The Uncanny Valley / The Floating Head

Dakar - I've Got That Feeling
Junior Boys - No Kinda Man (Jona Remix)
Goyte - Heart's a Mess (Supermayer Remix)

All three of these tracks are awesome. If you played them together, for example, on some sort of list designed for playing, in the order they're presented to you here, you would be treated to a sweet delight of grooving minimalness braised with soulful white male.

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Perhaps the most succinct explanation for the phenomenon known as the "Uncanny Valley" is that provided to Tracy Jordan by Jonah Friedlander on 30 Rock:



The thoughtful reader will have already noted that this valley is a purely visual category. There is no uncanny valley for music, for sound, for the human voice. What unites these three recent minimal tech-house burners is that in all of them, over a relentless electronic churn, a passionate male vocal swoons unfettered, detached, for the most part, from the clanking machine that surges beneath it. It's a song structure built around a dialectics of freedom. For the msot part, none of these songs really has much sounds that bind rhythm to voice, especially the Dakar track. The singing head and the churning beats straddle a big black sonic void. The locked-in techno beats only dialectically emphasize how unbound and free the voice is.

Dakar - is new on Get Physical
Junior Boys - from Get Physical's Body Language Vol. 6, mixed by the aforementioned Boys.
Gotye - remix commissioned by Australian singer Gotye from Supermayer, then, beyond all horizons of reason, inexplicably rejected. It's been floating around on the net for a while, and we present it to you like the glorious, mesmerizing dead butterfly that it is.