A little over a year ago, I saw James Blake live with Moses Sumney opening. It was a great show, and I remember both sets very clearly, but I imagine that over time the memory will blur into something like LIMBO. It's neat stuff, retaining the trademark Blake-ian fragility of voice and production but considerably more upbeat in terms of both tempo and mood.

Midtown 120 Blues is a seminal Deep House album, and is comprised mostly of delightful long-form warehouse excursions. It's also a forthrightly political work, and on two occasions features voiceovers in which the album's context is set. Given the content, it'd be a bit tone-deaf to excerpt them, and so here they are.

I’ve spent some six years of my life listening to this album in every situation imaginable, so it figures that the definitive experience would happen yesterday. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t actually listened to the album in a while, or maybe it’s hard to put myself back into the exact mindset of the era when I truly loved this thing - 2012, 2013, 2014, when I befriended at least three of you mostly because I could talk about Shlohmo for an hour and you’d tolerate it. Anyway, yesterday was far less exciting; the biggest joke of all about my job is that on the rare occasion that I do have to do any work it’s in the most hellish circumstances possible.

Jam City is a fella who made a record called Classical Curves which is widely heralded as very good and one of the decade's most influential pieces of electronic music. I've always found it pretty boring, and no one seems interested in explaining its importance in even remotely legible terms. A few years later, Jam City made Dream a Garden, a highly-anticipated and quickly forgotten left turn of a follow-up that saw him veer away from club bangers for nerds and plunge headlong into, like, funky guitar-based dream pop shit with vocals best described as ill-advised.

Apologies for the lateness, y’all - today and yesterday, I’ve been at a conference for something called DNN, which we don’t have to talk about at all. Because I’m a lazy, unprincipled shit, I offset my considerably-earlier-than-usual wakeup time with a Lyft to the convention center. My conversation with the driver, Oswaldo, unsettled me for several hours following, and I’m only now getting to this.

Truth be told, I don't often give album art the consideration that it deserves. Sometimes it seems pretty half-assed, or sometimes it leans heavily on an overused aesthetic, as is the case here; rarely, however, does indulging in that aesthetic render all other attempts to do so obsolete. The cover of Restless Idylls is an utterly perfect encapsulation of the album's sound - baroque, of a time that you're happy not to be in, and more than a little spooky.

This was one of the more enjoyable interviews that I've done, in that it felt more like provoking reminiscences from my grandfather than any sort of formal discussion. No disrespect intended, as 808 State is absolutely legendary; it just so happens that legends tend to be pretty old. Anyway, preparation for this interview basically kicked off my obsession with early 90's electronic music, and for good reason - 808 State defined the era, pioneering acid house and shaping the sound of the scene when it was more about dancing than whatever caused the mid-decade shift to the unfortunately-titled intelligent dance music period.

Rhythmically, there's a lot to diagram here - your calypsos, your dembows, and all manner of stuff that the trained listener could point out like when you get a beer that was brewed with honey and berries or something dumb and then go down the list announcing that oh, you're tasting berries and definitely picking up a note of honey.