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.

Last year, Petter Friberg absolutely floored me with the sheer stunning beauty of Optical Flow.  As is usually the case with albums of that quality, I was quick to get it into the hands of the few discerning souls I knew who’d have an appreciation for the austere minimalist constructions Friberg’s been producing for quite some time now.  The result, each and every time, was of open-jawed awe.

Optical Flow was my favorite album of the year from the moment I heard it, and I’m sure no other album received so many front-to-back listens as it did, in as many different environments, in as many different moods.  It was, and remains, perfect.

One of those friends I’d passed last year’s release on to let me know Friberg was back with Laponia. currently out on netlabel Thinner.  I didn’t even know he had a new one on the way, so it was a greatly appreciate return of the favor.  From the very first quavering notes, it is clear that this new Motionfield album is picking up where Optical Flow left off.  That’s an important distinction, because it is not “more of the same” here  – it’s a progression and maturity of a sound that I wasn’t sure could get any more of either.

Throughout the album, sounds of daybreak dawns and distant whoops and chirps filter through a pastoral gauze of maternal comfort.  Track three, “Kebnekaise”, is the first to feature percussive rhythm, and what is present dances lightly on the periphery for, at first, only a short amount of time, echoing and delaying with a mid-stereo field drumskin tap drawing it together, until the rhythm posits itself in a central but unobtrusive place among the soundwash.

I found myself drawing comparisons to the more ambient work of Robin Guthrie, specifically the Mysterious Skin soundtrack, or a much more restrained Boards of Canada, but as with most things of this calibre, it’s best not to dwell too long on the juxtapositions and references.  Instead, I kept turning the volume up – not to overcome some production shortcoming, but to dive deeper into the layers Friberg has built his work on.  Each decibel increased seemed to provide a new subaqueous creature, visible only in the auroral halo of the imagination.

Stark, honest, intelligent, emotive – this is an album that provides an aural canvas on which to transcend humanist ideas of beauty to instead examine the greater surround.  That is, it is a truly ambient album.

Architeq‘s Birds of Prey ep was killer but it was an ep.  Everything else happened.

I didn’t even know there was a full-length coming out, but Gold & Green is due out on Tirk shortly, if not already.  I’ve heard “Krakatoa” and “Spinning Plates” and it’s #1 of the year so far.  I haven’t been this excited to hear fourteen tracks since Paul Westerberg.

One of those rare, rare creatures these days – an artist and release with very little to no information available.

There’s a Myspace page, and a couple of links available to pick this up on the sly, but that’s about it.  It’s classified as dubstep, and I think that’s what initially drew me to it – but this is definitely not dubstep, at least in the typical sense.

It is more appropriate to classify this as the sort of deeper dub techno that instead ventures down the path of  Maurizio or Carl Craig for inspiration.  Absolutely sublime, the EP is reminiscent of classic Derrick May or Model 500.

A-side “Need to Sleep” drifts in on soothing filtered pads until a restrained electro beat drops in.  Everything’s in motion here, reaching outer depths of space and back again in momentary cycles.

The b-side, “Wind in die Risse” makes room for sparser percussion – I really didn’t even notice it was there until it was well on its way – flirting around a shimmering, mildly more aggressive mid-freq pad that would sound perfectly at home on any number of aforementioned Transmat releases.  When the horn-synth chords pipe in for the  final push, it’s an alien/human construct, the music of the spheres indeed.

Update: I was finally able to get onto Timely Aiah’s Myspace page, and he’s giving this release away for free. Get it via Mediafire.

When the first Wax white label EP, 10001, originally dropped, the identity of its creator was somewhat shrouded in secrecy.  Turns out, it was deep/minimalist Shed trying his hand at some Detroit-flavored house.

Keep it up.

The untitled a-side starts with the usual dj drum intro – but when those pads hit at one minute, watch out.  This brought to mind the Kelli Hand classic “Come on now baby” from the Detroit:  Beyond The Third Wave compilation oh so many years ago, and stays the straight up, low down funkin course for the remainder of its six minutes.  I can smell the warehouse dust and the sweat coming off the walls on this one.

The b-side starts off with that glorious Detroit combination of ringing pads and piano chords.  As the elements work a chop rhythm, the percussion picks up until it all drops ninety seconds in.  Tension is, to me, what Detroit is about, and the release when it all culminates is a night on the dancefloor like few others.  This is what the early morning drive back to Motown from Chicago must have sounded like so many years ago.

While neither track is much for rockist structure, it’s not needed here.  This is aimed at those of us with better things to do at 4am than sleep.