The electronic music of Finnish phenom Sasu Ripatti avoids the kind of easy patterns that sometimes sound a little too easy. Under his alias Vladislav Delay, he gestures toward dub without making too forced a point of it: The four long tracks on The Four Quarters (Huume) tumble through lots of spacious echo, but the buzzes and throbs sound too rootless to suggest reggae—or much of anything else. Then there's his work as Luomo: Recently reissued after falling out of print, Vocalcity (Huume) remains essential listening for anyone curious about dance music's real-time evolution. It's lush and soulful like the best deep-house, but tactile surfaces and glinting fissures reveal a heart so cold it's hot…
Unearthed by a collector who found a mysterious acetate in an antique store, Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945 (Uptown) features an electrifying live set by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in their bebop prime. The sound quality is excellent, and the track list runs through a series of jazz hallmarks like "Bebop," "A Night In Tunisia," "Groovin' High," and an ecstatic seven-minute version of "Salt Peanuts" in which Parker sounds like an absolute maniac…
Compiled by Señor Coconut (a German who once made an album of salsa-fied Kraftwerk covers), Coconut FM: Legendary Latin Club Tunes (Essay) gathers 15 tracks from teeming street-music scenes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Puerto Rico, and Panama. The songs are invariably gaudy and trashy, rough pawings at fusionary designs drawn around horns, cheap synthesizers, and booty-bass beats. Brazilian baile funk predominates, but Coconut also reaches out for bits of reggaeton, cumbiaton, and aciton…
The clicky, jumpy dance tracks on Alex Under's excellent Dispositivos De Mi Granja (Trapez) treat the tenets of minimal-techno to a buoyant lift of levity. The Spanish producer clips his warm chords and cool drum-sounds to miniature size, but that just lets them hang in the air longer than they would otherwise. Darting patterns turn psychedelic after enough repetitive cycling, and the beats take restless routes to that divine place where house-music never stops jittering.