you did the siren-wail abrasion of “Aggression”. How Seth got it in his head to give the club treatment to the revered poet laureate is anybody’s guess, but the crazy thing is, it works. And if you grasp this in its radical-ness, you’ll understand one principle of dance music innovation: as long as the booty-moving goes down, use any sound or source material you want, because the ends justify the means.

Done effectively, club music absorption of a well-known sample should expose something new in it, and true enough it’s remarkable how well the twists and turns of Angelou’s poetic cadence fit Troxler’s polished, spare house groove. What’s more, not only does Angelou’s paean to feminine charms find the dance floor a fitting place to put its theory into practice, insofar as it’s largely a catalog of minor anatomical delights, it’s also not that hard to make the rhetorical substitution of woman for track. Instead of advancing the cult of the woman, Maya could very well be praying at the temple of the beat. Imagine one last verse, where after “It’s in the arch of my back / the sun of my smile / the ride of my breasts,” she would say “it’s in the throb of my kick… the pulse of my bass… the flicker of my stereo-panned conga sample….”

On the flip, Troxler’s remix of Nicolas Jaar’s “The Student” is a heady delight after your ears have been primed by “Aphrika”s wonky audacity. Troxler’s production skills, which understandably take a bit of back seat on the A-side to the full-bodied vocal, are manifest here in their usual impressive form. Thudding and smacking noises abound here one wonders if he gets his drum patches from field recordings of billiard parlors or bowling alleys. Overhead, a moody, tumbling piano line unfolds in suspended Satie-like clusters while hi-hats and live kit samples build an expressive, jazz-tinged groove — a good soundtrack should Wong Kar Wai ever shoot one of his elegantly melancholic films at Fabric. If you take this release and stand it next to Troxler’s recent stunning Ibiza Voice podcast, comprised solely of new and forthcoming Wolf + Lamb material, you’ve got reason enough to believe that both artist and label are geared for a banner year.