The playlist: electronic - Levon Vincent, Project Pablo, Pearson Sound and more

Levon Vincent – Levon Vincent

Here is a record that shows just how stunning the techno long-player can be as a format. So often bloated creatures made primarily to drape the producer in the gravitas required to get them through another festival season, Vincent’s is utterly uncynical, passionately felt, and universally appealing. There are dramatic coldwave anthems (The Beginning, Black Arm w/Wolf), industrial creepers (Junkies on Herman Street, Anti-Corporate Music), a delicate still life (Confetti), and, in perhaps the best track, an exquisitely-rendered take on classical minimalism in Small Whole-Numbered Ratios. At a time when blockheaded dance producers like Henrik Schwarz and Kate Simko are using orchestras to make themselves seem deep, this is the inverse: an artist who learns the language of a classical form before speaking it. Oh, and he didn’t forget the bangers: Phantom Power and Launch Ramp to the Sky are crowdpleasing and melodically perfect. It’s a staggeringly accomplished record made all the better by the pissed-off screed Vincent wrote to launch it: “This is music for the ugly ducklings of the world. Music for swans. If you’re a member of the rat race, climbing around a dumpster with the other rats vying for power, you may of course listen, but know – this is not music for you. This is action against you.” Download it for free here.

Daniele Ciulini - Lipstick On The Glasses

Italy is beloved of electronic crate diggers – cosmic disco and cheeseballs Italo have been fairly well mined, and now harsher stuff is emerging. Alessio Natalizia (one half of Walls) packaged up the country’s no-wave gems for Strut with his excellent Mutazione compilation, and is now reissuing the work of one of the comp’s artists, Daniele Ciulini, on his label Ecstatic Recordings. Ciulini was part of the collaborative TRAX collective (no relation to the Chicago label), described by one of its members as “a sort of social network before the internet” – he used the diffuse but communistic group as a launchpad for his electronic sketches. Short, primitive and often meandering, they nevertheless draw you into the sound of the analogue age fumbling towards digital. Domestic Exile (Collected Works 82-86) is released next week.

Project Pablo - I Want To Believe

Straight outta Montreal is Project Pablo, the latest emission from Canada’s ridiculously vibrant disco scene. His debut album I Want To Believe, out on breakthrough underground label 1080p, continues their fascination with groove-led flotsam washed up from the 80s and 90s, be it stoner rap or smooth disco. This is very much the latter, full of neat Metro Area-style drum programming and violin stabs on the likes of Follow It Up, Italo congas on Movin’ Out, and thick Balearic waft on It’s Out There. With its vocal sample and ultra-deep mournful chords, The Fuss could wash up on an Ibiza poolside comp, while The Feeling goes more Euro still – it features the kind of cheap sax usually used to propel frotting on Kavos dancefloors, but its player is staring into the middle distance and thinking about that girl who just flew back home.

Jay Daniel - Anything With A Moonroof

Apologies for the frustratingly incomplete clip here, but 150 seconds is enough to thoroughly tantalise for the debut release on Jay Daniel’s new Watusi High label. Daniel is a protege of Three Chairs, the Detroit house supergroup made up of Moodymann, Rick Wilhite, Marcellus Pittmann and Theo Parrish, and this cleaves to their DIY spirit, where tracks of cosmic transcendence feel like they’ve nevertheless been knocked together in a garden shed. A stuttering drum pattern keeps getting caught up in itself, but doggedly stumbles on, soothed by maternal sweeps of synths.

Pearson Sound - Swill

Another track that’s unsure on its feet here, taken from Pearson Sound’s self-titled LP which is streaming in full over at NPR. Along with Ben UFO and Pangaea, he is one third of Hessle Audio, the label who showed how dubstep wasn’t just a cul-de-sac with Monster-chugging bros at the end of it, but rather a route back into techno. This track sounds like it’s struggling to kick into that higher gear, the chain not catching on the teeth of the sprocket – it’s a beautifully disorientating listen that makes the throbbing drop all the more thrilling, though there’s still the fear that it’ll slip out of time again.