Available on: Rush Hour 12″

Whenever a new FaltyDL released is announced it’s hard to know what the hell you’re supposed to expect.  Now the impossible-to-define producer (real name Drew Lustman), who in his short history has tackled almost every genre du jour in one form or another, has gone and made a retro-tinged EP for Rush Hour’s new Direct Current series.

Opener ‘All In The Place’ is immediately stunning, a classicist manifesto expertly blending all sorts of tried-and-tested sounds and textures.  It’s an adept mixture of Detroit, dub techno, and even acid house, and its restless, constantly morphing structure would be jarring were it not for the breathtaking clarity and propulsive momentum. The moment it starts it’s like the sun breaking out, spreading warmth and illuminating everything in its vicinity, and the plasticky, almost gaudy synths set a standard for the rest of the EP. ‘St. Marks’ pairs an addictive vocal sample with rolling staccato percussion, breaking out of its loosely-defined shackles for brief moments, jumping, puttering, and even stopping unpredictably. Lustman gets delirious for the second half of the track, laying strings all over, bringing the vocals to the forefront and and phasing the chords out in glorious 3D. Then everything drops and the drums become faintly crunchy, footsteps that suddenly explode into starbursts of light before zooming back into place, breathing heavily and struggling to regain composure.

The blindingly bright, cheery tones of ‘Discoko’ are offset by a silky smooth chords and acid squelches, making for a track that’s like a pastiche of the old Artificial Intelligence series on Warp.  But instead of the robotic, inhuman mechanics of those releases, “Discoko” stomps, and stomps hard – pseudo-Purple-Wow synths fly all over the track, but the drums are almost always there to pin things down and keep them firmly in place, landing hard and decisively. ‘Groove’ closes the EP in fine form, a little more straightforward than the other tracks with insistent percussion, chopped, broken up and shuffled behind gurgling synths interrupted by an absolutely gorgeous breakdown about a minute in, until the drums come back in and poke holes in the downy quilt, resuming the stunted gallop.

It’s actually quite fitting that Lustman released this EP on Rush Hour, as it sounds like it was made with mostly old equipment; in fact, it probably could pass for an old Metroplex record or something excepting that unmistakably modern touch. Lustman’s music bristles with a giddy excitability, the sounds stubbornly refusing to stay where they’re supposed to and his melodies often going off on unforeseen tangents. These tracks aren’t exactly straightforward techno, then, but they might as well be for a man whose gloriously confounding work is often described as dubstep, funky, wonky, IDM, garage, and whatever else you might want to throw at him.  I’m guilty of some of these myself, but when I listen to this record all those silly terms vanish and I’m forced to marvel at the clarity of vision and purity of execution here, a record that transparently apes the canon without ever sounding derivative.  It’s starting to look like FaltyDL can do anything, and this release is one of his best yet, with ‘St. Marks’ already feeling like a highlight of his surprisingly large catalogue.

Andrew Ryce