[Royal Oak]

I can’t think of a producer with a stranger idea of what constitutes house music than Atlanta’s Reggie Dokes. Like fellow Detroit expats Octave One, he gives listeners the sense that every off-kilter drum hit or plaintive piano chord has been placed with great care. Yet the melodic logic he’s employed since he leaped into production in 2001 has rarely made anything close to perfect sense. To be blunt, Dokes is positively all over the place, brewing up for his own Psychostasia imprint and labels like Philpot and Clone Loft Supreme a psychedelic suspension of weird chord changes and jarring phrase shifts. His Spectacle of Deepness EP on We Play House, a serious highlight of my 2009, even played like the hallucination of a madman. But what a gorgeously schizophrenic mess it was. His final transmission of 2009, “Untill Tomorrow” [sic] for Clone’s absurdly limited Royal Oak series (who knew you could press just fifty records?), finds him doubling back on the haziness of that release to produce a record on the whole more direct, more floor-oriented, and more obviously funky than most of his output to date. Unsurprisingly, however, those of you longing for those same old Rhodes vamps and Sascha Dive vocals might still want to look elsewhere.

On the titular A-side, Dokes places us in a tight spot between those oddly emotive, piano-driven melodies he’s made his name from and the kind of heavy percussion you’d associate more with UK funky than American deep. Dokes loves to play tricks with the soundstage — each element on the track, no matter where it’s been panned, vies for dominance over ever other simultaneously occurring element-and he crafts one of his tensest arrangements yet out of all these battling stabs. On the B, “Yellow Toe” finds Dokes winding down his BPMs slightly, but I’ll be damned if this groove isn’t more jarring, manic, and forcefully un-pretty than anything else on the slab. “The Beginnings of Ra,” however, lets all of this spiraling wackiness breathe a little. Like a malfunctioning robot doing a Theo Parrish impression, the track wanders and grooves through house tropes with a clumsiness that only makes it more endearing. For those house fans, like me, who have seized on Dokes as a breath of fresh air amidst the same old deepness, it’s precisely this mix of forceful groove, emotional exuberance, and borderline insanity that makes his records such a freaky pleasure. Keep us dancing, Reggie, and don’t you dare take your finger out of that electrical socket.