How does one review an extensive compilation of Murk, one of house music's most prolific duos? It seems like it would be easy, but the sheer breadth of material contained on Defected presents House Masters: Murk is honestly intimidating. Over the past 20 years, the Florida duo's work has maintained a consistent quality as it's developed and grown with the global underground house scene. It's hard to imagine a history of house, much less New York club culture, without the work of Ralph Falcon and Oscar G. Read more »
Hessle Audio continues to assert itself as one of the most reliable sources for forward-thinking electronic music, tapping the relatively fresh producer Objekt for two tracks that are as sophisticated and expertly crafted as they are absolutely visceral. Read more »
Planet High School, the sophomore album by Brooklyn beatmaker Brian Lindgren (a.k.a. Mux Mool), arrives roughly two years after the producer's first LP for the Ghostly label, and the time between releases has served Lindgren well. Skulltaste was splintered between instrumental hip-hop tunes and straight-up dancefloor fodder (not to mention hits and misses), but the new full-length finds Lindgren narrowing his sound almost entirely on bouncing boom-bap grooves and the retro-futuristic samples he's keen on crafting them with. That focus has yielded better results, too, as Planet High School is evidence of Mux Mool gradually coming into his own. Read more »
Back in November, we grabbed John Talabot for a few minutes of conversation, and the Barcelona-based producer expressed some trepidation about his new album potentially being labeled both "tropical" and "shiny." As it turns out, Talabot is likely to be 50% satisfied, as there is almost nothing "tropical" about his debut full-length, but the prevalence of glistening synth tones throughout the record makes it quite possible that someone might deem it a "shiny" effort after all. Read more »
Lapalux has a way of fitting an astounding number of elements into his productions. It's something he proved on 2011's Many Faces Out of Focus EP, and in the subsequent remixes that have populated his Soundcloud page and, incidentally, our own downloads section. When You're Gone, the Essex-based producer's debut EP for Brainfeeder, sees Lapalux only continuing to refine his techniques, molding and shaping his seemingly neverending array of ticks, chops, and blurps into even more concise packages as his compositions become more song-like in structure. Read more »
There's something of a close kinship between techno retrospectives and the act of framing graffiti in a museum. Both are dynamic forms of art, yet the act of canonization always seems to remove the momentum that lies at the heart of both. Of course, you'll find no shortage of either, as there are plenty of techno retrospectives and folks like Futura 2000 and Rammellzee (R.I.P.) went highbrow a long time ago. Read more »
Kompakt's annual collection of pop-tinged soundscapes enters its twelfth year with label mainstays Wolfgang Voigt, Superpitcher, and The Field's Axel Willner (operating here as Loops of Your Heart) joined by a cast of names old and new. The resulting ten tracks are aligned in their gradual approaches to ambient composition with a handful of highlights and a few low points found along the way. Read more »
Brixton's 92 Points label quietly crept on to the scene last year, dropping the one-sided "Mr. 67" single from Visionist, one of several producers behind the young imprint. Now, 92 Points has offered up a sophomore effort, tapping Puerto Rican producer Magnum to put together a five-song EP, All Over Me. Read more »
It's absolutely no surprise that when Ifan Dafydd first appeared on the scene with a couple of bootleg remixes streaming on YouTube, people thought it was James Blake operating under a pseudonym. The bubbly rhythms, the rich synth chords, the fractured vocal blips, the soulful musicality, the big sub frequencies; it was all a bit too coincidentally familiar. (Hell, the Welsh producer even looks a bit like Blake.) "Miranda" and "No Good" sounded like an ideal mix of the sullen ballads heard on the divisive James Blake and the percolating post-you-know-what offered by cuts like "CMYK," but, as it turns out, Dafydd is certainly his own man with his own tunes. His debut 12" for Push & Run, however, doesn't exactly prove it. Read more »
