Delroy Edwards has a knack for turning the past into the future. Through his label L.A. Club Resource and online store Gene’s Liquor, he unearths old underground rap and techno tapes that sound remarkably fresh, and his own music, be it his pumping house jams on L.I.E.S. or the cassette-sourced mixes he calls Slowed Down Funk, is drenched in a similar kind of creative nostalgia. His two proper LPs, 2014’s mini-album Teenage Tapes and now the 30-track Hangin’ at the Beach, both combine the faded ‘80s vibe of Ariel Pink and John Maus with a sharp eye toward what moves bodies on dance floors today.
The retro aspect of Hangin’ at the Beach is refreshingly irony-free. Edwards’ songs, most of which run under two minutes, sound like muffled AM radio because he likes working with hissy cassette tapes, not because he’s making cultural commentary a la James Ferraro or Daniel Lopatin. “For us there’s no kitsch value, there’s no gimmick in it,” he has said of his label’s music. “If we put it out, it’s because we like it.” As a result, there’s an eager joy in many of Edwards’ songs, which can be as fun as a goofy ‘80s comedy and movement-inspiring as a sped-up workout video, while simultaneously rattling club walls.
Not everything on Hangin’ at the Beach is simple and sunny, though. There are dark sounds here, and dense layers of lo-fi fuzz that reward repeat listens. The way Edwards weaves more abstract moments with passages of pure retro-pop gives the album the feel of a lost soundtrack. He can follow something as openly dramatic as “Brothers in Arms,” which could fit in a John Carpenter thriller, with the formless near-noise of “Tunnel Vision,” and make the two tracks feel like sides of a coin. He makes “Surf’s Up!” evoke waves crashing on Mars, and the electronic ripples of “Safe Places Pt. 1” sound like Fennesz in a basement closet. Tracks like those suggest that the beach at which Edwards hangs exists more in his mind than anywhere near his Los Angeles home.
If Hangin’ at the Beach is indeed a mindscape, then it reveals Edwards’ musical imagination to be much wider than his main reputation as a house-music maven. That’s what makes it a thrilling listen, too: you get the sense that he can go pretty much anywhere sonically, and the brevity of each track combined with all the driving rhythms makes the record feel like a roller-coaster tour of his firing neurons. Ultimately, Edwards is at heart a beat-maker—he was classically trained in jazz drumming and explicitly says his music is “fueled for clubs”—but on Hangin’ at the Beach he treats those genre parameters not as lines to color inside, but barriers to obliterate.
