Six Degrees of Araabmuzik’s Electronic Dream

An important album for its time, and an absolute blast for any kind of future that awaits, Kylie Minogue's Fever is slick, sleek and slippery. The smash single, "Can't Get You Out of My Head," became a self-fulfilling prophecy with a melody that is almost insidious for its overwhelming powers of seduction. And the rest of the album managed to make that merely one of many highlights, with thwacking house-music anthems like... "Love at First Sight," squiggly electro ballads like "Fever," and an ever-present gloss of pop glaze that makes all things shiny and smooth. When it came out in the newly web-centric world of 2001, Fever proved strong and worthwhile enough to begin to shift what "pop" could mean to different audiences — and how it could, in crafty hands, be enlisted and employed.

AraabMuzik had a hand in four tracks on Crime Pays, an album on which rapper Cam'ron sounds crazy, cramped and creeped out. AraabMuzik's beat for the single "I Used to Get It in Ohio" is a dense rush of frizzed-out textures, ominous drums and some deliciously chintzy piano tinkles that wouldn't sound out of place in a bad horror movie. It's all a bit cheap and definitely digitized, but there's so much... going on — and so many layers in play — that those otherwise damning aspects prove to be real assets. "Spend the Night" finds AraabMuzik playing around with a cool ray-gun sound, while "Chalupa" skews as laidback and minimal in ways that illuminate the kind of little skitters and sprays he slathers so well onto drum sounds.

El-P is a hip-hop producer who has seemingly never heard a sound that couldn't be improved by staring it down, busying it up and attacking it with a scouring pad. It's a strategy he's deployed to great success as part of Company Flow and behind the boards for Cannibal Ox, but his solo album Fantastic Damage feels all the more potent for its closeness to El-P alone — especially in the instrumental... versions available on Fan Dam Plus. His rapping is not immaterial, of course, but El-P's productions — with infusions of eerie noise and beats brittle and dry like AraabMuzik's — gain a good deal from extra open space to eat up and spit back out.

Some of AraabMuzik's darker, dancier moments hearken back to the early depths of techno in Detroit, where futurism was serious business and the best way to invest in it was to hunker down and burrow deeper and deeper underground. No enterprise did that better than the collective known as Underground Resistance, which made a show of its militant moods and turned out a slew of records beginning in the late '80s that... sound wowing still. Nocturbulous Behavior - The Mix takes a concise and wide-minded tour through the vaults, with heady and storming techno tracks by the likes of Mad Mike, The Martian and X-101 all mixed together in a DJ set for the ages.

With the right updating and messing around, it's easy to imagine some of the soundtrack music from films by John Carpenter being reborn as AraabMuzik tracks. The synthesizers in offerings from movies like Escape from New York, The Fog and Dark Star strike similar chords, literally and figuratively, and the creepy economy of the theme from Halloween falls very much in line with parts of Electronic Dream. What is a hip-hop producer... these days if not a distant descendent of the soundtrack composer? He has to know when to command the action and when to get out of the way — two habits that AraabMuzik has come to know impressively well.