The star of one of the surprise releases from earlier this year - Nicolas Jaar is back with the eagerly awaited follow up to “A Time For Us”. After his contributions to last year’s “Snuggle & Slap” compilation, Nicolas Jaar’s “Marks & Angles EP” marks his debut release on Circus Company, as well as another bold step forward for the musician himself.

All three tracks are rooted in house music, but Jaar’s rich acoustic textures and elastic timekeeping lead to a far more personal place. They explore strange emotional registers, a commingling of melancholy and joy in a shadowy slow dance. “Marks” is a shuffling, late-night number that’s too idiosyncratic to be reduced to its influences; a dub blues for organ and synthesizer blossoms into a piano’s modal jazz solo, all overlaid with Jaar’s haunted vocals. “Angles” stretches guitar strings like taffy through a forest of finger snaps and slow-motion electro shudder, with a cycling chorus teasing out medieval melodies. “Materials” is quicker of spirit, with a rippling pulse played out on muted jazz drums, shuttling between blocked piano chords and silvery oscillators and weaving an irresistible groove. It’s beautiful, unexpected and absorbing music-and there’s nothing else out there that sounds like it.

‘Desert Fires’ is Noveller’s full-length follow-up to last year’s No Fun debut ‘Red Rainbows’. Noveller is the solo project of Brooklyn-based guitarist and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate.  The sounds on ‘Desert Fires’ express a compositional evolution from layered loop-based drone work to more expansive formal arrangements of swells, throbs, tones and shimmer.  Where ‘Red Rainbows’ presented an anthology of studies in technique—from early bedroom recordings to Noveller’s first exploits in the studio—‘Desert Fires’ illustrates a refined, deliberate meditation on the physical relationship between Lipstate and her electric guitar.  Handling the instrument as her muse, Lipstate summons a sonic palette so rich as to challenge the listener to conceive of how it’s housed in a single instrument manipulated by a solitary performer.

Opening track, “Almost Alright,” stakes claim to ground in territory charted by Fripp & Eno or synth-heavy contemporaries Emeralds, and leads the listener into the spacious, sprawling landscape of ‘Desert Fires’.  “Kites Calm Desert Fires” is a sandstorm of rich, percussive guitar, warm humming bass and swirling rhapsodic chimes. “Toothnest (for Chris Habib)” arrives at an idyllic sonic plateau of windswept fuzz and tremolo, then charges blindly with a soaring guitar solo evocative of bagpipes triumphantly marking a return from battle. Closing track “Fades” is the precipitate of a fragile complexity of deeply sensual sonic reactions—physically pairing texture, air and chance with the strings of Lipstate’s guitar—it exposes the emulsion of one’s ears to the light of Noveller’s sounds.

Having recently translated the studio recordings of ‘Desert Fires’ into live arrangements, Lipstate has patiently nurtured the common pulse of musician and instrument into a seamless, organic enterprise fit for consumption from the stage. Noveller tours the US and Europe thru the summer and fall of 2010 in support of the Saffron Recordings release, ‘Desert Fires’.

The You EP, Gold Panda’s debut release on Ghostly International, is the stuff dreams are made of. Walking on the sunny side of the instrumental hip-hop street, the UK producer drapes the title track’s deep, crunching beat with slyly sliced-up vocal samples, a hint of nostalgia, and just a touch of shoegaze ambience—the results are both head-pleasing and emotionally stirring. What really sets “You” apart, though, is its musicality—Gold Panda knows well enough to situate his rhythms adrift in a pool of honest-to-god melody, making the track’s anthemic chord changes sound positively world-changing. And if not world-changing, then certainly summer-defining.

The digital version of the You EP includes three Gold Panda originals—the aforementioned “You”, the static-y dancefloor minimalism of “Killing Yourself on a Beach”, and the crisp, frothy micro-funk of “Peaky Caps”—as well as a whopping four remixes of “You”, including versions by Osborne, Seams, Dam Mantle, and Bristol, UK producer Minotaur Shock, who sends the track’s high-pitched vocal sample twirling into the club to mingle with marimbas, clattering hi-hats, and a crowd of warm synthesized strings.

Long gone are the days of Martina Toplay-Bird lending her spectacular voice to Tricky’s dystopian trip-hop visions. With ‘Some Place Simple‘, Topley-Bird finds her natural home on Honest Jon’s presenting an album of finely grained indie-pop. Highly recommended summer listening.