More of an EP than a full-length, the ever-prolific Luke Vibert returns to his Kerrier District alias for two three-track twelve inches, or all six on the CD. As with the KD debut, disco is the corpse exhumed and delighted in here, and as with that record, Vibert is content to toy with his audience—”Disco Nasty” might be the apex of his benign piss-taking, alternating deliciously crunchy grooves with fucked-up dubbage. As is usually the case, acid informs his moves, so while the source material is discoid in sound, there’s no Prelude / West End formalism to the way he lays down the funk—Vibert would rather mess with your head than sustain a flow, so he scatters delicious segments about with little regard for where they might fall. This either results in success—”Sho U Rite” suspends disco breaks into a kind of jellied noodle-house soup—or falling on his face (”Realistique” sounding like an attempt at evoking Sylvester from someone who’s only just mastered Kano.) But this is nitpicking: Vibert’s progressivism is a virtue to be admired, he may be one of the few interested in investing in future discos rather than disco futures.

Rephlex / CAT 183 R
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[Mallory O’Donnell]

Never mind those voyages to the planets of rainbows and winged amazons that countless prog-bands heard from their Moog synthesizers. It is an instrument of dork camp, and synth-pop icon Jean Jacques Perrey will back me up on that. Perrey and IDM maven Luke Vibert previously made excellent comrades in “You Moog Me,” where their vintage ‘60s lounge-pop vacationed under a Martian sky lit with star showers and criss-crossing flying saucers. Their new excursions in acid techno sadly lacks some of the same spark. “Moog Acid 138″ is a decent, acid-techno treatment of carousel melodies that get overwhelmed by a blaring traffic jam of irritating synth yowls. The snappier “Moog Acid 133″ gets larded by too many abrupt synth wonks, garbled vocoder mutterings, and erratic turntable scratching. The remix by Jackson and His Computer Band thankfully gets the blood flowing: he slaps together an erratic, noisecore-meets-Billy Joel’s “Pressure” groove. Plastician’s remix strips everything down to a steady rhythm that slaps both cheeks of the face, while traces of the original Moog track buzzes like a mosquito caught in the ear. Now that’s a fitting tribute to the legend of Perrey.

LoEB / LOEB 001
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[Cameron Macdonald]