[Macro] (buy vinyl tk) (buy mp3s)

Three or four dudes hunched over laptops, MIDI controllers, and a tangle of cable — is that a band? With relatively few exceptions (the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Theo Parrish’s Rotating Assembly, and Innerzone Orchestra all come to mind), that’s about as close as you’ll get to one in club music. Plenty of red-blooded guitar wielders have owed a massive debt to house and techno; some, like Animal Collective or Hot Chip, owed one massive enough to make us reconsider the genre to which we’d had them pegged. But has a power trio — the “rock band” in its most elemental form — ever tried to straight-up play techno? On their 12″ debut for eternally unpredictable Macro imprint, Elektro Guzzi do just that, and they claim to do it without overdubs, loops, or laptops.

There’s no question that Elektro Guzzi (featuring guitarist Bernhard Hammer, bassist Jakob Schneidewind, and drummer Bernhard Breuer) has passed the threshold of truly embodying — and not just filching from — the techno aesthetic. “Hexenschuss” and “Elastic Bulb” both rise and fall, tense up and release, and groove just like every electronically produced side in your record bag. The band’s trick (their co-producer and mixer, Cheap Records honcho Patrick Pulsinger, surely deserves some credit for this) is harnessing the unpredictable variations in organically generated drum hits and guitar stabs to lend their techno an exciting layer of sonic uncertainty. “Hexenschuss” proves especially adept at this trick. Once Breuer’s kick drum settles into a 4/4 thump, his partners ramp up the tension, putting their instruments in the service of atmosphere rather than melody or rock-out. While it’s undeniably impressive how well the trio holds together during the track’s two big breakdowns, their choice of gear becomes only the faintest of background chatter; as a subtle techno burner, “Hexenschuss” transcends any inherent gimmick. A good deal longer and less interesting than the A-side, “Elastic Bulb” shows that Ableton Live isn’t the only cause of loopy formlessness in tech-house these days. But their full-band grasp of the sort of tech-house weirdness their label boss Stefan Goldmann made his early career out of — not to mention the detailed sounds only perfectly miked live instruments can leave on tape — renders it a worthy listen regardless. Like a Pipecock rant taken to ultra-extremes, Elektro Guzzi proves that analog really might have more to offer than your average bedroom producers’ ones and zeros. I’m not sure this power techno trio concept will catch on like comic book movies or nü-deep house, but let’s hope these Elektro Guzzi boys maintain their chops.

[Syncrophone] (buy vinyl)

Whether out of self-censorship or plain old yacht rock ignorance, almost none of the press surrounding Anthony “Shake” Shakir’s Frictionalism 1994-2009 has mentioned that “Arise,” one of the retrospective’s standout inclusions, is basically just a beefed-up edit of the closing drum break from Steely Dan’s “Aja.” That’s right, techno brethren: Shake just made you listen to Steely Dan. Featuring the percussion acrobatics of legendary session drummer Steve Gadd (who, rock ‘n roll lore has it, pulled off his contribution to the eight-minute track in a single take), the title cut from the band’s 1977 album has always felt like something more than a guilty pleasure, a soft rock epic with enough funk and stoney strangeness to win over even the Dan’s most humorless anti-fans. And on a 1998’s …Waiting For Russell 12″ for his Frictional imprint, he officially brought Walter Becker’s and Donald Fagen’s irony machine — perhaps the smoothest conceptual art project of all time — into the fold of his myriad influences.

First arriving in the shops just ahead of Rush Hour’s seminal Shake compilation, an “Arise”-specific reissue from the house fanboys at Syncrophone seeks to woo record buyers with clear vinyl and a Trus’me remix. If you’ve already shelled out for Frictionalism on vinyl, or if you snagged the record the first time around, is it worth shelling out again? Considering you’re likely to wear out the grooves on whichever the version you’ve already got, I’d say so. “Arise” takes the rather ambiguous mood of the source material and distills it to pure euphoria. Rather than build a song in the strictest sense, Shake loops the sweet spot of the break and, with various combinations of drum machines and filters, lets it expand and contract. When it bursts open, as it does just a handful of times, it’s truly a dance floor moment to behold. If anything, “Arise” proves a producer can make something inherently tracky (typically a term of derision around these parts) without sacrificing craft or playability. It’s a relatively simple disco-house slight of hand, sure, but it’s a drop you won’t soon forget — or stop trying to bust out in every DJ set you can manage.

Prime Numbers labelhead Trus’me trades in the kind of sample-based slow cookers Shake is only now getting due credit for. Strangely, his remix of a remix shies away from the producers’ shared aesthetic by going rather big-room. Where Shake found joy, Trus’me finds bleakness, if not end-of-night nihilism. If the mood is present at all in Steely Dan’s original, it’s almost nowhere to be found in “Arise,” a point made all the more apparent by the dissonance of the original tracks playing softly underneath the added shadowy, Carl Craig by-way-of deep house vamps. It’s an interesting recontextualization to say the least, but I’m not sure that it casts either Trus’me or Shake in the finest light. “Arise” thrives on sunshine, and this vampire remix leaves me thinking it should stay that way. Still, any Frictionalism holdouts should take note of this release. And while you’re at it, make a pit stop at the used bin and root around for Aja. Shake can tell you: it won’t bite.

Since 2003, the Unsound Festival has been about bringing the disparate impulses inherent in electronic music under one roof — a music event urging you to scratch your chin one minute and dance your ass off the next. Presenting itself like a film festival but booked like a forward-thinking summertime weekender, Unsound has consistently showcased brilliant and challenging new sounds without ripping them from their underground trappings. Any music festival as likely to feature Sunn 0))) as Zomby is sure to pique my interest, but by nature of it happening in Krakow, Poland, its ridiculously open bookings stood quite a bit out of my reach. New York City — its population overeducated, overstimulated, and relatively accepting of high-end dance music thanks in no small part to Beyond Booking’s forward-thinking Bunker parties — always seemed like the perfect candidate for something like Unsound, and for a week in February 2010, my fair city got it. And not even a knock-off, either! The Unsound Festival New York brought a truly impressive and deliciously diverse line-up of electronic musicians — asking you to ponder, get down, or do both at once — to underground venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn. And I was lucky enough to trudge through New York’s famous February weather to witness the festival on Little White Earbuds’s behalf. (Very big ups are due to Gamall Awad of Backspin Promotions for making this possible.)

Before you commence living vicariously through me or skewering my apparent snub of your favorite electronic music subgenre, please allow me to offer this disclaimer on my coverage. Like most New Yorkers, I have a day job that doesn’t stop for Ezekiel Honig. And one of the venues, Littlefield, in Brooklyn’s quasi-apocalyptic Gowanus district, would have been nigh-on-impossible to get home from in the wee hours of a “school night” for a dude who doesn’t own a car. (My sincerest apologies, Morgan Geist.) In the interest of staying sane enough and awake enough to fully appreciate the programming LWE’s readers (and, I must admit, your correspondent) would take the greatest interest in, I had to streamline Unsound’s programming somewhat to best suit our needs. If your musical interests and general stamina are anything like mine, my guess is you would have done the same.

A still from “Blowjob” by l_c_m_tt_

After my supremely special guest for the weekend, LWE editor-in-chief Steve Mizek, arrived from Chicago, my Unsound week began in earnest. We kicked off the festival on Friday, February 5, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, to watch Carl Craig and nsi. perform live soundtracks for Andy Warhol’s short films “Blowjob” and “Kiss.” I’d been hearing whispers throughout the day that Tobias Freund’s participation in the festival had been nixed, but Max Loderbauer could certainly have done much worse than snagging Sasu Ripatti to sit in for his visa complication-addled nsi. partner. I can’t imagine the duo had much prep time, but I found the seasoned improvisers’ impressionistic score for “Kiss” hitting plenty of the right notes. The piece, however, didn’t seem to have much to do with the sloppy black-and-white making-out happening right above Loderbauer’s and Ripatti’s heads; indeed, about halfway through the short film, Loderbauer closed the laptop the duo was using to monitor the film and proceeded to just jam on keyboards and effects units to their hearts’ content. C2, donning his finest mnml scarf and sipping daintily on red wine, was more in the business of soundtracking than the opening act. His score, filled with musical double-entendres befitting his tawdry material, wasn’t necessarily any better than what preceded it, but I found it on the whole more engaging. Steve and I had known for months we’d be seeing Loderbauer and Ripatti later that weekend at the Moritz Von Oswald Trio’s U.S. debut, but we’d been tipped off — by MVO himself, on LWE no less — that we’d be seeing Craig on stage once more that weekend as an honorary member of the Trio. The performance thus proved to be an auspicious beginning. But our night was hardly over.

After a dinner of artisanal tacos, Mexican Coke, and rampant dance music gossiping, Steve and I made our way to Public Assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for the first of three Unsound-affiliated Bunker parties. After head-nodding in the coat check line to Legowelt’s supremely nerdy live set, we made our way into the club’s dimly-lit back room, where Luke Hess was playing a tasty if same-y dub techno PA to a disconcertingly tiny group of dancers. The room began filling, though, as midnight — and the U.S. debut of Newworldaquarium –drew near. I don’t normally get too jazzed about live sets, as a dude standing in front of his laptop generally loses my interest pretty quickly, but NWAQ’s nearly two-hour performance was truly one of the most revelatory things I’ve ever witnessed in a club. Members of the now-packed dance floor were literally screaming in bliss as our protagonist dropped classic after classic — yes, he played a souped-up version of “Trespassers,” and yes, we all almost died — at an impossibly loud volume. (Once again, Beyond Booking, kudos on maintaining perhaps the best soundsystem for house and techno in town.) NWAQ gave us a masterclass in letting just a few perfectly funky sounds do a whole lot of work, and hearing some of his best works in succession really brought out their subtle brilliance. Too exhausted and too blasé about the line-up for the next three hours to hang around for Ripatti’s Uusitalo set (a very rare thing, and a tantalizing replacement for tobias.’s planned closing performancing), Steve and I and our ringing eardrums called it a night.

Saturday, February 6 paired another Warhol film with a new electronic soundtrack, this time one performed by musicians less associated with dance music and on a more epic scale. While Steve and I recovered, LWE correspondent Momo Araki ducked into (Le) Poisson Rouge in Manhattan and filed this report:

“Empire,” in Andy Warhol’s words, is a film to “see time go by” though twenty-four hours of continuous footage (compressed to eight screening hours) of the Empire State Building. It captures nonevents like blinking building lights to mark gradients of time. Though I was only able to catch about ninety minutes of Groupshow’s eight-hour accompaniment to the film, with about thirty to fifty people cycling in and out of the show at any moment, some staying briefly, others ostensibly for its entirety, I thought of their set also as a nonevent. To be clear, this is not a criticism. It felt right to enjoy the intimate basement performance in a casual manner with the metropolis buzzing routinely above. The performance seemed more about circulation than destination. You enter, tune in, chill out, leave, get a sandwich, come back, and go home, all at your leisure. The players did the same: Jan Jelinek would leave his seat, and with his synths hibernating, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler would strip down the sound to a rhythm section of drum pads and delayed electric guitar. When Jelinek returned, he’d drone things out, at which point Leichtmann would get up for a brief reprieve.  

Things might have been more formal and intense from the outset, or have intensified towards the culmination, but with ”Empire” as their reference point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Groupshow intended for, and executed, this casual pacing throughout the eight hours. To be clear, this wasn’t about the sensory overload achieved by Warhol and the Velvets. Groupshow would sketch up a jam for about ten to fifteen minutes, cut it loose into the ether, and begin anew, much like their latest album. Formerly known as the Kosmischer Pitch live band, Jelinek, Pekler and Leichtmann last came to New York to perform Jelinek’s material from the 2005 album of the same name. My friends reported it was like contemporized Krautrock; I didn’t catch any motorik beat this time, but the band was definitely on form and abundant with musical ideas. With so many reference points to their sound, describing it is an exercise in futility (for those curious, a simple Googling will help); nonetheless, finally catching them live left me excited about their next moves. With the Moritz von Oswald Trio to lay down later that night in a musical style none too dissimilar from Groupshow, Saturday ended up a truly rich day for improvised electronics.

–

Steve and I joined Momo at (Le) Poisson Rouge later that evening for the aforementioned Moritz Von Oswald Trio performance, the event we’d been anticipating more than any other at Unsound. (A quick word for the designer sweater-wearing bro working LPR’s coat check: if my hooded sweatshirt and pea coat are worn as one item and fit easily on one hanger, how can you sleep at night knowing you charged up the wazz for two items? I stuffed my hat in my coat pocket — why not just charge me for three? And promoters wonder why no one goes out in Manhattan anymore.) Apparently hundreds of others had been similarly set abuzz: after an opening performance of Ravel & Mussorgsky pieces (from which C2 and MVO crafted their 2008 Recomposed album) that honestly felt a bit distracting and patronizing — must electronic dance music be paired with classical music in order to take on an acceptable level of artistic seriousness? — the crowd waited anxiously for the stage to fill with the creators of last year’s instant classic Vertical Ascent.

(L-R) Moritz Von Oswald, Max Loderbauer, Carl Craig and Francois K. Photo by Dariowaty

When Ripatti, Loderbauer, and MVO finally took their places behind mountains of gear, they were joined by C2 and Francois Kevorkian, the latter of which lent the group his legendary mixing skills. At the end of their performance, C2 grabbed a microphone and declared this particular MVOT performance to be “the best set” they’ve ever performed, and it’s tough to imagine he’s wrong. While lacking the floor-readiness of some of Vertical Ascent’s most memorable moments, the personnel extracted genuine charisma and humanity out of a stageful of machines. Analog bleeps soared over boiling washes of dub and churning electro-acoustic rhythms, serving up what Momo elegantly described in an email afterwards as “a lush synthesis of modern music from the last thirty years.” It was a supremely tough act to follow, and shit-hot New York producer Levon Vincent didn’t necessarily try with his closing DJ set. He just did what he’s best at — playing the nastiest, toughest house jams imaginable — and in the process coaxed a decent percentage of the crowd into a dance party. His set, encompassing plenty of deep, dirty cuts and such gems as Floating Points’s “Vacuum Boogie” and his own “Six Figures,” would have been the highlight of practically any other club night, and it left me and my friends with awesomely sore feet on Sunday. One epic weekend down, one editor back to Chicago, and one equally epic weekend to go.

While I’d had Wednesday’s experimental Silence and Noise showcase at LPR with Tim Hecker, Radian, and Mountains on my calendar, a sizeable blizzard kept me confined to my apartment. That left a program of electronic music documentaries on Monday, February 8, to hold down my weekday Unsound activities. My girlfriend recently gave me a copy of White Noise, the cult British electro-sleaze-pop record featuring BBC Radiophonic Workshop guru Delia Derbyshire, so I was thrilled to see the New York premiere of Kara Blake’s “The Delian Mode” and learn a bit more about this enigmatic tape machine manipulator. Both that film and the documentary that followed it, Mika Taanila’s “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be,” about crazed Finnish computer guru Erkki Kurenniemi, suffered from too much style and too little substance. The Derbyshire documentary in particular glossed over tangible biographical details — critical for giving audiences more than an insinuation of her importance to contemporary electronic music — in favor of making a kind of filmic homage to her method and aesthetic. (“The Alchemists of Sound,” a BBC documentary from 2003 available on YouTube, is more useful to anyone truly interested in her and her Radiophonic Workshop colleagues’ work.)

Friday, February 12 brought on the second Bunker party, perhaps the one I was most excited for. It seemed that others might be suffering from club night overload. As I waited outside for my +1, I watched more than a handful of potential attendees step up to the door, grimace at the $30 cover, and wander off to someplace cheaper. I was almost compelled to intervene, to grab these Friday night revelers by the shoulders and explain to them that the legendary Anthony “Shake” Shakir, the brilliant Mike Huckaby, and the exciting underdog DJ Qu would be playing, and that such a lineup just might be priceless, but I felt for these folks. With the exchange rate, these Unsound Bunkers were more expensive than a Saturday night at Fabric; it’d be a lot to pay for a standalone night, let alone a night in a week packed sardine-like with them. So it goes. I made it in for the last half-hour or so of hometown headfuck practitioner and ever-opinionated Internet personality Eric Cloutier’s opening set in the back room, and he mixed up just the sort of the painstakingly-curated smoothness for which he’s gaining international renown.

Next up was DJ Qu, an Underground Quality member I’ve somehow never seen play out before. He was absolutely brilliant, playing a set of un-trainspottable stoner-house that just got better and better with every track. It was only in the last twenty minutes or so that I could drag myself into the front room for the final moments of Mike Huckaby’s set. Huckaby’s mixing was a touch rough and his track selection somewhat scattered, but dancers seemed to be having a good time. The real gem of the night, if not the whole festival, was Shake. Opening with a sublime string of poppy, vocal-laden Detroit house tracks, Shake cast his adoring crowd in multicolor, a feat awesomely at odds with the Bunker’s signature low light. Obviously fatigued, the veteran flubbed some transitions and had to spend some time seated behind the booth as his set went on, but every single track he dropped was pure gold. And the guy’s still got plenty of tricks up his sleeve. At one point, Shake dropped two copies Cooly G’s “Narst Dub” on the decks and proceeded to extend the break and ingeniously cut up the beat structure for a number of minutes. He’d start one record a beat or two off and swap between both records with the cross-fader, creating a wild re-edit on the fly. I felt truly honored to witness this legend in action, especially when he busted out “Arise” — perhaps the most euphoric side on his Frictionalism retrospective — and damn near splattered our brains all over the walls.

2562. Photo by Kristopher Trolle

I went into Saturday, February 13, expecting to have to shift gears considerably. That night featured Unsound’s big finale, Bass Mutations, a version of the dubstep party brought over from the festival’s Krakow edition in collaboration with the Bunker. Given the power of Beyond’s soundsystem and the relatively grimy, low-key confines of Public Assembly, my expectations were running extraordinarily high. The Bass Mutations forum earlier that day, in which a smattering of the night’s performers opined on the state of bass music, had done much to excite me as well. I hadn’t been expecting straight-up Croydon bass wobble — almost all of the artists on the evening’ s bill are known for pushing the envelope — but I wasn’t expecting the DJ’s and producers on hand to nearly mutate the bass right out of their sound.

TRG, the Romanian producer best known for his work on Hessle Audio, hid his dubstep pedigree deep beneath layers of funky, tracky tech-house in his back room set. In the front room, Alka Rex’s Konque project played a live set that took an extended meander into mid-decade minimal. Untold, spinning at peak-time, brought a violent, hyperactive vibe that seemed to exist beyond genre conventions — truly brilliant music with plenty of bass, but it was almost too manic and intense for me to stomach for extended stretches. My girlfriend lived in London from summer 2008 to summer 2009 and heard plenty of dubstep, but she said that these sounds bore almost no resemblance to the ghostly sounds she’d expected based on her time there. Something tells me that’s exactly what these guys were going for. The night encapsulated a truly fascinating moment in this corner of dance music: the dubstep producers showcased are defining themselves by how far away they can get from dubstep. I can’t wait to see where they settle, should they deign to settle at all.

After two weekends packed with parties soundtracked by the vanguard of dance music, I’m more than a little wiped. But I’m also as excited by this music — and New York’s viability as a dance music town — as I’ve ever been. It’s possible many festival attendees experienced an entirely different Unsound than I did, one in which harsh electronic experimentation and heady panels dominated. At Unsound, festivalgoers must choose their battles to some extent — maybe not what the festival’s organizers, hellbent on crossing genres and listening experiences, had in mind, but a reality for anyone with a job and without a car. Whatever their intentions, the festival’s curators (Beyond Booking especially) happened to assemble a handful of the best club nights I’ve come across anywhere. Here’s hoping that Unsound decides to catch an international flight over from Krakow again next year.

[Ostgut Ton] (buy CD) (buy mp3s)

It’s hard to resist beginning any discussion of an Ostgut Ton release — be it a single, album, or mix compilation — without discussing the room from which its artist ostensibly drew his or her inspiration. Berghain, with its veritable pipe organ of Funktion One stacks pushing sweaty air into lofty post-industrial buttresses, is particularly susceptible to this line of thinking. As evidenced by the sandpaper highs and sucker-punch lows adopted by just about anyone who’s been at (or looking to get their records to) the club’s helm, Berghain begs producers to push its acoustic buttons in extremely particular ways.

Even if Sub:stance, Berghain’s Hotflush-fronted bass music showcase, wasn’t a reality, there’s a better than good chance the potential influence such a space would have on dubstep would make for excellent rhetorical fodder. But forget about the furthering of dubstep’s love affair with techno or any grad student grovel about musical and architectural parity in representations of 21st-century urban decay; instead, just think about the sound — bass dropping like an atomic bomb on Westminster, coating Croydon in a thick, deadly dusting of fallout. I haven’t had the chance to experience Sub:stance firsthand, and I come to the club night’s first mix compilation — compiled by Hotflush mastermind Scuba and released on Ostgut — with the acceptance that a mix is hardly a substitute for the real thing. But Sub:stance, featuring an array of exclusive or unreleased tracks by scene stalwarts and upstarts alike, has enough of the rusty, dread-laden textures we’ve come to associate with the Berghain to provide a pretty solid approximation of what shape dubstep might take in that space. Through this filter, and in Scuba’s dextrous and profoundly able hands, dubstep sounds as bleak, wacky, and creepy as ever.

Beginning with an ambient track, “Light Swells (In Distant Space),” from Hotflush regular Sigha (making his first of four appearances here), Scuba makes it clear from the start that Sub:stance is as concerned with atmosphere as it is sub-bass. When the mix really takes off with the one-two punch of Pangaea’s “Sunset Yellow” and Joy Orbison’s “The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow,” the sudden burst of energy is less a result of getting smacked in the face with bass than the chilly house vibes suggested by the introductory tracks finally opening up enough to fully envelop you.

Once he’s grabbed you, he really takes you for a ride. Bouncing you from the insane avant-stepping of Untold, Shortstuff, and the selector himself (in the form of “You Got Me,” taken from his breathtaking forthcoming long-player, Triangulation) to the hard-edged, digital-clipping techno of Surgeon and DFRNT (remixed by Scuba) he throws you in about fifty different directions beat-wise. It’s in this portion of the mix, though, that Scuba’s expert mixing truly pays dividends. Eschewing rewinds and quick cuts for relatively extended, techno-style bleeds, Scuba guides bodies through moods as disparate as they are tense. It’s also the moment where the influence of the Berghain really starts to shine through. With its hollow, punchy kick and static-infused cymbals, AGF’s “Born And Raised (Version)” could be an MDR B-side. The same could be said for Badawi’s “Anlan 7,” which briefly simmers up through the glitches and casts impossibly black shadow on the mix. It’s Sub:stance’s precise midpoint, and Scuba has us at a crossroads, and on the very edge of our seats.

Like Diplo continuing to drop M.I.A.s “Paper Planes” long after you helped your mom load the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack on her iPod, Scuba is probably one of the last DJ’s in the world with free reign to play Joy Orbison’s sublime yet overexposed “Hyph Mngo.” Ironically, our selector (and the man responsible for the track’s release) creates an utterly unexpected moment out of one of the most ubiquitous sides in recent dance music history. It’s tough to construe “Hyph Mngo” as anything other than a call to place all hands in the air, but Scuba manages to turn that euphoria into something sexy, a tawdry release from all that grinding. The mix gets progressively stranger with a string of peculiar tracks you can’t imagine anyone else figuring out how to use, the best of which — Ramadanman’s “Tempest” — might be the mix’s most musically sublime. From Instra:mental’s bona-fide minimal techno banger (?!) “Voyeur” through Joker’s prog-dubstep epic “Psychedelic Runway,” Scuba’s taking us home, but he’s managing to keep it rough, sweaty, and surprising right through the final moment. Berghain, Sub:stance seems to suggest, embodies an ideal broader than techno; it’s about rawness, breadth, and quality, no matter where in a measure the bass drum happens to thump. Dance music’s favorite decommissioned power station just got a whole lot more cavernous.

[Hessle Audio] (buy vinyl) (buy mp3s)

One could argue that dubstep traditionally thrives on massiveness: those seemingly infinite bass lines wobbling up from the deep like tsunamis, those scythe-like snares ripping the fabric of the track at each half-step. But in the years since Skull Disco cut its singular path out of wamp-wamp-stomp, producers have become far more willing to manipulate eardrums on a much finer scale. The world’s subwoofers may continue to suffer abuse, but their previously bored tweeter brothers and sisters have found their work on weekend evenings getting a bit more technical. Kevin McAuley, the young Leeds-based producer, DJ, and Hessle Audio co-founder better known as Pangaea, comes from this school of bass music thought, and his soul-soaked singles for Hessle Audio, Hotflush, and — perhaps most memorably — his as-of-this-writing one-off Memories white label have tweezed ecstasy out of a more whispery sound pallet. His burgeoning discography, however, has yet to feature anything as distinctive and defining as what’s on offer over the four sides of his self-titled Hessle Audio doublepack. Quiet remains the new loud, but Pangaea’s wall-hugging sonics beckon you deeper into his fully-formed musical landscape than any of his records — and many of his peers’ records — have before. Witness the birth of a major contender in bass music. Now witness him contending with the lightest of touches.

At the heart of Pangaea’s appeal is his surprisingly un-radical approach to bass music. While his intricate beats, liberally lubricated with deep house and techno, grind forward at manic garage pace, he stops short of the kind of full-on embrace of those genres we’ve seen from the likes of Scuba and Martyn, and he’s also abstained from falling down an Untold-ian rabbit hole. The Pangaea EP sounds like dubstep, and calling it that requires very few caveats or groans about how meaningless that tag is these days. But from the opening measures of “Why,” it’s clear Pangaea wishes to rub, not slap. He sets his cymbals and snares stepping with quick, jazz-like taps, not the smashes of so many Skream-biting meatheads. But you sense he’s after more than just not disturbing the neighbors. Allowed to ring softly, Pangaea’s percussion conveys all kinds of alluringly tiny details while leaving room for equally expressive bass lines and atmosphere. “Sunset Yellow,” caned to great effect by Scuba on his new Sub:stance mix, makes use of this softness brilliantly: unhindered by compositional massiveness, the purple chords of so many recent Hyperdub records can make colorful waves despite broadcasting more ambiently, and from much deeper within the mix, than we’re used to. On “Dead Living,” those same chords return before dissolving into resonance and atonality; their lightness, though, allows the melody to melt down without taking the entire track with it. With such a handle both on his genre and his influences, Pangaea proves a producer doesn’t need big, wacky sounds to make a huge statement.

Still, it’d be easy to imagine Pangaea veering too far into sedateness; Shackleton’s Three EPs, for example, possesses incomparable sonic detail, but it’s a trio of late night records better suited for your bedroom than the club. Pangaea manages to steer clear of all this chin-scratching, and he does it allowing one element to stand confidently in front of his others: ghostly, steamy, nearly orgasmic vocals. On “Why,” a disembodied voice wants us to tell her something, while on “Sunset Yellow,” she wants to get something off her chest without ever managing to elucidate it. And on “Neurons,” an authoritative narrator just wants to freak out anyone who’s pilled up. Executed with great confidence and care, they manage to avoid sounding like the gimmicks such vocals all too often are. Operating neither as chorus nor verse, these disembodied howls magnify the energy so tightly packed within Pangaea’s tense arrangements. Kevin McAuley just wants to make sure you’re paying attention, that you’re feeling these moody burners just as much as he thinks you should. When presented with four sides of dubstep this tantalizing and finely crafted, well-something tells me you won’t need too much convincing to get on board.

[A Made Up Sound] (buy vinyl) (buy mp3s)

Throw a stone anywhere in house and techno and you’ll hit a production alias. Plenty of producers release music under a couple of different names, but only a handful have been able to embody each persona so fully that none of them feels like a side project. Rene Pawlowitz, whose aliases have gone so far as to remix each other, is one of those producers. Dave Huismans, the Dutch bass juggernaut whose A Made Up Sound project Pawlowitz championed on his Subsolo imprint, has proven himself to be another. The softer side of 2562, AMOS lets balmy house syrup flow over chapped dubstep knuckles, and the combination has made for some of Huismans’s juiciest and most effective material. So it’s no wonder there’s a lot riding on AMOS’s latest self-released sides, especially for anyone who heard his house-flecked “Rework/Closer” 12″ last year and still has goosebumps. Hardly the house coming-out party you might have expected (if anything, his 2562 full-length Unbalance pretty well accomplished that), “Sun Touch” instead finds the flecks of wiggly, pale house that distinguish Huismans’s personae burrowing even deeper into the spaces between all that jagged steppin’. It’s another stand-out AMUS record, but he’s hardly just showing off.

He’s certainly not trying to sound pretty, either. Pouring a thick coat of grim over Unbalance’s considerably rosier palate, “Sun Touch” resists the colorful and whistleable at every conceivable turn, which isn’t to say he’s not giving us something to jack to. Out of the void of uncertain synth pads and jagged drums, the A-side takes an awesomely unexpected turn towards Mathematics; pumped full of rough acid resonance, uncertain dancers might quit scratching their heads and let loose. Stepping techno drum machines wrapped in crisp, metallic sound design have long been a mainstay of Huismans’s sonics, but it’s rare we get to hear them so distilled. However weird he’ll get, he almost always lets you know where you stand rhythmically; more often than not, his intricately arranged beats march in lockstep. That’s the case with “Sun Touch,” but “Drain,” which kicks off the flip, sees its core evaporate almost entirely. The title is fitting: a stuttering, weirdly placed downbeat gives you the sense of falling down endlessly, with each ever-unexpected bass push pressing against you like a tub-clogging plug of hair. It’s the lusher of the record’s sides, but the jungle’s rotting, or at least methodically burned down. The bright, wonky bonus beat, “Untitled (Shortcut),” cleanses our soot-coated palates but feels unfairly marginalized at two and a half minutes. When a veritable placeholder brims with more studio confidence than many label rosters, you know you’re listening to someone working at the top of his game. Clawing his way deeper into his farthest-out tendencies, our fair producer has provided further evidence of his elastic genius. He’s delivered not just a fantastic A Made Up Sound record, but an excellent Dave Huismans record, too.

[Freerange Records] (buy vinyl) (buy mp3s)

You get the sense that André Lodemann’s ears aren’t made from the same stuff that yours are. Producing since 2004 but really picking up speed in 2009 with his self-released output on Best Works, Lodemann has a way of rendering strange, tiny melodies into much catchier, dreamier, bigger components than they might fundamentally be. His definition of a hook, not to mention his sense of pacing and melodic development, might not be yours, but his level of execution — from a technical standpoint, dude’s biting at Martin Buttrich’s heels — and sheer earnestness go a long way towards selling you on such wacky deep house logic. Derided as cheesy by some, Lodemann rivals Reggie Dokes as one of house’s most idiosyncratically appealing voices. The aptly named “Still Dreaming” for Freerange, perhaps his highest-profile release since the Wanna Feel EP on Simple in 2008, brings to the big room those mystical, meandering melodies Lodemann spent 2009 perfecting. He’s made one of the more distinctive European house anthems in recent memory.

“Still Dreaming” is all about contrast, pairing the shimmering, warped atmosphere of earlier Best Works highlights like “Where Are You Now?” with the hard-edged synths of so many C2 remixes. Like Lewis Carroll’s logically nonsensical poem “Jabberwocky,” Lodemann feeds us his musical mishmash so convincingly that at first brush we might not realize how little sense these sounds actually make together. Despite occasionally veering (some might say dangerously) close to electro-house pomposity, “Still Dreaming” consciously keeps all that potential fist-pumping in check. Witness what Lodemann does to those grinding synths: at the height of their steamrolling, he grabs them out from the mix, only letting them punch through in taut, ever-lightening packets. Control becomes the key word here — there’s enough to keep this unlikely groove rolling and show us that he really means business with it, but not too much to fully de-emphasize that unlikeliness.

Soulphiction, the Philpot manager and Perlon alum who continues Lodemann’s tradition of having his work remixed by more famous soundsmiths, turns in a fine, smoothed-out “SP-X-Mix” on the flip. Lodemann’s melody gets wonderfully flipped into a rolling Steve Reich-esque micro-packet of color, but in general the mix does little more than make deep house out of dream house; I can’t help but miss the wackiness of Lodemann’s original. “Whatever I Do” brings together the mood of “Still Dreaming” without its focus or boisterousness — a gorgeous afterthought, but an afterthought nevertheless. If you’re like me, though, you might never flip the record over, so who’s complaining? At a moment in dance music where the formula for deep house anthemics can be stiflingly codified, it’s nice to stumble across a producer like André Lodemann who’s fastidiously tearing it to shreds.

Dance music is nothing if not purpose-driven. And when one of your primary concerns is filling up a floor and making those on it go apeshit, it’s tough to resist what’s tried and true. But how does a producer not reinvent the wheel without engaging in outright hackery? In the weeks since I received Oskar Offermann’s latest White 12″, “Apple Crumble Beneath My Feet,” I’ve been scratching my head over whether the producer and labelhead is painting by numbers or insidiously distinguishing himself from the hordes of producers making records nearly identical to this one. WHITE008 brings you three tracks of bog-standard, disco-flecked Rhodes riffs — your laptop wearing a Moodymann wig, basically. But I can’t help but feel like Offermann has a compositional sense that pushes him beyond his music’s ever-obvious sound palate. It’s quite possible you already own this record in about twenty or thirty near-identical forms. Is it worth buying again?

About six minutes into his A-side, “The Fog Burns Off,” I really start wanting to say yes. It’s all about those strings: simply layered and left to flutter without heavy reverb, they tug in glorious opposition to all that deep stuff vamping just below them. For a solid minute and a half, all of Offermann’s tricks combine into one exceptionally tasty build, an energy bar of sorts for any DJ climbing house mountain on a weekend evening. The remaining 18 minutes or so of this 12″, however, feel a bit too studious and clean-shaven for serious consideration. Before getting the aforementioned Patrick Adams treatment, “The Fog Burns Off” finds itself mired in an endless loop of tambourines, handclaps, and flaccid bass drum (albeit with some cool, creepy Rhodes ambiance), all topped off with some ultimate-dweeb spoken word that I’d love Oskar to have kicked to the curb. “Only My Shorts,” perkier in tempo and drum machine programming, feels utterly stiff and curiously unswung. Offermann’s Detroit house homage, “Queens,” lacking the soul samples that comprise the heart and soul of that style, finds little melodically to rally or even meander around. Offermann knows his house, and I don’t doubt he’d like to see his young roster at White one day producing at the level of Smallville’s or Underground Quality’s finest. But until he can move beyond those same old sounds and flesh out those fleeting gorgeous moments like the climax of “The Fog Burns Off,” that day will sit decidedly out of reach.

[Royal Oak] (buy vinyl)

I can’t think of a producer with a stranger idea of what constitutes house music than Atlanta’s Reggie Dokes. Like fellow Detroit expats Octave One, he gives listeners the sense that every off-kilter drum hit or plaintive piano chord has been placed with great care. Yet the melodic logic he’s employed since he leaped into production in 2001 has rarely made anything close to perfect sense. To be blunt, Dokes is positively all over the place, brewing up for his own Psychostasia imprint and labels like Philpot and Clone Loft Supreme a psychedelic suspension of weird chord changes and jarring phrase shifts. His Spectacle of Deepness EP on We Play House, a serious highlight of my 2009, even played like the hallucination of a madman. But what a gorgeously schizophrenic mess it was. His final transmission of 2009, “Untill Tomorrow” [sic] for Clone’s absurdly limited Royal Oak series (who knew you could press just fifty records?), finds him doubling back on the haziness of that release to produce a record on the whole more direct, more floor-oriented, and more obviously funky than most of his output to date. Unsurprisingly, however, those of you longing for those same old Rhodes vamps and Sascha Dive vocals might still want to look elsewhere.

On the titular A-side, Dokes places us in a tight spot between those oddly emotive, piano-driven melodies he’s made his name from and the kind of heavy percussion you’d associate more with UK funky than American deep. Dokes loves to play tricks with the soundstage — each element on the track, no matter where it’s been panned, vies for dominance over ever other simultaneously occurring element-and he crafts one of his tensest arrangements yet out of all these battling stabs. On the B, “Yellow Toe” finds Dokes winding down his BPMs slightly, but I’ll be damned if this groove isn’t more jarring, manic, and forcefully un-pretty than anything else on the slab. “The Beginnings of Ra,” however, lets all of this spiraling wackiness breathe a little. Like a malfunctioning robot doing a Theo Parrish impression, the track wanders and grooves through house tropes with a clumsiness that only makes it more endearing. For those house fans, like me, who have seized on Dokes as a breath of fresh air amidst the same old deepness, it’s precisely this mix of forceful groove, emotional exuberance, and borderline insanity that makes his records such a freaky pleasure. Keep us dancing, Reggie, and don’t you dare take your finger out of that electrical socket.

[Deconstruct Music] (buy vinyl)

With DJ Jus-Ed on permanent impresario/wood-cutting duties and Levon Vincent releasing a near-constant stream of contemporary classics, New York house’s flagship positions look pretty well locked-down as 2010 gets cracking. It’s a bit more of a tossup for the underdog slot. Fred P., whose Black Jazz Consortium long-player and singles for his own Soul People Music imprint were among 2009’s most coveted dance records, makes for something of an easy bet, though I can’t deny his talent at cranking out tense, minimalist house trips. And Anthony Parasole, who’s already proven himself a formidable selector, will almost certainly raise his asking price when his first solo production credit drops later this year. But I’m throwing my lot behind DJ Qu, the New Jersey man and former dancer born Ramon Lisandro Quezada. His latest, “Party People Clap” for Vincent’s and Parasole’s Deconstruct Music, has a whole lot to do with it.

What’s set Qu’s productions apart from his peers is his abstract approach to building a groove: dark, dense layers of booming percussion — derived both from the analog machines of so much techno and the organic microsamples of so much house — form an almost impenetrable membrane around what could be a world of melody; seemingly whichever flits of color slip through, no matter how disparate and atypically matched, are allowed to float across the soundstage like creepy one-celled organisms on a microscope slide. Forget “deep” — DJ Qu records often go beyond. “Party People Clap” retains that penchant for strangeness and heaviness but achieves it through a minimalist bent notably absent on his preceding releases. With just a few listless handclaps, throbbing dub chords, and ironically muttered invocations to commence party-time, Qu lays down his most infectious and direct transmission to date, recalling (and damn near besting) everyone from Prosumer & Murat Tepeli to Guillaume & the Coutu Dumonts to Vincent himself. Were it not released mere moments after most dance writers had already submitted their 2009 ballots, it would have done battle with the best of them.

With a stripped-down anthem on their hands, Deconstruct pulled out all the stops for the remix treatment, inviting everyone in the scene to cover the doublepack’s remaining three sides. Fellow underdogs Parasole and Fred P. absolutely nail their tagteam take, morphing Qu’s stoned shuffle into an ultra-taut 3/2 workout. They’ve also combined the original’s myriad rhythmic fizzles into one of the more epic trapdoor moments in recent memory. While Parasole is an unknown quantity as a producer, his influence might be evident in how little this remix resembles the Fred P. we know: screechy, punchy, and techno as hell, it’s a raucously far cry from his stately BJC sides, and I’m glad to hear it. Jus-Ed, in typical fashion, nudges down the BPM’s and cranks the positive vibes to eleven, leaving very little to complain or rave about. If you like the guy or don’t, his remix probably won’t change your opinion, but it makes for a nice detour from such hard-hitting club sonics.

The set’s only real disappointment comes courtesy of someone not known for delivering them. Pushing too many ugly and unintelligible midrange elements into the same point on the soundstage, Levon Vincent’s remix refashions sexy murk into vibe-ruining mud. Only in the track’s final moments, when stuttering drums tickle sassy Nu Groove pads for about twenty seconds, does Vincent show us what a light touch he could have given to Qu’s elements. If “Double Jointed Sex Freak,” released concurrently with “Party People Clap” on Novel Sound, didn’t comprise a pretty brave step forward, I’d be worried about what he’s doing with the artistic mandate he so impressively and rightfully earned for himself in 2009. His misstep shouldn’t go unnoticed, but it shouldn’t prejudice anyone excited, or looking to get excited, about a new year of New York house: the biting Parasole/Fred P. collab, Jus-Ed’s house-ification, and especially DJ Qu’s magical original make this hand-stamped (in fuchsia!) doublepack well worth owning. Vincent spent all last year having his coming-out party; might he just be letting everyone else have theirs?