LAURIE SPIEGEL/JEREMY GREENSPAN Drums&Drums&Drums 12" (Jiaolong)

Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys takes composer Laurie Spiegel's "Drums," a 1975 composition first released in 1983 and included amongst the bonus material on the deluxe reissue of her excellent album The Expanding Universe, and turns it into a rock-solid house anthem. The magic comes from Spiegel's original, a minimal computer music piece derived from the hypnotic rhythmic overlap of multiple electronic pulsations, which sounds like Ghanian funeral drumming played on Kraftwerk's pocket calculators. Greenspan's frugality is key here; he does very little other than subtly edit Spiegel's piece, and then slowly builds layers of 4/4 machine beats and spiraling arpeggiations of synthesizer overtop of its body. It's no small feat that he so successfully takes a very academic piece of music and exploits its primality, taking it out of Bell Laboratories and into Berghain. The flipside is no slouch, either, with Greenspan's original "Sirius Shake" playing like a conceptual sister to the A-side, laying out a slowly pumping, tribal dance via a filtered, farty bass synth, quietly hissing cymbal pulses, and a high-pitched siren squeal that spirals skyward as the rhythm circles around the stereo spectrum like a Hatian vodouist. All in all, it's a stunning little slice of wax for the more adventurous rhythm scientists out there, and is not to be missed!

-Mikey IQ Jones (February 11, 2013)