About 15 years ago, a truly wonderful deep techno record came out of the city of Detroit on the Surveillance Recordings label with a strange catalog number under the artist name DFA. This was during the time that there was the label releasing indie dance under the name DFA, as well as soulful NYC house bootleg remixes of neo-soul jams by a totally unrelated artist also called DFA, both of whom were generally much more popular than this one record despite it being the most musically interesting. This confusion and the fact that it remained the only release under this artist name and on this label led to this record remaining obscure. Theo Parrish eventually used it in a mix, causing the discogs nerds to flock to it, raising its second hand price as one would expect.
I try to be on top of everything, but somehow I missed the release of the second record by this artist last year. A friend from Glasgow (Jamie Thomson, a pretty slick DJ if you’ve never had the pleasure) mentioned this recent one the other day on Facebook, so I quickly scrambled to discogs to order the last remaining copy shipping from the US. I didn’t reveal it to anyone else until the record landed safely on my doorstep, so now I can let the cat out of the bag for all the rest of us who missed it. This one is under the more lengthy pseudonym Deterministic Finite Automata and is issued on DaRand Land’s Urban Imagery label, a fitting home for such emotional music. Entitled Graceful Decay Of Admissibility, it is another worthy addition to the slim but stellar catalog of DFA. I can only hope we don’t have to wait another decade and a half to hear more! YouTube videos of the jams are poorly recorded, so check out the label clips here:
https://soundcloud.com/apomeda/sets/deterministic-finite