[The Corner]

Anthony Parasole is from Brooklyn: that his new label, The Corner, is the most evocative of Kings County in some time should come as little surprise. This isn’t the “new” Brooklyn filled with artisanal mayonnaise and pickle shops, budding musicians, and bad mustaches, but rather Brooklyn as the dance-music powerhouse of the past 20 years. Parasole’s major precursor is Adam X, a man who looked at the house and disco coming from the Paradise Garage and the Limelight across the East River and went in a different direction, putting his borough on the techno map with Detroit and Berlin instead of Manhattan. Gritty, desolate, and industrial was how the borough sounded, and Parasole has embraced those and other sounds of the borough with his own Atlantic Ave and the hip-hop/house combination of the Tri-State EP.

Stepping up for release number three is Shawn O’Sullivan, whose rough and ready records for L.I.E.S. and W.T. have already earned him numerous plaudits. “Security” storms out of the gate with the straight-laced thump of vintage Regis — an excellent club track that throbs and warps over its seemingly too brief runtime. Teaming up with Beau Wanzer as Civil Duty, “Courier” is a rattling, distorted slice of mental body music, and O’Sullivan finishes up solo with the stepping, ominous “Crisis”. Together with The Corner’s strong design flourishes (the mob hit cover art, label decreeing that “Help is on the way”), Security depicts scenes from a rugged, violent city. As a soundtrack to the darkest De Niro movie (n)ever made, it hits all the right buttons, and should be a staple in every techno lover’s bag for the months to come.