Being part of the Circus Company is necessarily a bumpy, zany affair, but few wear the clown’s nose and elephant’s makeup with quite as much aplomb as Dave Aju. Most of my Circus Company EPs date from around ‘02-’03, when I started collecting the label after my first “WTF?!” collision with Ark’s fiendishly cutup hatchet-house and other loose-hinged jackfests. More recently, the label has definitely come off my “buy on sight” setting, exhausted and exhausting by its own exuberance. But Dave Aju’s The Unorthodoctor was a notable exception that has proven its superlongevity, being both an extremely inventive, quirky and (decisively) useful EP that always finds itself as the DSP’d glue in the crack between my channels.

Love Always likewise conducts these strengths of invention, peculiarity, and utility to come up with what is for me a latecomer shortlist shoo-in for one of the top EPs of the year. In a year (this is still 2007, right?) redolent with bland beats bleatened to death during prolonged bouts of Abletonitis (not to mention the all-too-common outbreaks of “lame hooks disease” and digitally diffuse wackness), ANYTHING with personality stands out a mile.

But Love Always isn’t just inspired by contrast ­– it also finds poetry through homage to jazz greats (James Brown, Alice Coltrane, and others) channelled through filters in circuits (and vice versa). And all this with an irresistible house-groove with one foot in ’90s US deep and the other in the 21C microworld. Dig the preach-a-pella praising the sun on “Be Like the Sun”, groove to the mantralike “Timing is Everything” (Aju here seems to be following Cassy’s moves chantwise), vibe to the beautifully snatched and smeared flute on “Love Always”. The result is something between the aggressively retro sublimations of Hieroglyphic Being and the silicone-flattened sound-design of contemporary microhouse. And this is a fine thing.

Circus Company / CCS 021
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[Peter Chambers]