Pitchfork

Less like a singles comp than an album ex-post-facto, Western Store resequences 11 tracks (all culled from five EPs, some pre-dating Rest) out of chronological order. Perhaps this explains a few notable absences, like where's the fucking bonus disc of Müller's genius remix work (in which he both out-freaks Ricardo Villalobos and out-funks Recloose)-- or indeed whither few non-Playhouse productions and remixes, like his florid International Pony rework or his heartstopping, breaks-based "It's About" from Freundinnen? But these are quibbles; if Western Shore falls short of definitive, it's deep enough to display Müller's range-- and, perhaps more importantly, offers a sufficiently unorthodox take on electronic body music to convince all those indie critics who Pazz & Jopped We Are Monster into the top 50 to take another look at the Playhouse back catalogue. House is a feeling, and the way Isolée gropes his way through it, eyes closed and twitchy fingertipped, should be enough to lure the staunchest four-to-the-floorphobes into the dark corners behind the kick drum.

A convoluted doc, Western Store opens with the hesitant, bewildered off-rhythms of someone stumbling back from the wilderness. It's an interesting bit of narrative revisionism, given that "Bleu" dates from Isolée's third, not first, Playhouse 12", but it's a smart move, pulling together in one stroke machinic, Säkho-styled techno, up-front house rhythms, and the pinging dub of Rhythm and Sound, as if to banish techno's conventional timelines altogether. With "Initiate II", the disc dives into the cavernous vocal house of Luomo, but Müller's garish Rhodes and itchy hi-hats jerk against the soporific effects in a way that Luomo's never do.

These aren't, actually, the disc's best tracks; those would be the quartet from Play 018, the EP also titled Western Store: "Rockers", "Surfers", "Simone Rides", and "King Off". Despite a low-slung electric bassline, "Rockers" has nothing to do with rock'n'roll-- nor with reggae, for that matter. A tin-can and fingersnap percussive jam, it's a virtual blueprint for, well, almost every current track in a Wighnomys vein, right down to the use of reverb as an instrument. Every drum has its own little pocket of airspace and a frequency so unique you could tune a radio to it. "Surfers" plays with the same ideas, but with some detuned chords starts to explore the sickly melodicism of Rest, while "Simone Rides" and "King Off" creep further into the humming darkness.

These tracks show a taste of Isolée to come, as he begins kinking up his fishing wire, throwing weird little hooks-- neither verse nor chorus nor bridge-- into otherwise solidly "tracky," non-songlike constructions. "Cité Grande Terre" may open as a traditional dub-techno track, but the doubletime crackle and anxious bass bumping beneath might as well be part of a different song altogether; once again, Müller's doing the work of the DJ ahead of time. The one-and-a-quarter minute "Poisson Mort", similarly, sounds like what you might get if you fast-forwarded through Rest at 16x.

By "Lost", which equips the early years' clatter with enormous, pie-in-the-sky Pink Floyd melodies, jazz chords, and Detroit techno balladry, the Monster inside begins to stir. Segue giving way to segue, this is where the Rest author gets restless and gives free rein to all the hooks and riffs and meta-motifs swimming around in the soupy innards of his sequencer. It's not easy listening, but that's "Beau Mot Plage", the unexpected breakaway hit that got Müller licensed by a thousand "shitty" (his word) Ibiza comps. Who knows why Playhouse went with Freeform Five's Latin-jazz "Freeform Reform" (which was comped more often than the original anyway); the tinselly electro original isn't just more appropriate an inclusion, it's better-- no less breezily Balearic than the remix, but simply lighting the beach with a phosphorus tide line instead of sweeping halogens, the better to illuminate, in the most natural way, Isolée's most unnatural approach to spinning glassy strands out of granulated blips.

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