[BAR25]

German producer and BAR25’s most frequent contributor, Matt John, has quite a knack for evoking uneasy yet familiar feelings with his sound design. In “Hawaii You,” his hit collaboration with Ricardo Villalobos, it was that brief clunk of melodic color between foreign vocal samples — a computer alerting its user of a finished download. In the crowded house-pleaser, “Soulkaramba,” the lucid piano progression and orchestral swells anchored the frantically crammed track to more “traditional music.” “Olga Dancekowski,” John’s latest, is by contrast a relatively straightforward dance floor track; except this club seems to be taking a tumble through someone’s intestines. Rising from the undulating pattern is an even more seasick melody, somehow reminiscent of a delightfully unconvincing synth trombone and the adults from the Peanuts cartoon. The end result is surprisingly memorable and rave-friendly, even if its peculiar timbres have you looking over your shoulder while shaking it out.

Matthew Dear (as Audion) comes at “Olga” as if he were editing one of his own tracks during a live show. His remix uses bits of his own vocal utterances, ramped up percussion and a nagging synth vamp for off the cuff urgency. Dear also opts to repeat the original’s soliloquy himself, then snares it in his sampler and affects it beyond recognizability. It’s a tactic he’s quite fond of employing in his live PA’s and it has the same dizzying effect here. Fans accustomed to a more precise sound from Dear might but put off by its reckless construction, but more likely his remix of “Olga Dancekowski” will put them on the dance floor with more important matters at hand.