While Exchange Bureau Music might not be the most well-known label in Detroit, it’s definitely had its fair share of notable releases.  Alton Miller, Ibex, and Kansas City’s favorite son Pat Nice (who has a remix on Midnite Jackers’ If You Only Knew ep) have all released on the label.  This time around, Tony Ollivierra gets back into his Ibex guise to follow up the outstanding 360 EP on Rush Hour with four more slices of quality Detroit-infused house music.

“Panacea” opens up with John Tejada-ish synths and a simple, pumping rhythm just before keys twinkle in and the space disco is underway.  While there’s quite a bit going, the production is crisp, helping to contribute to the sustainability of the piece over seven and half minutes.

“Soulmate” offers a tougher, grittier synth bedrock amid a more persistently dirty drum track.  Once the higher-end pad drops and strings kick in,  things get a little overwhelming, but it falls in line with a lot of the house side of Detroit  - uptempo and pushing dancers without being overly aggressive.  Again, another seven-plus minute track that would be suited for a late-night crowd that’s not afraid of a little bit higher bpm.

The back half of the ep starts of with the drum intro to “Phoenix”, a little bit of cowbell and then some very nice propulsive pads.  The lead-in culminates in an insistent key line that changes just enough to introduce the groove before a tempered saw synth fills up the mid-range.  At just under five minutes, “Phoenix” feels like the most accessible track on the album, delivering a foreshadow of the climax early and then working towards an outcome before fading out.  This is definitely one I wouldn’t mind having another couple of minutes of.

The title track closes out the ep with a wonderful Aubrey-esque liquid funk groove and a spoken word piece.  The bass is big dumb simple, giving easy back-and-forth instructions to the butt while the feet are counting out Olliviera’s drum programming.  Everything else will be following the layers of pads that drop in with a little bit less insistency than found elsewhere on the ep, and probably the better for it.  “Eden” has a sense of maturity to it, of being at home on an adult dancefloor, one full of dancers who know who they’re going home with at the end of the night.

With appearances on Planet E, Transmat, and Intuit-Solar’s Comin From the D compilation to his name and a Discogs entry that goes back to 1996, there’s no point in calling Olliviera part of the new wave of Detroit house producers.  His sound calls to mind a denser, house-thinking variation of Model 500’s cosmic disco-symphonies or some offworld John Tejada/Recloose collaboration than it is to either the stripped tech-house of Curtiss/Troxler or the electro-funk of Omar S, Patrice Scott, or Moodymann.

After an almost seven-year lapse between releases,  Olliviera titled his 2008 ep The Second Coming, and both Eden and 360 continue to serve as a re-emergence for an artist who’s got roots as well as a re-introduction for fans who are just now beginning to examine the years of music between the Third Wave and the New Wave of Detroit producers.

Here’s to hoping the quick turn-around between these two recent EPs means there’s going to be a lot more Olliviera and Ibex in our future.

If you aren’t familiar with Blasta, you’re probably not alone.  The St. Petersburg (that’s Russia, not Florida) based producer has been around for a little while now, releasing drum ‘n bass on Strictly Digital, Dub Bullet, and Respect, but with one full-length (Blastorama) already on his resume and now with the release of The Incredible Adventures Of Kenzolika And Quetzalcoatl Among The Air Castles on Argon, he’s going to be getting a whole lot more attention.

Granted, with a title like that, it’s easy to think Blasta might fit somewhere more along the lines of the Aztec Mystic/Los Hermanos crew or a Studio Ghibli press release than Russian junglists and dubsteppers.  While the Detroit contingent shouldn’t have a problem finding things to like about this release, The Incredible Adventures is instead an exercise in future-breaks that straddles the line between the atmospheric ideas of Good Looking and Silkie’s City Limits Volume 1, full of best-behaved gangsta swing and future funk, both alien and organic at once.

And just look at that artwork!

My first exposure to Blasta was the third track on the album, “Saturday Morning Bed Steppin, ” so we’ll start there.  Even though the first few moments are a fairly familiar drum/sound intro, there was an obviousness that the track was going to go somewhere.  Indeed, once it did, all bets were off.  The full swing of the track kept my feet thinking jazzy drum n bass, almost Peshay-ian in its rhythm, while the step and bass had my heart set to dubstep.

It is both rare and sad that I don’t spend nearly enough time these days listening to albums from beginning to end, but when a track like “Saturding Morning Bed Steppin” gives me the full-on business like this, it’s not a hard decision to make.  Starting over again at the album opener, “Owl’s Fall” acts a nice introduction to the album - jazzy sax lets you know you’re going to be in for a good amount of  soul along the way, while hand drums mixed with delayed snares keep the rhythm uplifting but not strenuous.

Blasta’s Rasperry Syrup mix of L-Wiz’s “Syrup Feeling” moves the tempo up a notch and makes it clear that this is going to be a listening experience nearing blissful overload.  It might initially seem odd to include a remix of another artist on an album - especially as the second track - but it works here, much as it did on Blastorama.  Watch out for that guitar lick, syrupy indeed.

Even slower-tempo numbers like “Blast Air” are meticulously composed to keep the listener engaged.  Jazz keys and upright bass build a foundation for stuttering brushes and a soulful “I fell in love with you” vocal to all drop into a reduced-bpm step that just asks for an arm-around-the-waist dancefloor embrace, perfectly suited for either late summer evenings or cold fall body-heat nights.

“Feels So Good” is a throwback UK Garage track in the very best sense of the tradition.  It’s the sort of thing that had me reminiscing all those speed garage comps that flooded the States a decade ago, but never could manage the quality control of what was going on in the scene itself.  This would sit perfectly with the likes of Tuff Jam or MJ Cole.

“Zeppelin Nacelle” keeps the momentum moving forward with a driving but not aggro wobble at its core and plenty going on in the mid and high ranges.  Clean and crisp tones press this into a track tailor-made for discerning, loving dancefloors.

“Your Dub Delay” gives the first sinister hint on the album, taking a lower-midrange and echoing vocal and throwing it out over a more dubstep-oriented rhythm track than elsewhere on the release.  When the vocal line drifts in at around two minutes in, Blasta builds the tension until the first real drop kicks in, and we’re on from there.  I’d classify this as the pop-club number on The Incredible Adventures, and while the track is a bit too maudlin for me to give it a full thumbs-up, I will give credit where it’s due to the lyric “I could be your dub delay, feeding back every word you say” . . . clever!  Could you ever really be mad at a girl that got that reference though?  I don’t think I could.

The last third of the album serves as an exercise in demonstrating Blasta’s ability to, much like the aforementioned Silkie album, continually tie the influences of post-hardcore, pre-techstep era of drum n bass through the UK Garage/2-step movement and into the present-future of dubstep  While so many former junglists are trading in their amens for wobbles, tracks like “Black Muscatel” and the bouncy space-funk of “Butterflyz Inside U” show that there is still life in the livelier nuances of breaks-oriented music, life that doesn’t need to rely on overtly aggressive razor-yobbles to define a presence.

The album closes out on “Trip 42,” a sublime, downtempo-leaning number drenched in atmospheric horns and filtered guitar that would sound perfectly at home on an Earth or Cookin’ compilation.  The final piece of Kenzolika And Quetzalcoatl’s Adventure, it’s a restful homecoming and an understated confirmation of this album.

Solid and cohesive from beginning to end, similar but still engaging, Blasta has given Argon a release for sitters, standers, and swingers.  I think that’s just about got us all covered, doesn’t it?

Dub techno’s resurfacing in the last couple of years has been a welcome counterpoint to the over-the-top arpeggios of the decade-plus “progressive” house stranglehold on most dancefloors and the as-of-late DOA minimal techno scene.  The life imbued between sparse beats and foggy atmospherics is a refreshing throwback to a time when producers were artists first and businessmen as a last resort.  Given the niche aspect of the genre and the near-zero commercial viability of the sound, both artists and label heads are given the freedom to put an appreciation of the craft first.

Fatih Tuter is one of the newest of the new breed of producers focusing on this sound.  As Dubatech and Cold Form, he’s appeared on such leading netlabels as Cism and Deepindub, and his inclusion on this year’s Selected Moments II compilation from Shoreless undoubtedly served as a much-needed introduction to a bigger audience.

Wide & Shallow, also out on Shoreless in cd-r format, posits Tuter in a similar frame as his compilation companions.  The frozen-glass pads and resigned melancholia of Bvdub;  the simple but structural drum work of Quantec and the more restrained moments of Brendan Moeller;  the high-cloud ambient atmosphere of Anders Peterson’s Relapxych are all available reference points.

Tuter thankfully does not rest on influence or groupthink to distinguish himself.  Given the opportunity to stretch almost an hour out over seven untitled tracks, the producer chooses the artist’s high road , painting strokes of muted dawns on the grayscale dub techno canvas.  While Echospace’s The Coldest Season may be the template for a night lost in a wasteland of tundra, Tuter here provides the dim glow of home just visible through the treeline.

The moments of motion on Wide & Shallow, as evidenced on “Untitled #3″, are generally solitary in their composure, bringing to mind more a sense of introversion and inner-space exploration than hand-holding companionship or crowded-room comraderie.  With an emphasis on restraint and subtlety, the listener strains to the point of exertion to understand, and, in the last moment, falls exhausted into audio-kinetic euphoria.

While there is more than enough dub techno capable of putting a dancefloor through its paces, it is the restrained subtleties on tracks like “Untitled #4″ and “Untitled #6″ that lift Wide & Shallow.  Beatless and coming in at just over four minutes, the shifting, echoing pads and steambath pulses give “#6″ an opportunity to lighten the mood without forcing a physical hand.  “Untitled #7″ returns to gauzy chords and a slow-motion bassline initially, all the while building over its eight minutes with each passage through the loop cycle into something of a final flight through the aurora.

Tuter, in all his guises, is a name to watch, as is Shoreless.  With the furtherance of bass culture’s cross-genre pollinations, an understanding and appreciation of how to use works like Wide & Shallow in both static and ecstatic environments should become less of a specialist notion.  Discerning selectors looking for atmosphere on that third or fourth deck in the mix have known this for quite some time.  It will be continued releases like Wide & Shallow that guide a return to the end of the night, instead of the standard closing-time crash and burn.