Fur (No 740)

Hometown: Denton, Texas. The lineup: Bryce Isbell (music, production). The background: Nearly a year on and our love affair with chillwave/glo-fi/hauntological hypnagoguery continues apace. Is there any bad music being made in this genre? Anything less than distressingly poignant yet wanly divine? That you can nod your head to and even, at a pinch, get you dancing, albeit like the Mandrax'd spectre of John Travolta moving to Mantronix in a trance? Bryce Isbell, who makes records as Fur, does indeed operate at the dancier end of the chillwave spectrum, like some distant memory of ambient techno or IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), only with the budget lushness of his lo-fi laptop peers. And it's all done out of his bedroom in downtown Denton, Texas – close enough to neighbour Alan "Neon Indian" Palomo, in fact, to swap damaged memory tapes of pop music past. Let's take a close listen to the songs on Fur's MySpace, shall we, because they really are quite lovely. Clears Throat is, like all these tracks, instrumental, but the melodies, the chord sequences, say as much as any words Isbell might have come up with. It is, as we say, more focused towards clubs than a lot of other so-called chillwave but something about that softly sussurating synth sound suggests a semi-somnolent sadness. Swymnastyx uses clicks and cuts to form the beat, as though Boards of Canada had remixed Washed Out. The aching melody, as per BOC, makes you feel nostalgic for a childhood you never quite had. Lackadaisical, the title track of Fur's current EP, is less blandly relaxing than it is gently unsettling. Black Castles is weird – a hissy old 78rpm pre-war burst of classical dance music is slowly but surely invaded by the hum and drone of IDM, as though Aphex Twin had taken over the decks on the Titanic. The title of Haunted suggests Isbell is up on the hi-falutin' terms being ascribed to this genre – "hauntological" being the most resonant, with its intimations of music with the power to disturb. With its hiss and static, Haunted is like the vaguest recollection of something from the soundtrack of Miami Vice reworked by someone on Warp. The final piece of controlled reverberation here is Tunnels, which is quirkily melodic, and puts the itchy and glitchy into bewitching. Fur's new album is called Witches – Isbell knows just what he's doing, what spell he's casting, but that doesn't mean his yummy Fur music isn't magical and moving. The buzz: "This might be the apex of chillwave. All others can pack their bags. Some of these tracks are INSANE." The truth: It's Proustian disco – a la recherche du downtempo perdu. Most likely to: Make you sleep-dance. Least likely to: Make you want to read Proust. What to buy: The Witches album is out now on Waaga. The Lackadaisical EP is downloadable for free at waagarecords.com . File next to: Neon Indian, Memory Tapes, Toro Y Moi, Boards of Canada. Links: myspace.com/bryceisbell Monday's new band: Boy 8 Bit.