- Daryl Seaver's output as Samantha Vacation certainly jibes with the DIY, outsider aesthetic L.I.E.S. has unleashed upon electronic music over the last two years. After all, the Meager Sunlight co-founder emerges from the same underground scene as Container, Profligate and Lazy Magnet. Yet her debut can also be seen as a vicious curveball from the label. Where a great many plates from the vaunted Brooklyn imprint pivot upon stripped-to-the-bone hypnotics and a punk-as-fuck embrace of minimalism, Seaver's productions instead distinguish themselves with their labyrinthine exquisiteness and menagerie of rhythmic devices.
There are, in fact, very few rhythmic devices that haven't been incorporated into "Samantha's Vacation" and its more abstract flipside "Postcards From Mssr Perdu." With an academic background in classical composition, Seaver has more or less co-opted the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sensibility unique to the vintage disco edit (we're talking Walter Gibbons territory) in order to stitch together perversely shaped scraps of deep house, Italo, bass music, synth pop, electro and even Can-like space-funk. Not surprisingly, this also means neither cut is—however propulsive and tactile—terribly dance floor friendly. But that's not the point. Seaver is clearly a producer with a progressive understanding of groove architecture and to simply lose oneself amongst her metamorphosing structures is a thrilling experience in and of itself.
Tracklist A Samantha's Vacation
B Postcards From Mssr Perdu