Pitchfork

Beck has said that today it would be "prohibitively difficult and expensive" to make an album with the many brief and variegated samples that made 1996's Odelay such a rewarding and detailed listen, as Ryan Dombal noted in his Deluxe Edition review. It's true: Sampling with the complexity of Odelay or even the Beastie Boys' decade-earlier Paul's Boutique, which the Dust Brothers also produced, seems to have gotten lost in the past, victim to clueless copyright laws and your basic human greed. But genre-defying records that mix and match source material, creating a collage-like effect that goes above and beyond just lifting an already-proven hook, are with us still. The KLF's Chill Out, in 1990, and the Avalanches' Since I Left You, in 2000, neatly bookended the last decade, and the current one has given us everything from the Go! Team to Girl Talk to Jens Lekman and The Tough Alliance.

From a slightly different angle, the cosmic disco of Lindstrøm, the eclectic DJ mixes of Optimo, and the Balearic A Mountain of One have all looked to once-discarded genres and used old sounds for their dreamier, ambient qualities, sort of like way back in the Chill Out days. This is the immediate universe of Quiet Village, a collaboration between Matthew Edwards of techno's Radio Slave and former film editor Joel Martin, though there's plenty overlap all around. Taking a name from the 1950s exotica track made famous by Martin Denny, Quiet Village combine car-chase funk, wailing sirens, horror-movie screams, soulful crooning, Mancini-esque orchestration, and superhero horns on "Circus of Horror", from the forthcoming Silent Movie. Scary movies aside, it's no horror at all-- a swoon-worthy, layered track as triumphant as the Go! Team and as beach-sexy as Studio.