Stream: Drumcell + Audio Injection “Cell Injection”

(from the Cell Injection EP available now from Droid Recordings)

Being the latest in back-to-basics Detroit-style minimalist squawk ‘n’ thump from the Droid Behavior collective, this original plus five remixes of “Cell Injection” comes from deeper in the L.A. underground as most are likely to get. The smooth cyborg call-and-response of the Drumcell and Audio Injection original is deconstructed, massaged, pulled-apart, abstracted and restitched by the turboweight club-dance likes of Tony Rohr (who breaks it into stuttery beats and metronomic pulses), Acid Circus (laying down a grimy cinematic throb), Tim Xavier (getting all techno with it) and DPLS (which sounds like the specs readout for a two-stage Titan ganja-rocket expressed as rhythm and harmonics), rising masters all. This is darkly sensual stuff made by and for nighttime people rampant midnight-to-six in ill-lit warehouses as spiritually far from Hollywood as Podunk or Parnassus; a hassle-diminished urban paradise best approached with GPS and pepper spray. These five bleak and sexy tracks compress L.A.’s node of this international milieu into a tidy 90-megabyte romp, good for your next spasm of non-dancefloor action-adventure and as fine an occasion for civic pride as Ripley’s Museum, the next Randy Newman album or the grave of Sam Yorty.

—Ron Garmon