Automat by Automat [via nil]
By a strange coincidence I'm already familiar with part of this album from Radio Soulwax's D&SCO mix where The Genus is used as a transition track between Sunday Morning Fever and Welcome Aboard (at around 11:20). Due to the mixing you can pretty much only hear the higher synth parts, so it's nice to hear the rest of it now.
Anyway this is a neat combination of space disco and progressive electronic. (No, not that progressive. The early synth and new wave stuff.) This means that you literally combine a space disco beat and bassline and everything else is progressive electronic noodly stuff. It works pretty well! All aspects are fairly well done. It's not super-catchy but it sounds good, and combined with the beat to keep things moving this is great general cruising music. The first three tracks (which are the A side) even flow together smoothly, and I'm probably always going to be a sucker for that. Also of note is the passages where the beat drops out completely, and that's still decently well done.
In general I would advise against dropping this into any mix not designed in some way to be chill-out or so, since it's not the fastest and the beats aren't super-crunchy, due to the fact that every sound was made by an experimental monophonic synthesizer. Which, if you think about it, is kind of impressive, but it still doesn't have a forceful drive, since that's not exactly what it's trying for.
Robots are awesome.
» xwd