[DFA]

Though DFA is deeply rooted in promoting mutant strains of disco there has always been room in their roster for quality house and techno too. But checking out their latest release, Since We Last Met, I had to keep making sure this was the same DFA Records that had recently seen releases from Ray Mang, Yacht and Black Van. For not only is NDF the work of Bruno Pronsato teaming up with Sergio Giorgini, but their first release together for the aforementioned label features one Mr. Ricardo Villalobos on remix, hardly a name you’d expect to find on DFA. Pronsato’s tracks are never short of feeling, but perhaps it is this collaboration with Giorgini (half of Benoit & Sergio and Birds & Souls) that has brought a more organic feeling to his latest project. As the hopeful, opening melodies build upon each other, a wooden flute appears amongst the more brittle claps and shakers that are unquestionably Pronsato’s. Deep, resonant drums add to the accumulating sense of wonder and beauty, eventually giving way to a regular 4/4 kick around the four minute mark. Throughout the track a world-weary voice lazily recounts the hopelessness of seeing an ex-lover on the street, realizing that whatever pure feeling there once was is now supplanted by a forced ambivalence.

Ricardo’s first mix clocks in at over 17 minutes and as such is a digital only affair. It is classic Villalobos, riding a seemingly endless tribal loop and packed full of delicate minutiae atop, be it needle scrapes, blown out, flapping woofers, or tiny sparks and glitches. It’s as if these were all offcuts of a mammoth studio project left lying around on the studio floor and were swept up and stitched together with the frayed edges of the original. These tiny scraps of sound bubble and pop out of the speakers, creating their own organic groove. Ricardo keeps the melodies of the original buried under these many layers, occasionally letting them bleed through a little more in places but largely keeping them subdued. His 12″ mix, still taking up most of the space on the record, plays around with subtly different vocal effects but largely is just a truncated version of the 17 minute mix. Like his best remix work, these remixes are bewitching and intricate and push the original on to greater heights. In the words of Pronsato and Giorgini themselves, “Since We Last Met” is “dance music twilit by melancholy.” They just forgot to add the necessary superlatives to help describe how good it is.