Sam Ribakoff is sponsored by Bud Heavy.

It’s May in Los Angeles, which means it’s getting close to corporate sponsored day parties. So when you’re sipping on your trusted trademarked beverage, looking so young and vital, filled with money to spend and a focused grouped and market tested image to maintain, ask the DJ to play some of these tracks:

Actress- AZD

A lot of the coverage of Actress’ music dives immediately into its theoretical underpinnings and its aesthetic goals, which all bounce off of Actress’ long and detailed press releases that accompany the album, which is cool and all, and important, but these pieces almost always bury the lede about Actress’ music and that is, that it’s really fun.

Tracks like “CYN,” “X22RME,” and “VISA” knock with a propulsive energy extracted from the upstream source of black art where hip hop, techno, and experimental music derive from. There’s also a lot of beautiful melodies on this record, from the mournful early morning distorted Fender Rhodes pluck of “FALLING RIZLAS” to the gentle forcefulness of the piano and ambient textures that sounds like a light summer rain duet on “THERE’S AN ANGEL IN MY SHOWER.” This is an album, and an artist, that might take a couple of spins to find your groove with, but once you’re there, Actress provides an atmosphere and an aesthetic that no one else can create. When you’re there, then the meaning of his music will open up like a chrome plated flower.

N1L- Mud Diver

N1L is a producer from the country of Latvia, way up there in Europe, scrunched into the Baltics, but his music sounds like a kid who listens to way too much Animal Collective and Chief Keef, and is obsessed with anime and N64. Meaning, this shit is tight as hell. Mud Driver plays with poppy melodies, only to mess them up with cumbersome drums and ambient soundscapes which the latter half of the album explores in detail. Sometimes music that emphasizes sound design and ambient textures gets chastised as navel gazing music, but Mud Diver makes a pretty solid argument that a sweeping ambient whoosh can be just as interesting as any chord or melody line.

COHN- Boom Bap House

I don’t know how I got to hearing COHN’s Boom Bap House EP, but somehow through the magic of the internet I got to hear some pretty sweet, ecstatic, sample-based house music from Tel Aviv, Israel, which I now share with you dear reader, for your listening pleasure.

Miracle Steps Music from the Fourth World 1983 - 2017

Fourth world music is an ambiguous genre. A name grabbed from a Brian Eno record that’s been retroactively pasted onto a number of records from around the world that all seem to stem from a post psychedelic, ambient electronic, new age spirituality vortex. In theory, fourth world music takes aspects of traditional “world” music, mixes in that post '60s psychedelic haze and new age-y ambient soundscapes, and pops up something special. In practice though, a number of these artist represented on the comp are European artists playing with foreign instruments and tropes of “world music.” It’s interesting, but at times slides into exotica (and not the cool Andrew Pekler or Les Baxter kind). Check out Javier Segura’s “El Sueno Perdido” and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe & Ariel Kalma’s “Mille Voix” for interesting ethereal jams.

Dance Music Roundup: April 2017