sync or swim

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Rebecca Anderson lives in Ypsilanti in the United States and she has a beautiful voice. Together with her husband Hans, a cellist, they make strange but very funky electronic music as Double Helix. Their latest EP, sync or swing, which is out now on emoticon recordings follows on from last year's three tracker, Funxtiles, which appeared on Rush Hour. There's some really deep music in here - Rebecca's voice, dense layers of strings, exotic percussion, gently simmering 303s all laid out over beautifully formed, carefully jacking beats. Ypsilanti lies about 30 miles west of Detroit, on the way to Chicago which is where I'd put the music if I was asked to try to define it - the attention to texture and detail that is the trademark of Detroit coupled with the heads down 4/4 vibe of the Chicago dancefloor. There's an archive on their appearance at the 2nd Detroit Electronic Music Festival at Groovetech that you can check out if you don't believe me.

Subscript kicks off the collection with a rounded, dubby b-line with the odd synthetic bass slap thrown in to give it a more funky inflection. Filtered drums occasionally roll in and out of the mix while the groove is nailed down by swung hats, machine claps, crisp congas and a solid kick in the bottom end. Rebecca's smooth, breathy vocal shares the lead with two meandering synth lines - one mysteriously gliding from pitch to pitch, the other taught and stretching restlessly. There's some ambivalence here - the minor melody which opens is slowly subjugated by the more positive, pushed organ chords that emerge at the end of the introduction. Eventually a chorus emerges in the last third of the track, the refrain "I am not afraid" echoing the ultimate dominance of major over minor that happens throughout this track. Profound stuff, but there's plenty here to keep a dancefloor moving as well as thinking.

Percussion, vocal snatches, filtered riffs and a growling bass sound swim around over clipped house beats in Unlocked - an ever mutating and shifting, heads down and shoulders up sound over a cheeky then pumping bass line. The repeated line "open your mind and you'll feel fine" could be taken as listening instructions for the whole EP.

The last track, Witness, is the standout. Listening to the opening bars you feel that it's the kind of music MJ Cole might have written had he been born in Ypsilanti rather than London. Here the voice is at its most exposed and obviously beautiful. It's accompanied by lush cello lines that move together in parallel and swim in and out of the mix, a bubbling analogue bass over a straighter eighth note groove and some bizarre percussion. On the strength of this track alone this EP is going to be in my bag for some months to come, but there's so much to listen to in the instrumentation and that voice on all of these pieces that this is one of those rare house disks that I'll be leaving on the turntable when I put the headphones down and my feet up. Something for your head, heart and feet. A rare combination.