Ursadelica, the second official DJ mix from Alex Gimeno (a.k.a. Ursula 1000), could have just as accurately been called Breaksula, since he runs so rampantly through genres. This makes for consistently surprising bedfellows, like when he rubs Skeewiff’s swingin’ contemporary lounge number “Nitty Gritty” against the neo-garage rock of the…

On the year’s best officially released DJ mix, Unclassics, Morgan Geist turns water into wine by presenting Italo and Euro disco of the early Eighties as a clean, soulful form. He plays down Italo’s low-rent synth-love and emphasizes its disco roots, peaking with Purple Flash’s “We Can Make It,” a…

The British duo Swayzak is a dance Darwinist. Last time, on 2002’s Dirty Dancing, the onetime tech-house act’s evolution lapsed into fashion and electroclashed with its previous emphasis on beauty. Loops From the Bergerie, Swayzak’s fourth studio album, houses all that was good about Dancing (specifically, rampant pop tendencies) while…

Berlin’s Ulrich Schnauss spends his sophomore album, A Strangely Isolated Place fighting against the titular solitude. His attack is a dense, gently suffocating sound/security blanket that places him in a shoegazing context, with its thick haze of string-slung and digital melodies and neutered vocals (delivered by Schnauss’s girlfriend Judith Beck,…

When he reviewed a Throbbing Gristle gig in 1979, Melody Maker’s Chris Bohn described the “in joke” that was the group’s nihilistic stage presence. “They can smile smugly if you stay, snigger derisively if you leave. Either way it’s a hollow, depressing victory,” he wrote. Otto Von Schirach, whose music…

On her stubbornly conceptual fifth solo LP, Björk mostly cares about blowing — almost all of Medulla’s sounds were generated from human mouths. Nothing sucks the fun out of a record like a pretentious concept, but she’s capable of pulling off this stuffy idea because at her core (her medulla,…

Tadd Mullinix (sometimes known as Dabrye, here referred to as Cotton, and never to be confused with the similarly named blues guitarist) knows that retro electronics are becoming passé. It’s not enough to rehash, so on his first album as Cotton, The Dancing Box, he rearranges history instead. The delirious…

As if Timbaland hasn’t accomplished enough, Junior Boys’ debut signals another achievement for contemporary pop’s MVP: influencing (and therefore elevating) blue-eyed soul. Affected as he is, lead singer Jeremy Greenspan doesn’t need melisma or homeboy posturing when he has herky-jer-er-er-ky beats to mimic Tim’s stutter’n’B. But Exit isn’t just about…

Electroclash was just a fifteen-minute cocaine high on the pop timeline, so Miss Kittin is deservedly cranky on her solo debut-cum-comedown, I Com. She kicks off a liturgy of her sub-A-list duties (adding people to the guest lists, kissing cheeks) on the opening track, “Professional Distortion,” before reminding us that…