It turns out that Beautiful Swimmers are from DC, the city which has played host to my life's various extremes. Apt, then, that they're peddling nostalgia; the true north towards which all house music is oriented is the disembodied, time-distilled joy of fond recollection with or without any specific object of recall. It's probably intentional - the title doesn't give much away, but the mix is run through with old favorites re-orchestrated for the club (that soca mix of Sweetest Taboo was pulled from here, and it plays directly into an equally-classic treatment of Marvin Gaye's I Want You; shortly thereafter, there's a song by someone named Ariya, which is close enough).

This is terrific. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention that closely, but my recollection of Sophie's work to-date is that it was a series of relatively anonymous singles, some great and some just ok, collected occasionally on full-length releases that offered little value over the experience of listening to one's preferred tracks individually. OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES, for all of the different directions that it goes in, has that ultimate quality of feeling irreducible; that is, its contents are balanced on the whole rather than what any individual song or subset can offer.

This is an incredible album that has locked down an admirably-wide lane for me - slow Spanish guitar, the most sedate vocals possible from Ximena Sariñana, and no discernible cultural impact whatsoever. Omar Rodríguez-López was a big deal as a part of At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, but a huge part of his legend was the staggering amount of material that he released in every conceivable style (and, to a lesser extent, the wildly varying quality of those releases), and it's exactly this sort of curio that keeps people combing through his discography. There's no indication that El Trio will ever reunite, and the only music that does remotely the same thing for me was made by a guy who's dead now.

I can't remember the last time that a project grabbed me this immediately. It probably helps that the first track (and the fourteen following) runs its course in a minute flat, but it's not like more of any of these would be a bad thing. It's been amusing to watch people around the internet freak out trying to solve this, convinced that the simple-enough concept - fifteen minute-long raps - is a part of some greater mystery, or that there are full-length (i.e.