Altered Zones

Ghost Notes, the debut EP by New York electronic duo The Gamut, sounds like something Excepter might have dropped had they emerged from the spirited sweatboxes of North Brooklyn DIY instead of the narcotic haze of post-9/11 LES. The obsession with duration and group ritual is absent, and the offerings pack enough melodic punch to satisfy instantly, but the line of spiritual continuity is hard to ignore. Combining Suicide-era drum machines and real-time digi-percussion, Kosmische synths, and the bass of Berlin techno, The Gamut mobilize the history of electronic music to construct a seductive pre-technological illusion-- a return to the primeval beat of the dance around the fire. If there's one thing that Derek Maxwell and Christian Fuller know, it's that all that imagined simplicity-- that deep-riding boom boom, those two-note Yodel melodies that would lose all their staying-power if they were forced to accommodate a third-- is really just the stuff of pop.

MP3: The Gamut: "Distantland"

Ghost Notes EP is out soon in MP3 and CD format, and will be available via MySpace