FLYING LOTUS - Cosmogramma

When I first saw that Ravi Coltrane (son of, well, you know who...) was a guest on Cosmogramma, my curiosity was immediately piqued. After all, despite his legendary pedigree, Ravi is hardly a well-used sideman in electronic circles. Of course, then I quickly found out that Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus) is the saxophonist's cousin. Ellison's aunt and Ravi's mum, Alice Coltrane, was a truly exceptional figure. From her coming out in 1965 as a pianist in her husband John's late- period quintet, she grew into a remarkable bandleader in her own right—in particular, her late 60s/early 70s albums are all canon-worthy works of psychedelic, tranced-out jazz (especially when she turned to the harp as her main instrument).

So why the family tree? Because this ancestry definitely adds something of an understanding of what Flying Lotus is after on his excellent Cosmogramma LP. From the mystic sketched artwork covered in Arabic script to the restlessly open nature of the music within, this is a very worthy successor to the kind of aural voyage his aunt began in the '60s and '70s. Mind you, this is still a modern record—a product of computers, technology and the possibilities these devices open to us. But FlyLo is constantly looking for ways to connect the two eras. The result at times is one of the more 'classic'-sounding electro/hip hop records you're likely to hear this year.

Hip hop in general has a strong presence here, but unlike DJs such as Madlib, it's one of the few musical histories that's not really mined for material on Cosmogramma. Instead, it's used to refract other styles into pleasing and surprising new shapes. The mid-record trio of "Arkestry", "MmmHmm" and "Do The Astral Plane" is a mini-suite of resonant jazz drums, searching sax, early-evening soul and disco all viewed through a hip hop lens. Elsewhere, we're treated to minimalist psych, bursts of 8-bit noise, tight percussion loops, and even a game of table tennis transformed into a loping rhythm. It's telling that maybe one of the least successful moments on the record is the collaboration with Thom Yorke—not so much because it's a bad song, but more that hearing the Radiohead frontman whisper sweet, incomprehensible nothings over skipping electro-beats ain't exactly new territory.

But thankfully for Ellison, the rest of Cosmogramma is entirely top drawer stuff. And when he drops a little nod to Alice on "Drips / Auntie's Harp", you know it's a mention that would make the dearly departed icon proud.

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - This Is Happening

"You wanted a hit/but we don't really do hits", LCD mainman James Murphy scoffingly taunts on "You Wanted A Hit". Well, yes and no. Ever since he first began to make a name for himself about five or six years ago, this soundman-turned-producer-turned-indie star has been the guy decrying the taste of cake while it oozes from between the teeth of his shit-eating grin. Because lengthy and caustic as they may be, tunes like "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House", "All My Friends" and "Losing My Edge" are hits, and Murphy knows it. Even more than this, he's the kind of hitmaker whose main source of inspiration is a smart but obvious rescrambling of a series of past successful templates. New Order, The Velvets, Eno, Bowie, Cage, Reich, The Slits—he's the hip joint of a hipster, a vital intersection with tastes so unerringly tasteful, it's very easy to be a cynic.

What's saved Murphy from going up in his own flames has been an eagerness to expose himself to his own withering and often humourous cultural critique—and to paraphrase his own "North American Scum": the more he did it, the better it got. What started as a dumpy, middle-aged scenester squeezing his tummy in front of the mirror ("Losing My Edge") became a very poignant self-examination of how to age—relevantly, if not gracefully—alongside a club scene that is built for the young. When this approach climaxed on the one-two punch of "Someone Great" and "All My Friends" from 2007's Sound Of Silver, he'd become the John C. Reilly of rock stars (er, well, I guess that was Dewey Cox, but roll with me on this one)—funny, inexhaustibly observant and wry, and yet full of a boatload of tragic humanity. He was an outsider to the very scene he was creating.

That's an exceedingly tough balance to maintain, and no doubt many are gunning for This Is Happening to be the sound of Murphy finally choking on his own bitter bakery. But he's a slippery character and on this newest album, he manages to make some of his deftest escapes yet. Lead single "Drunk Girls" would be that gagging death-blow if it weren't so hilariously dead-on. "Pow Pow" (which finds the guy from "Losing My Edge" full of bleary-eyed rebuttals the next morning at the coffee shop) has a tackle box worth of putdowns that are simply far more fun to go along with than critique. But above all, Murphy knows he has to start strong, and does he ever on Happening. Opener "Dance Yrself Clean" is as good a defense of the LCD brand as any could muster, gently lulling you with a series of off-hand wanderings before walking face-first into a telephone pole of a synth breakdown that turns into a completely irresistible five-minute party. It's flat out awesome and like several other tracks here (especially the soaring guitar love affair of "All I Want"), you bet it's a hit. Because, as great a character as Murphy has been able to construct out of his own midlife missteps, it's ultimately his dance steps that we're most interested in. Don't worry, kids—daddy's got this one covered.

VA - Deutsche Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock and Electronic Music 1972-83

Aside from a bunch of outrageously-named collections from a few years ago (Kraut! Demons! Kraut!, for example, or Obscured by Krauts, to name but two), there has been a surprisingly small industry dedicated to this highly-fetishized era of German progressive rock and electronic music. Leave it to Soul Jazz, then, to not only do it with authority, but to have the nerve to stretch the timeline into the early '80s, when the genre had been largely abandoned by its diehard fans. Heck, even today, the umbrella term “Krautrock” (conspicuously unmentioned in both the title and subtitle of this set) and its main proponents are largely unknown to most Germans.

Key events of the last couple of years have precipitated this release, namely the recent tours of Cluster and Faust; the remastering of Kraftwerk’s definitive catalogue and release of an unauthorized but leagues-deep DVD, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution (check our shelves!), which documented both the band and the development of the scene as a whole; and Black Dog Publishing's Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy book from last winter (we’ve got that one, too!).

Soul Jazz serves up a double-disc survey that kindly summarizes the key players (minus the preciously protective Kraftwerk) that would satisfy neu-comers and vets alike. Sequencer-meisters Cluster and solo members Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, along with Kluster's enigmatic Conrad Schnitzler (who shows up on the cold wave “Auf Dem Schwarzen Canal”) are here; so is the more hippy flute-crazy wing (Kollectiv, Ibliss). Of course, there’s also Can (post-Mooney/Sukuki), Faust, Harmonia, Neu!, Ash Ra Tempel, and Amon Düül II. And then there are late entries La Düsseldorf and E.M.A.K., who both underline how key the Teutonic influence really was on rock's New Wave.

A highly immersive experience, replete with fine liners and wonderfully garish packaging, Deutsche Elektronische Musik is wholly mind-expanding, and a mere scratching of the surface of an oft-referred-to but underheard world of music.

CARIBOU - Swim

The term polymath is something that we tend to use to describe the dead, past masters whose deft skills in a number of disciplines rendered them above the fray of mere mortals: Da Vinci; Al-Razi; Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps it's because we're so much more comfortable canonizing those whose lives are done, especially with a term that rings with such intellectual regality. Even after his death, Dan Snaith (a.k.a. Caribou), will likely never be called a polymath. But as both a master mathematician and musician, he's definitely anything but ordinary. And as someone who utilizes IDM traditions and computer composition techniques to engage, not shun, pop music, he is a true trailblazer as well.

His previous record, 2007's Andorra, was a high watermark for Snaith. Its Zombies-inspired sunshiny psych pop was his most direct foray into actual songs yet. Leaving his beatscape, mash-up sound sketches behind, it opened its arms wide to embrace not only a larger audience, but the 2008 Polaris Prize as well. Swim is equally as trippy as its predecessor, but it is consumed by a distinct darkness. This is the nighttime to Andorra's day, where fear and regret replace love, nightclub techno replaces AM-pop, and slippery texture replaces crisp definition. Snaith as been widely quoted as wishing to make "liquid dance music" this time out, and in this respect, Swim is a masterpiece. The record shifts its visual colours like a melting kaleidoscope (see the excellent "Sun" for a perfect example of this)—even for someone as pan-happy and beat-shifty as Caribou, it's new territory. It also sees him slink slightly away from the 'songs' of Andorra, a move that will no doubt disappoint some. But that doesn't stop a track like opener "Odessa"—with a sample hook that sounds like a Muppet mating call from Fraggle Rock—or the gently-pulsing "Leave House" from making immediate impressions. In short, Caribou has earned the right to have your trust, and that trust remains in good hands. Meticulous, tuneful, surprising, and always finding a deep groove, Swim is yet another brilliant work by a true master.

VA - Fabric Presents Elevator Music: Vol. 1

An overview of the back-to-the-future sorts of sounds making waves these past few years in the dance/electronic bass scenes of London and elsewhere in the UK (spreading out in increasingly larger, instantly adapting/adopting pockets of activity worldwide, including right here in Toronto), Fabric's Elevator Music: Vol. 1 does an honourable job of bringing to light the degree to which 2-step/garage/house sounds are reinvigorating dubstep, grime and UK funky, with the latter's soca-derived snare emphases and tropical percussion touches likewise inf(l)ecting all of its neighbours in the club.

For a more in-depth nuts-and-bolts/by-the-BPM dissection of related microtrends in DJing and production, I'd suggest checking out this roundtable discussion with a number of those featured here, but if you're to sample just one track from this all-exclusives compilation that gets all the above-made points across in a particularly exciting way, let it be Mosca's "Gold Bricks, I See You", which combines Todd Edwards-style diva cut-ups with badman ruffage, halfway-mark synth-horn hurrah and a keen sense of builds, drops and extended song structure for the most exciting listen here—that he's one of the newest artists included (with only one EP to his name so far) says much about how fast things are being pushed forward in these circles.

FOUR TET - There Is Love In You

Kieran Hebden hasn't made any original Four Tet tunes for a little while now, instead filling his time with his excellent experimental collab with percussionist Steve Reid and, as always, throwing down a bunch of remixes here and there. These remixes have been a real key to understanding his M.O.—it's what sets him apart from so many of his electro-peers. Where many remixers see such projects as an opportunity to completely gut and strip a tune, Hebden often turns in a revision that is less about his own ego and more about the track's original intent slightly tweaked.

In short, the man's got an ear for melody and a respect for the structure of a song. There Is Love In You holds true to this, in Four Tet's own unique way. Unlike close friend Dan Snaith, a.k.a. Caribou, he has not made a full switch over to embracing what would be typically termed 'songs' with distinct verses and choruses, but this album still maintains a close relationship with melody via disembodied, cut-and-paste voices and swirling, levitating synth arpeggios. His attention to layered detail is acute without strangling the life out of the music—in fact, quite the opposite is true. The buoyant, evolving groove of "Love Cry" wastes not a second of its nine minutes, twisting itself in and out of fascinating, yet ever danceable, musical knots. Even the most straightforward pieces—the stately "This Unfolds" or the barely-there "Reversing"—have plenty of meaty strata through which to dig.

Four Tet doesn't mine any new territory here, but a voice already as strong as his doesn't need to. This is heartfelt computer music, where the hand of an 'unfeeling' machine is used to communicate some beautifully oblique emotions.

BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP - Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age

Broadcast keep getting stranger and stranger, ditching all remnants of their '60s British pop leanings and embracing the naïve and chaotic while retaining their soundtrack inclinations, although they tend more toward the avant end of sound library recordings these days (along with harsh electronics, as evidenced during their recent performance here in Toronto). The amorphous processing on display at the show was just a hint of what Trish Keenan and James Cargill have been up to since 2005’s Tender Buttons, although we won’t fully know until they drop their next proper album next year. In the meantime, we have this nearly 50-minute “mini”-album to contend with, the first musical collaboration between Broadcast and The Focus Group (Julian House, co-owner of the Ghost Box label who has also designed most of the sleeve art for Broadcast). Witch Cults flows like a disturbingly surreal dream, with Trish’s increasingly lullabye/nightmare vocals spread out over a handful of the 23 tracks here. The asymmetrical loops and nonsensical treatment of harmony and melody further add to the notion that Broadcast’s creative vision is far from spent. 

THE XX - xx

Everything about this young English quartet is stylized and calibrated to within an inch of its life, especially its romantic attachment to the '80s culture of minimal electro/goth pop. At times, it's a little unnerving—particularly for anyone who lived through it the first time—but that's kind of the point. All in their early twenties, these folks didn't live through it, making drawing upon Soft Cell and Young Marble Giants no different than mining Nick Drake or 13th Floor Elevators or, heck, Robert Johnson. In this light, xx is a total triumph, combining these influences with a touch of hip hop production savvy and low-end to create a unified album that never once breaks its established mood. Austere, cold and clipped, but filled with raw, relatable late-teen confusion and emotion, The xx work because they use only the fewest elements possible to establish each scene. This gives ample space for the dry, up-closeness of Romy Croft and Oliver Sims' vocals to take effect. The result ends up being a lot closer to R&B than anything else—dark, even detached, but still loaded with sex and tension.

VLADISLAV DELAY - Tummaa

On Tummaa, Sasu Ripatti's newest album under his Vladislav Delay guise, there's if not a frenetic, then at least a restless aspect to its performances, a gnarled element in its flattened, alien tweaks that makes it, to these ears, a cut above the comparative placidity of Moritz von Oswald's Vertical Ascent trio backed by Ripatti's processed percussion with Max Loderbauer on synth, whose debut was likewise recently released. With key contributions here from Craig Armstrong's Rhodes and piano and Lucio Capece's woodwinds, this is one fine, lively recording, in league with Mokira's Persona as this writer's personal favourite ambient/abstract electronic discs of 2009 so far.

ARVE HENRIKSEN - Cartography / JON HASSELL - Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street

Sometimes you can just look at the back of a jazz album, check out the list of players and their instruments, and conclude that it will be great. And when the label in question is ECM, anyone who needed an extra push just got one. So is the story with the latest of the label's discs to win this writer's heart from a pair of exceptional trumpet players—Arve Henriksen's Cartography and Jon Hassell's Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street. In truth, this may be the most revelatory pair of releases on ECM since Anouar Brahem's transportive Le Pas Du Chat Noir. Henriksen and Hassell both possess a uniqueness of phrasing that transforms the typically bright clarion call of the trumpet into a mournful timbre more akin to that of an oboe. Match that voice with layers of drifting electronics and spare, exotic percussion and you end up with the kind of East-meets-West albums in which ECM specialize—records that manage to deftly navigate the fine line separating truly gorgeous, multi-ethnic ambiance from, well, Enya. It's far harder than it sounds, and they owe their success mainly to a touch that never forces any one flavour upon a track.

Henriksen's album is even more remarkable for the success of spoken word appearances by David Sylvian. Often the straw that breaks many a pretentious album's back, Sylvian's spare readings intersect beautifully, much in the way that similar (albeit much heavier) pieces on Sunn 0)))'s recent albums blend ambience and narration. Although both discs stand easily on their own, it's telling how well they complement one another—each an exceptional exercise in active musical meditation.

(For another take on Jon Hassell's Last Night The Moon..., also check out a review of that disc that ran back in February 2009.)

MICACHU - Jewellery

Much as our intrepid ears may try, we're never going to catch everything immediately upon (or before) its release; the ongoing flood of upcoming releases ensures that there'll always be some albums that we're a little late on the draw in checking out, even if the cover art or press copy might have caught our eyes and helped push a disc onto our "to listen to" pile, and Jewellery's one great, big, bouncy and rambunctious case in point, released on these shores back in March. 22-year-old Mica Levi's first full-length, backed by her primary-patterned Shapes, is an innovative and extremely catchy set of modern 2-step-schooled skiffle, precociously playing with song structure and production value, but never at the expense of a hummable tune. Fans of Dry/Rid Of Me/4-Track Demos-era PJ Harvey, producer Matthew Herbert's work with Dani Siciliano, and fellow early-twenties young'uns Born Ruffians and Lykke Li should find something special about Micachu, that rare brand of British talent that both The Wire and NME might be watching for a while to come.

THINK ABOUT LIFE - Family

The artwork for Think About Life’s sophomore album Family shows the three band-members (vocalist Martin Cesar, keyboardist Graham Van Pelt and drummer Matt Shane) sitting on a Persian rug at Friendship Cove, the venerable Montreal venue where parts of this album were recorded and where 2/3 of the band used to live. Behind them hangs a green screen backdrop, which has been Photoshopped to show different scenes, including a marsh, a beach, and a waterfall. The way they’re sitting makes it look like they’re posing for a family portrait, which is fitting considering the name of the album. Besides that, the artwork is slightly ridiculous, though still pretty amazing. You may be wondering, “Alright, you like the artwork, but what about the music?” Okay, sorry. This album is fun, catchy, and 100%-danceable. I find myself walking around the street humming “Sweet Sixteen” on a daily basis. This might just be the strongest album I’ve heard all year, from start to finish. This is all coming from someone who doesn’t really dance, and who primarily sits at home listening to slowcore and brooding alone in my bedroom, so this album is a bit of a coup d'état for me. Instead of resisting the urge to revel, I’m going to embrace the new outlook on life this album has provided me. Soon you’ll see me walking down College with a neon t-shirt, oversized sunglasses and a copy of Family blasting from my ghetto blaster. Won’t you join me?

MOKIRA - Persona

It goes without saying that we're always on the lookout for new music, so thanks to the mighty Boomkat (as well as the recommendation of one of our regular customers) for the tip on this one. Although Sweden's Andreas Tilliander has been crafting electronic music for the better part of the last decade, releasing self-described 'clip-hop' on Raster-Noton and Mille Plateaux in the early '00s, his music as Mokira for the Type label (this disc follows 2004's Album) strips the beats away and finds him fashioning finely-honed ambient floaters. Most of Persona is a seamless suite, making it all the easier to get carried off into its drift, as its elements crossfade from crackle-and-hiss-laden treatments to weighty feedback murk, with percussive shards spiking out and eventually clanking together some semblance of melody. Tilliander's recent straight-up TB-303 techno (released under his own name, and heard on his MySpace page) creeps in obtusely on "Valla Torg Kraut", while the home stretch turns to Spiritualized and Spacemen 3 for inspiration, only to then take a deep breath and plunge back into the depths for a misty tape-fuzz finale.

FEVER RAY - S/T

While just as beat-based as The Knife's own output, Karin Dreijer Andersson's new Fever Ray project stresses the downtempo tendencies with little to none of the hi-NRG end of the Dreijers' group sound, using the dropped-octave vocal effects brought to the fore for Silent Shout and just as spookily employed here, especially on opener "If I Had A Heart", a lone overtone-laden loop the only backdrop to Dreijer Andersson's split-personality electro-pop psychodrama. A solo debut as adventurous as it is accessible, Fever Ray's mood is captured perfectly by Swedish artist Martin Ander's nick of Charles Burns' shading style for the cover portrait.

JEAN-PIERRE MASSIERA - Midnight Massiera: The B-Music Of Jean-Pierre Massiera

Known to collectors primarily as the mad genius behind the nutsoid quasi-soundtrack album Les Maledictus Sound from 1968, French producer/engineer/guitarist Jean-Pierre Massiera epitomizes Finders Keepers' sensibilities perhaps more than any other artist. Recording mostly in the late '60s and '70s, Massiera's vision was to never do anything straight-ahead, whether playing cosmic surf music early in his career, charting similar psychotic territory as White Noise, Pierre Henry and Ennio Morricone, or experimenting with proggy disco. His ear for radical combinations of sounds and effects puts him in league with producers Joe Meek and Lee Perry--just check his version of "They're Coming To Take Me Away" in French! After being blown away by Midnight Massiera, you can also seek out the Mucho Gusto label's Psychoses: Freakoid (1963-1978), their second of two collections which focuses mostly on his weird Euro-disco period.

HENRIK SCHWARZ/AME/DIXON - The Grandfather Paradox

Upping the personal record-collection connections made with this 2CD comp collab between DJ/producer Berliners Henrik Schwarz, Ame (Frank Wiedermann and Kristian Beyer) and Dixon is the number of pre-techno artist picks chosen for Schwarz's 2006 DJ-Kicks mix (Moondog, Cymande, Arthur Russell) that reappear (with different tracks chosen from each) on The Grandfather Paradox. Pat Metheny's performance of Steve Reich's "Electric Counterpoint", so infamously spun into "Little Fluffy..." chillout territory by The Orb in the early '90s, instead gets underpinned herein by Ame's remix of Etienne Jaumet's "Repeat After Me", locking into an afro-percussion-propelled three-on-the-floor throb. The bonus, alternately-sequenced unmixed disc makes one appreciate this foursome's mixing and re-editing abilities all the more, especially their transformations of the aforementioned Cymande's "For Baby Oh" and "Metamorphoses", a live late-'70s synth/drum-machine workout from one-time Yes member (circa Relayer) Patrick Moraz. Other highlights include soulful vocal house thumper "Feedback" (a lesser-known Theo Parrish production under the alias Green Pickles), as well as the cooldown finale of minimal originator Robert Hood's "Minus" (bringing things back to that three-beat feel) segueing into tasteful processing of material by Raymond Scott and Moondog. Those entranced in recent years by both Optimo's classy eclecticism and the more formal treatments of Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald's Recomposed should find a formidable middle ground with this set. As these discs' title toys with, you can play with the past--so long as you're mindful of the potential ramifications, and manage to stake out a parallel timeline of your own.

TIM HECKER-An Imaginary Country

The one and only time this writer has seen Tim Hecker perform live (giving what now reveals itself to have been a full preview of this new disc), he made a point of setting up perpendicular to the audience, offstage and to one side, so that when the opening 'live' band finished and his performance began, it took a few seconds for us spectators to find our bearings and figure out where this disembodied barrage was emanating from. Combined with an equally discombobulating ceiling-projected slide show, it was the perfect visual analogue to Hecker's work, deep immersion to the point of self-removal, and An Imaginary Country could be his heftiest exercise in dark, granular ambience.

BIBIO - Vignetting The Compost

Another reminder from Stephen Wilkinson that just because it's electronic doesn't mean it has to be cold and clean. Instead, it seems he's managed to capture exactly what we were all hoping to produce with those hours of bedroom four-track experimentation--Fahey 101 guitar moves and murky vocals ornamented by swirling backwards sounds, all with the wobble of a cassette auto-reversed a few too many times. Dictaphone recordings of bird song and creek water add to the film strip soundtrack vibe and keep the mossy environments of the album's more ambient moments green, even when things enter full-on Penguin Cafe mode on tracks like "Weekend Wildfire".

SIN FANG BOUS - Clangour

For those of us who like our pop a little psyched-out--pumped through loop pedals, chopped up in samplers, layered over itself, lost in reverb--Sin Fang Bous' Clangour comes as a welcome new listen. The first solo effort from Sindri Mar Sigfusson, founding member of Iceland's folksy Seabear, provides him a forum to experiment with his hitherto unheard electro-pop urges. Fans of Seabear will be surprised to hear Sigfusson breaking free of his band's slow, quiet folk lullabies in favour of curlicued and rainbow-splashed pop melodies. Comparisons to Animal Collective, Panda Bear and Caribou, which Clangour has garnered, are well-deserved, and are easy but not unfair to make, as their audiences should find much to enthuse about in this Nordic songmaker's particular guise.   

JON HASSELL - Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street

Always one to leave breadcrumbs of esoteric info around for the interested (as on his website's Atmospherics sidebar), Jon Hassell makes a point of musing on the term "montage" in Last Night...'s liner notes, and enough time has elapsed since his Maarifa Street group first assembled in 2005 for a second recording by the band to now arrive, composites of live and studio work that follow last year's long-awaited reissue of Hassell's first session for ECM back in 1986, Power Spot. With Hassell's harmonizer often tracking his trumpet as on past efforts, Jan Bang and Dino J. A. Deane's live sampling particularly helps congeal these tracks into a miasma both tense and placid, nearly New Age but with an unmistakable edge that's been remarkably maintained throughout thirty years of Fourth World formulations.