Axel Boman shows with two albums at the same time that the house can still go in all directions ★★★★☆

For a long time, he wasn’t over the top, and now we know why. Swedish producer Axel Boman puts out two hefty albums at the same time, and you can hear how much painstaking work has gone into it. And above all: how much vision, from yet another Swede who takes dance in a completely new direction.

Boman had a small club hit in 2010 with the track Purple Drink† Thanks to that song he came in the sights of the experimental house DJ DJ Koze from Germany and lingered a bit in the club of the warm, experimental house. On his new albums Boman lets his accessible and trippy music shoot in even more directions, far beyond the boundaries of electronic club music. the track Nowhere Good starts out as a classic deep house track around a bubbling bassline and swirling keyboards, but the song takes on an intense dancefloor finale thanks to vocal samples and bouncing, shrill acid arpeggios.

The attention to sound design and detail is unparalleled: from deeply flowing, almost completely filtered out basses and disco samples in Grona Dalen to the tightly produced salsa percussion in atra, with Kristian Harborg’s honking jazz saxophone. Boman plays with the genres and leaves in tracks like grape and Sotto pasggio the easy listening or the lounge return to a bygone era in an intoxicating setting of exciting house and dub-techno. But he avoids all clichés, and includes, for example, in the acid-like dub song Cacti Is Plural captures attention by merely turning the filters of his synths and allowing the sounds to change color by a millimeter at a time. The delayed breakbeats in the track Roman Plumbing come from a past of trip hop and drum and bass, of course, but you’ve never heard them like this before, next to strange, echoing voices and again those ripping saxes. A heartwarming and groundbreaking house diptych.