#2555 Michal Minert - Space Jazz

God this overflows with things to like. Packed with djshadowready soulful samples, justice-big electroriffs, blasts of horns, prefuse startstops, washes of reverb, slashes of rightangle rap -- like, who the fuck is this kid? Cursory reading says he tours with a full on fucking band and goddamn I want to see _that_

It's spacy, sure, but immediate, empathetic, hard-edged, thrilling -_ all this kind of bracing shit that is the negative space of not space and not jazz and coming at ya hard. I mean, put on Another World and tell me you're sitting still and I'll shut this whole motherfucker down. That shit is _fire_ and the rest is reflected heat 4.5/5

#2554 BadBadNotGood / VA - Late Night Tales

A soulful, surging night music mixtape, glancing off of little tropical//global inflections, blurring together damned smoothly. I was unfamiliar with the vast majority of tracks (and some are outright rarities for anyone), giving the listen a smooth anonymity, making the Beach Boys' Don't Talk a little jarring. Also, the Lydia Lunch spoken-word nightmare is an awful note to end on, as if the guys didn't have the nerve to just make a good mix and had to put an arty stamp on it 3.5/5

#2553 Cornelius - Mellow Waves

Cornelius's songs have gotten so smooth, so pretty, that you barely notice how weird they are, how packed with squalls of noise, offkilter offbeats, fizzling electronics. All things I like, and yet this left me a little cold. There's little true boldness, few memorable melodies, and obviously the mostly-Japanese lyrics make it a little harder for the non-speaker to connect to. It's an album that's better the close you listen to it, but that you might not find the need to 3.5/5

#2551 Siriusmo - Enthusiast

Siriusmo is, full stop, one of the best electronic musicmakers going right now, and he keeps getting better. I couldn't be more pumped for his upcoming album. In the meantime, this, his 2013 masterpiece made it onto Spotify, and it's a lively, thrilling little listen, evoking all the most-enjoyable moments from Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, plus the rockist nerve to go big on the fuzz, dotted with madcap bursts of rap and luscious organ washes.

Friedrich lists Squarepusher as an inspiration, and it shows - there's shades of the same stuttering breakdowns and jazzy inflections. But it's so much more than that. Siriusmo's got the science and the heart, a master of crafting nasty tones, a proper player's sense of inflection, bringing so much nuance and organic sprightliness to every melody.

On the album scale, its a little slow to build, but once it turns the corner on the delightfully squelchy title track, its onward into blistering hip hop, and back, and back again, before settling into pretty pure tonality and wild experimentation - all of it completely enjoyable. It's all wildly inventive, all delivered effortlessly, a terribly rare hybrid of headtickling nuance and headbobbing power 4.5/5

#2550 Dip in the Pool - Brown Eyes

Smooth, sunny crooning over Starbucks-ready horns and shuffly drums, sounding strangely French in its coy lilting, never really getting your attention. It's all very one note, overstaying its welcome even at 26 minutes 2.5/5

#2549 Strip Steve - Micro Mega

More mega than micro -- there's glitches and squiggles and big 10's detune-surges, but mostly it's bigass beats. Basement Jaxx beats, disco beats, house beats, big thumps punctuated with blasts of bass and samples and squonks. It's a good balance - never overintellectualized, never one-dimensional, the microscope/pipe on the cover summing it up nicely 4/5

#2548 Ben Lukas Boysen - Golden Times 1

Profoundly powerful cocktail of sparking, minimal strings; simmering low, lurching high -- cracked with fizzled electronic glitches -- washed with fully-loaded synth waves. A masterpiece of minimal//maximal soundcraft, with negative space that threatens to swallow you up, a hole you fall farther into the deeper you look 4/5