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Metro Area: Atmosphrique |
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(Environ) |
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"Atmosphrique" [154k RealAudio] "Piña" [172k RealAudio] |
It's rare thing in music, especially electronic dance music, when a recording becomes "timeless." Tastes are fickle, samples become dated, presets get overused. Not to mention that radio has lost nearly all of its long term memory. The task of assimilating good material and quality music of the past, present and future is left almost entirely to the DJ.
Rarer still are records like this one from Metro Area. Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani have obviously mastered the aforementioned challenge, and do so with great ambition: this EP also weaves in live instrumentation (strings, bass and percussion) with the anachronistic synths and tempos of yore. "Atmosphrique" is the faux-sophistico title of the first cut -- almost sounds as if Geist and Jesrani are starting their own '80s Detroit social club! Very much a disco/post-disco blend, this track somehow reinterprets the electronic influence of Italo-disco, while never letting it overwhelm the American disco-funk basis. And just to shake up the timeline some more, the song is also overlaid with some of the late '80s stacatto effervesence. Guitar and piano riffs make "Piña" an easy favorite for me, having worn the grooves in John Tejada's recent material on Palette and 7th City. There is just something about jazz guitar in the context of electronic dance music that seems to mesh with the mechanisms like no other ingredient has before. But nothing on this EP rests on the strength of one instrument: the great bassline evokes some of the best electronic r&b records of the '80s, while the piano is just cool enough for this to shake off any pop sensibilities. Finally Metro Area gives us "Rainy Street Feeling," which presents yet another paradox : this moodiest of cuts is also the EP's most up-tempo. How do they do it? Aside from the voice synthesizer, Dr. Hawking has nothing on Geist and Jesrani when it comes to rocking theories of space and time.
-DS |
