Darkness and the Light

A certain Nintendo hockey cartridge once famously devoted 75% of its paltry ROM to the opening refrain of "Blades of Steel" uttered by a distended electronic sportscaster. Much of Jesse Rose's Let's Start Again EP purrs and bloops with the electrohustle of distorted, twitchy samples, as if Rygar, Mega Man, that dude from Castlevania, and all the cool NES characters were partying it up in the production suite. Not so with his final track, the woozily infectious "Black Coffee".

Jesse Rose - Black Coffee
*Buy it from Juno*
*More about Jesse Rose here*

This dark gem juxtaposes crisp beat programming with a sultry female wail and background strings firing like frayed synapses. Perfect 5 AM music for a pre-dawn stumble.

---

Brennan Green cobbled together a track that is almost the diametrical oppostite to Rose's "Black Coffee". Here he remixes EPOD's "The Pursuit" with soulful aplomb, meshing wistful Rhodes lines with the original's spirited choruses. Why is it that naive happy house sounds like so much dreck, while the best stuff is made up of party sounds sustained by a certain longing (a la Larry Heard) or sadness? Is it a fairer take on the ups and downs of our lives? Brennan Green DJs every second Thursday at his Pop Your Funk affair at NYC's APT.

EPOD - The Pursuit (Brennan Green's Trackdown)
*Buy it from Coco Machete*