Minimal Man EP

“Timelessness” as it applies to music is a slippery and often pernicious term. It’s used by canon-reinforcers and transcendentalists to try and put things outside the bounds of context and material analysis, which is dodgy. But sometimes you hear certain pieces of music that feel outside of the normal flow of time. Thus with these four tracks (two of which are versions of “Outside the Window”) on William Orbit’s Guerrilla label. Peter Adshead aka Baby Ford and Ian Lovely aka Eon and many other aliases — both part of the UK’s underground dance scene going years back before acid house blew it wide open — were often capable of that whether being ultra minimal or brashly raven, but here they really went in deep. The most cosmic of techno, 70s and 80s Italo disco, the bump and shuffle of the truest of true-school house, the psychedelic industrial continuum: all flowed together towards what feels like the ur-groove, the source of it all, the 3am eternal place where the moment is all that matters. It’s a great record, and time has not dimmed its… well… timelessness.