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DJ Seinfeld Time Spent Away From U Lobster Fury

06.11.17

Like many artists in the ‘lo-fi house’ movement, DJ Seinfeld is not responsible for how others classify him. Buzz-worthy press prescriptions can lumber a whole throng of diverse sounds under the same header, and electronic music is especially guilty of this. But from his fairly limited experience as a producer, either under his Rimbaudian, Birds of Sweden or Seinfeld alias, the Swedish artist’s raw yet schmaltzy house sampling has muscled him into a category that he has grown to embrace. “What I am doing is nothing really that new, it exists within an already established paradigm of dance music,” he said when asked what drove him to explore the lo-fi aesthetic. Instead, while happy to accept the movement’s burgeoning distinction, his latest record associates itself more so to electronic music’s historical continuum, rather than a newly designed perception of it.

Debut album Time Spent Away from U, released via Meda Fury and Lobster Theremin’s collaborative imprint Lobster Fury, is a break-heavy glut of acid-soaked house and delicately orchestrated techno. It’s a nostalgic journey guided by crumbly synths and archetypal 4/4 pulsations and it’s also a surprisingly sensitive record. Akin to March’s Sunrise EP, warped snippets are applied to generate an air of emotive reflection. Opener I Hope I Sleep Tonight warbles to a softly crooning phaser of garage-indebted vocal splices. Even the more hard-hitting, straight-laced cuts on this record such as the club standard I Saw Her Kiss Him In Front Of Me And I Was Like WTF?, Bring U Back and How U Make Me Feel carry a deep-set sincerity to them, which was merely hinted at on Sunrise and April’s Ruff Hysteria.

Stylistically, Time Spent Away from U doesn’t waver far. But the record is infectious in its simplicity, ad there’s enough emotional potency to see it through, allowing Seinfeld to transcend his ‘spoof house’ trappings once and for all.