Summer(y)’s here and the time is right. Last calendar year, "Work It" aside, was a rather lackluster one for dance music; even folks who should have known better got caught up with that soulless electroclash and forgot about the funk. I’m happy to announce that things are different in 2003. Beyond the full-scale synthpop revival we seem to be experiencing (qv. recent reviews in this pages of Erlend Øye, Postal Service, etc.), several post-everything trends have been emerging to right past wrongs and point in exciting new directions. Even just the last few weeks have seen a handful of stunning dance-oriented releases from around the globe, demonstrating that dance is as much a global phenomenon as ever. Here’s what’s been blasting from my stereo, and why I’ve been keeping my floor clean this semester:

The Bug: Pressure
(Tigerbeat6)
If the mp3 playlists of Paces DJs are any indication, I’d say Jamaican riddims and dub flava are succeeding banghra as clubpop culture’s exotica-flirtation-du-jour. Now, I don’t know from dancehall, but if the customarily glitch-oriented cats at Tigerbeat have perked their ears up at the Bug it’s safe to assume there’s something gleaky going on here. Indeed, the transatlantic producer breathes electro-tinged life into a genre I’ve always found intriguing but a tad too monotonous. This is helped by a great diversity of tempos, structural approaches, and guest vocalists (Dominican, Viennese, Trinidadian…), though individual tracks tend to pound one monolithic groove into the ground; true to the genre and the base needs of dancefloors everywhere. And though a couple of mellower, almost melodic cuts provide a welcome change of pace, the clear standouts here the roughest, nastiest bass-bin thumpers.

Various Artists: Digital Disco
(Force Tracks)
The genre that until recently dared not speak its name, having spent well over a decade thinly disguised as house, emerges to reclaim the free-spirited soul it lost along the way and revel in the sheen of a sleek new production ethos. "Micro-house," as they’re calling it, denotes less a specific sound than a painstaking attention to sonic detail that makes the stuff just gleam; especially welcome in a genre mired to death in a swamp of indelicate, monotous 12" sides. Force Tracks, the German label responsible for many of the nascent style’s highlights, offers this flagship compilation of smooth/edgy glitch-popping funk-outs, horn-fueled throwback diva jams, and pulsating filtered vocoder anthems (don’t worry: taste theory has been debunked.) Despite the variety, there is real cohesion here, and a real sense of purpose; a group of producers around the globe with a shared vision for the future of dance.

Burnt Friedman and the Nu Du Players: Can’t Cool
(EFA)
Impossibly stylistically-intermingled and constantly self-reinventing, this is a bizarre album that occupies (but is not limited to) a territory in between the two discs discussed above: Jamaican-inflected but truly international collaborative effort (at least four continents are represented) spearheaded by an alias-crazy electro-head down with the German techno elite. The press release categorizes it as "folk-funk reggae soul hybrid," but even that doesn’t capture it all. Truthfully, much of this is too laid back for dancing, though those influences never disappear completely, and there are at least a couple of funk jams worthy of a globetrottin’ Sly Stone. It’s clearly an experimental record, and the results are sometimes breathtaking, sometimes merely curious – and unfortunately, none of it lives up to the stellar first cut, "Fuck Back," a slab of pitch-perfect micro-house, subtle but unbearably funky stop-start building up into layers of horn skronks and lithe guitars.

The Gotan Project: La Revancha del Tango
(XL Recordings)
Revancha means revenge, and while the emotional nabe of this record is anything but hot-tempered, it’s amusing to think of this as the vindication of a genre too long ignored in the world dance scene. Traditional tango instrumentation – sinuous bandoneon, swirls of Spanish guitar, violin stabs – combined with electronica – in this case, danceable "down-tempo" sometimes straying into sophisticated house territory – seems like such a natural pairing; it’s hard to imagine it hasn’t happened before. Or perhaps we just haven’t heard it: after all, there is serious potential here for the worst sort of hackneyed, uninspired lounge-exotica. Thankfully, the Paris-based project sidestep these concerns to fashion an album both elegant and suitably sensuous, but never glossed-over or sentimentalized. The beats, consistently creative and enjoyably organic (thanks in part to substantial live drums and percussion) never overpower the tango elements, which in turn are more fully realized than a mere novelty. And bonus remixes, by everyone from Peter Kruder (of K&D) to Antipop Consortium suggest a range of possibilities future directions for techno-tango encounters.