I just reviewed "Toeachizown," the lead single from Dam-Funk's first EP of five, for Pitchfork. It deserves the seven it got, but in the proper context, it's a dimepiece.

At the beginning of the summer, I would walk the four miles home from my favorite nite spot through the brief period of constant humidity that characterized the first couple weeks of a relatively cool summer.

The reason I would walk so far was because I didn't want to hurry home -- drenched in sweat, feeling it trickle down my skin under my jeans felt so right while listening to the wooshing synthesizers that dominate Dam-Funk's incredible BBC mix. This mix is probably the best I've heard this year, to the extent that I would listen to it twice over on the long walk home. It's the kind of thing that makes me rethink reductive assumptions about genres and what they're supposed to mean, or the importance of how music works relative to an audience, to the relative unimportance of genre. It can also make me zone the fuck out & not think of anything at all but its own sunset zen perfection.

My favorite music right now seems to work by surprising my own taste, by standing out from my past experiences with music in increasingly radical ways; if the world of music is flat terrain, flattened further by repeated listening, Dam-Funk's work, when heard in the right context, feels like a solid mountain at the moment. He joins artists like DJ Quik & Kurupt and Gucci Mane in doing something that feels truly apart. It isn't so much that they break against current trends, simply replacing one zeitgeist in order to anticipate or inspire another. Instead, these artists work for the long haul in their own worlds, creating their own microgenres where they set their own rules, their own system of tensions between pop pleasure and resistant dissonance, between cheesy obviousness and tasteful security, between the feminine and the masculine and the predictable and unpredictable.

Then they upset it all, just to keep you paying attention. "LAtrifying," for example, off of the Toeachizown EP, is such an exception to what you expect from Dam at this point; instead of slow riding funk, it takes the stuttering snares & drums of two-step or old school 70s funk, wedding them to the typical Dam tropical '80s synth vibe; it feels so much more exceptional because it pushes against your expectations of what a Dam-Funk track is supposed to sound like.

I'm not sure what it means that my favorite artists are so inwardly-developed, that they seem to be ingesting the logic of Simon Reynold's 'scenius' & turning into this internal auteur's modus operandi, but I really like it. Maybe this is a long-running theme for artists -- I certainly recognize this sort of thing with Timbaland's late 90s/early 00s work -- but with Gucci and Quik's latest record, and especially with Dam-Funk, it really feels like the artist is very aware of how he is creating his own world for the audience to revel in. It's also very well-considered, not simply trying to throw together a bunch of disparate genres to push progress without consideration for the framework of rules in which these genres function.

I also recommend checking Rich Juzwiak's excellent post on Dam-Funk's recent mix with James Pants entitled "Chart Toppers," which you can read here.

DF will also be spinning @ The Shrine here in Chicago a week from Wednesday.