[Sei Es Drum]

Sei Es Drum releases don’t tend to come out very often, but whether or not you agree with label boss Ricardo Villalobos’ statement that they all “come out because they have to come out” there is no doubting that each release carries something special about it. The latest offering from the label is a two tracker that will likely prove to be the most popular to date, even if only for the spellbinding A-side, which itself will hugely divide opinions.

Villalobos teams up with Argenis Brito and two unknowns, O. Weidenthaler and M. Messelis, to deliver “Peculiar,” an incredible minimal workout that liberally samples Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t It Peculiar.” Where so many deep house and disco tracks sample the great, late soul singer, most do so by lifting a short vocal phrase or velvet sigh. “Peculiar” takes the entire vocal of the early Gaye hit and laces it over the top of the writhing, punchy track. It’s a fit that feels uneasy at first, with the honeyed soul of Gaye’s phenomenal voice seeming worlds away from the spacey, synthesized surge of the music. But by the end of the track I found myself won over by the disparity of the two ingredients, the unlikely bedfellows making for a weird but wonderful treat. I’m guessing though that many will feel otherwise, grave robbing issues aside.

On the flip side Ricardo teams up with old hand 3 Phase for a decidedly less controversial and less interesting track, “3 Züg.” Stretched out over sixteen minutes, it’s a fairly stock-standard Villalobian meander injected with some audible peculiarities of its own. The slowly building track incorporates spooked out pads and industrial background noises, together with some ambient nature sounds, but in the end feels like it is almost a purist rebuttal to the somewhat sacrilegious use of Marvin Gaye on the A-side. Sei Es Drum’s latest may be a matter of picking your particular poison, but I’m not about to argue with the labels mission statement just yet.

[Sei Es Drum]

Ricardo Villalobos’ best productions, the records of his I will play for my children to help explain why daddy can’t remember large swaths of his early twenties, might be behind him. But whenever I’ll tune into a bootleg or Youtube video from a Ricardo festival set (W has left the White House, sir; now will you please book some US gigs?), I can’t help but imagine him seconding Lil Wayne’s rueful boast on the burden of singularity: “We are not the same/ I am a Martian.” Everyone’s favorite floppy-haired, German-Chilean pure sound advocate has traversed stoned aural landscapes where few ears have dared venture before, and it’s only through the labyrinthine logic of his magnum DJ sets that three-quarters of his record bag makes any sense. I thus greet each new platter from Sei Es Drum, Villalobos’ quasi-white label platform on which he tosses the public some of his sets’ most typically-Ricardo material, with the excitement of owning a souvenir from this man’s space voyage and the trepidation of knowing it will bring me no closer to ultimate hallucinogenic-bongo knowledge.

“Baile,” credited to RV and featuring sleazy Los Updates dude Jorge Gonzalez on vocal duties, basically lives up to expectations. Villalobos, an unabashed Depeche Mode fanboy, injects about as much post-punk, electro, and breakbeat into his rhythmic palate — and as much aggression in his bass line — as he has since his landmark remix of Thomas Dolby’s “One Of Our Submarines” in 2002. Over the course of its twelve and a half minutes, syncopating beats keep things tense in between breaks of steamy, straightforward hats and snares. Aside from some punched-up kick and acid filters in the final third, though, this party keeps an even keel, perhaps to a fault. Like much of last year’s Vasco, “Baile” finds Villalobos trimming much of the fat from his arrangement but not his run-time. As his work from the last few years has shown us (see his remix of Shackleton’s “Blood On My Hands” or “Fizheuer Zieheuer”), letting your machines trip on for extra-extended periods can tease out serious euphoria from simple arrangements. And some of Villalobos’ most impressive work, like “4WD” (also with Jorge Gonzalez) and his take on Depeche Mode’s “Sinner In Me,” uses simple, sparse vocal melodies to warm up otherwise Spartan sound design. Unfortunately, these elements just don’t coalesce as well here, and Gonzalez’s vocals feel especially underutilized and un-integrated. But perhaps in the context of a heavily-layered transition on a club’s well-endowed sound system — i.e. Ricardo’s typical Thursday evening — “Baile” really jams.

Reboot, whose work for labels like Below and Be Chosen has revealed a deftness with driving organic percussion, never strays too far off the South America-Germany axis on the flip. If SIS’ innocuous Sei Es Drum anthem “Trompeta” from last year played like a CliffsNotes “Fizheuer Zieheuer,” then “Caminando” mimics “Primer Encuentro Latino Americano,” a quasi-remixing an acoustic singalong into an arena-sized tribal house rally. Reboot’s well-edited drums here absolutely slam, possibly because it sounds like there are thousands of them. As a potential dance floor moment, “Caminando” would feel far more at home eliciting good vibes at a Luciano gig than feeding red-eyed paranoia at Ricardo’s. It’s a downright mainstream A&R snag, even at well over twelve minutes, by the standards of house’s most avant-garde tastemaker. But even a Wire cover star must feel like sweating through that designer t-shirt every now and again.