The Noise In the Sky

The 2012 sophomore album from Pierre-Antoine Grison (Krazy Baldhead) finds the Parisian producer having even more fun than he did with 2009’s The B-Suite, a debut album that was divided into four movements. The Noise in the Sky opens with its title track, where playfully percolating tones bleep, blip, and bubble around stuttered beats. Grison smoothly segues distorted analog synths and a deep, wobbling bass without falling too deep into dubstep trappings. He pitches up female vocal loops in “Surabaya Girl” before pumping them through Vocoder effects that bob and float over a trance collage. When the song breaks down, it sounds like an orchestra of vintage videogames trying to keep up with the sporadic patterns of a drum machine. “Amplifried” similarly clashes digital innovation with analog textures to create a robotically funky standout track. Hints of early-'90s Chicago house dart in and out of the skittering “Empty Boy”; this time, fewer effects are used on the womanly vocal samples, making for a more soulful-sounding tune. “A Child Is Born” closes by contrasting electric guitar delay with Casiotone notes.