It's startling how contemporary Brian Eno & David Byrne's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (Nonesuch) still sounds 25 years later—and not just because of spacious remastering. One of those albums that's proven almost too influential to isolate out of context, the cut-and-paste mood-maker finds the two art-rock greats—around the time when they collaborated on Talking Heads' Remain In Light—laying voices pulled from murky radio broadcasts and exoticized "world music" records into songs of funk and folk made all the more real by the fact that they're fake… A
Tom Moulton didn't just help invent disco—he also helped invent the very idea of dance music. His early remixes—made with spliced tape on reel-to-reel players—looped drum breaks and rearranged strings in tracks he extended to draw out drama. It was an elemental process (he made the first-ever 12-inch single), but the thrill remains on A Tom Moulton Mix (Soul Jazz), a two-disc collection of mixes made for the likes of B.T. Express, Grace Jones, and Isaac Hayes. It would be a mistake to go much longer without hearing the second half of his 11-minute mix of Eddie Kendricks' "Keep On Truckin'"… A
Dance music has come a long way since disco, and Luciano's psychedelically syncopated mix-disc Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi Volume 2 (Soma) sounds a call from the farthest reaches (and/or Berlin). Digging deep into a minimal-techno sound that has grown wildly animated, Luciano wanders through wet and dry spells, winding pitch-shifted drums through fleshy basslines and focusing on the strange sounds above. His track list includes artists like Adam Beyer, Thomas Melchior, and Ricardo Villalobos, but it all winds back in weird ways to Luciano's ear… A-
For music that all but yawns through its most antic moments, the songs on Vetiver's To Find Me Gone (DiCristina) trail an intriguing mix of anxiety and calm. They're the kind of songs traded in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon in the 1970s, when zoned-out songwriters went to work in the realms of folk and rock. Vetiver leader Andy Cabic works closely with Devendra Banhart, but he's more straightforward and assured than his friend: The strange parts of his songs hide out in tunes too hummable to allow for a lump in the throat. B+