Despite the visceral punch of the Chicago house innovator Larry Heard’s earliest hits—“Washing Machine,” from 1986, churned with grueling acid squelch; the following year’s cymbal-battering “Slam Dance” came down like a hailstorm—it’s his conflicting impulses that made him an icon. His two biggest tunes, “Can You Feel It” and “Mystery of Love,” both released under his Mr. Fingers alias, balanced percussive force with a newfound softness, drawing up the blueprint for deep house in the process.
But that same reluctance to settle into a single lane probably kept him sidelined in a genre that can be notoriously risk-averse. Boasting a glistening finish and bearing titles like “Dolphin Dream,” 1994’s freeform Sceneries Not Songs, Volume 1 came closer to new age, while 1995’s Sceneries Not Songs, Volume Tu suffused hip-hop and house beats in crystals and incense. The following year, Alien grafted jazzy R&B onto cosmic synths, suggesting a lab-grown hybrid hatched way out in interstellar space.
Heard has periodically returned to remind clubbers that he is a force to be reckoned with; his 2006 single “The Sun Can’t Compare” has attained latter-day classic status. Now, with Cerebral Hemispheres, the first Mr. Fingers album in almost 25 years, he attempts to sum up the full range of his interests and talents.
His last Mr. Fingers release, 2016’s Outer Acid EP, picked up Alien’s interstellar signals and translated them back into the language of the dancefloor, and part of the new album continues that project. In fact, all four of the EP’s tracks are reprised here, scattered across the album: The gurgling standout “Outer Acid” finds its mate in the steely minimal techno of “Inner Acid”; the ruminative drum circle “Nodyahed” has a new percussive counterpart in the title track, a similarly hypnotic array of drums, synths, and breathy accents.
But the operating metaphor this time is not space but the brain, whose opposing halves preside over Cerebral Hemispheres’ dual nature. Counterbalancing his techno leanings, a good portion of the album is given over to R&B’s silkiest trappings: jazz brushes, saxophone solos, dimmer-switch synths. In a recent Billboard interview, Heard recalled a proposed Sade collaboration that never came to pass, and there are hints of what that might have sounded like in the quiet-storm detailing that shades the album’s first half. A slow-burning blues guitar solo colors “City Streets,” a mid-tempo house instrumental; “A Day in Portugal” drizzles honeyed pads over a bossa-nova beat; the horn leading “Sands of Aruba” wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place on Diamond Life.
Given that the last Mr. Fingers full-length, Back to Love, came out in the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it’s understandable if Heard wants to make up for lost time, but the album probably doesn’t need to be 100 minutes long. Its length might have worked better if he had more neatly divided its 18 tracks into a right-brain and left-brain side, rather than breaking up its flow by zigzagging between satin-finish soul and misted minimal house. But the few surprises scattered along the way that make its unpredictable course feel worthwhile.
In “Tiger Lounge,” jazz guitar, sitar, and dub swirl together over indistinct background noise; whether a live recording or a simulacrum of one, it suggests a space that’s not quite of this world. Then, just past the album’s midpoint, “Electron” fires up the fattest-sounding synth in Heard’s arsenal and sets its course for the heart of the Arpeggio Nebula, following in the path of cosmonauts like Klaus Schulze and Edgar Froese. Set to a skeletal beat, it’s the simplest song on the album, and the perfect distillation of his expressive sensibilities.
