However you divvy up the spectrum of electronic dance music, Siriusmo is an outlier. A Berlin producer with a penchant for French-sounding electro-house, he infrequently performs live, even though his slick touch on the keyboard is a big part of his appeal. Ambivalent about scenes, he released singles on many different imprints before finally showing, on 2011's Mosaik, that he could work beautifully on a larger canvas.
Issued by similarly genre-averse dance duo Modeselektor on their Monkeytown label, this career-spanning 2xCD compilation finds Siriusmo cleaning out his closet. It turns out that the ratio of pearls to embarrassments is impressively favorable. Many of these 42 tracks are available in digital form for the first time, and eight of them, such as the Vitalic-style grinder "Hello DJ", are previously unreleased. Covering the first decade of the 2000s, the set bears ample French-touch traces, often evoking a more musical Mr. Oizo, an earthier Daft Punk, or a much airier Justice. Siriusmo's remixes and compilation appearances for Ed Banger and Kitsuné Maison make this Parisian connection as close as he comes to a scene affiliation.
Still, the hot-blooded, jammy aesthetic here is more like a bundle of personal predilections than a membership application. Siriusmo loves to set scampering funk, meaty saw-wave synths, and hammy vocal samples against percussion so crisply pounding it edges into rock territory. Clean-cut verses and choruses, connected by extended, unlooped instrumental solos, enhance the live feel-- the electric guitar on "Last Dear", for instance. Some of the sample choices loaded into Siriusmo's Korg Trident lean toward pop, such as a brief Stevie Wonder/Jackson 5 horn flourish on "All the Girls". Others are more obscure: Early electronic pop pioneers Perrey-Kingsley supply the protoplasm for "Blaue Sonne".
At nearly two-and-a-half hours, Pearls & Embarrassments is a lot to take in, and the reliability of Siriusmo's craft causes the songs to run together after a while. But that's just the nature of this sort of housecleaning. You really can dip into the compilation at any point and find something appealing. Siriusmo works in essentials: Key in on the effective groove and the stirring harmonic idea, and jettison the rest. In a way, he's a throwback to a time before limitless soft synths gave producers limitless choices. "Sometimes," he told one interviewer, "it's good just to have your one synthesizer or one piano and your drum and you can play like you're in a little band."
