Larry Gus marks a bit of a departure for DFA Records. While his peers deal in nü-disco delights, this Greece-born producer-singer and recent SPIN profilee combines visceral grooves with ’70s spiritual jazz, making for music that hovers in the rafters high above the dance floor — that heady place where hash smoke, vanilla-scented fog, and evaporated sweat mingle in a molasses-thick atmosphere. There’s a little bit of Matthew Dear in the mix, and also some Madlib, but the man blazes his own trail on “The Night Patrols (a Man Asleep),” a simultaneously propulsive and atmospheric highlight from the forthcoming Years Not Living full-length, due out August 20. Fittingly, Stones Throw fella James Pants is plotting a remixed version — so is techno strangeoid Bookworms, but for now, this is plenty to digest. Related trivia: Panagiotis Melidis chose the name Larry Gus because it’s a homonym of the Greek word for “larynx.” The more you know …
Larry Gus, Years Not Living track list:
1. “With All Your Eyes Look”
2. “The Night Patrols (a Man Asleep)”
3. “Taxonomies”
4. “The Sun Plagues”
5. “The Eternal and the Ephemeral”
6. “Merely Today”
7. “Pericles”
8. “In Violet Ink (Misprints)”
9. “The Percival Seascapes”
10. “Paths Laid Down”
