AxOxH is the new collaboration between Jesse Perlstein (A = Abandoned Battlefields), Daniel Sparks (O = Omniscuro), and Erick Eiser (H = Hornsbee) out of Los Angeles. Finding the space between ambient experimentation and dark industrial techno, their intersection of field recordings, modular drums, synths, looping vocals and noise creates a gestalt genre of lo-fi ambient EDM, like a party in the dusty stacks of The Strand.

We’re swirling in the artefacts of low fidelity here.

I say that in the best possible way. Lost on the Dance Floor isn’t your typical “lo-fi” basement tape (although I do happen to know that much of this debut album was recorded in a garage in hot, steamy East LA) — this is analog modular synths, cassettes, cheap vocal mics, and super clinky clunky drum sounds jarring and sparring for a tiny one-bedroom amount of audio space.

And it rips.

I didn’t mean to begin this review talking about fidelity, obviously it would make more sense to start with the musicality of this project, and this record, as it’s in high form. But when you’re listening to electronic dance music it’s almost criminally rare to even “think” about fidelity. That’s because so much music today is generated by the same VSTs, MIDI sounds, sample packs, plugins, and virtual processing in the same 3 or 4 DAWs we hear everyone using — and those sounds are just really, really dull.

This isn’t the time or place for a diatribe about the democratization of music production (which I’m a fan and proponent of by the way), but the fact that every producer from Luxembourg to Lagos is largely using the same, digital, perfect-right-out-of-the-box synth sounds, is like a waking nightmare for me. The upside I guess is that it makes hearing actual drum machines, actual hardware keyboard sounds triggered and filtered in real time, and an actual human voice being looped and dubbed on archaic machines, so refreshing.

Full disclosure, Jesse Perlstein is my bandmate in Sontag Shogun. I have nothing to do with AxOxH, I’m just a fan boy. But it makes sense (to me at least) to start this new editoryal adventure with something close to my own music-making activities. Perhaps it’s because Jesse’s given me so much over the years creatively and as a friend, it’s only natural to use this space to give something back to him in return. Or perhaps it’s because I just really like this record.

Lost on the Dance Floor is built of seven hard, analog dance grooves, some short, some long. Some feel more dialed in (“LA Sidewalks” and “Lost on the Dance Floor”) while others (“Smashed Ankles” and “Higher Land”) feel more like the trio is improvising and figuring shit out. In both cases, there’s somehow always a moment in each track where everything slowly culminates and coalesces. And that’s partly because of how this album was made, stemming originally from longform improvisations and then sculpted and finished from there. But it doesn’t make the magic trick of three head-bopping dudes coming from three corners of sound space eventually link up in unison any less fun to watch.

In Jesse’s work, I recognize the howls, the cassette tape squiggles and cycles. And although I’m less familiar with Sparks and Eiser, their ears are definitely tuned to their machines. Sparks on modular drum programming and Eiser on the Prophet synth and Wurlitzer. I know what it’s like turning finicky knobs on an unpredictable hardware machine and trying to do it artistically and with intention, they do it artistically and with intention.

All in, this is molasses music. It’s not slow, but it does droop, and glop, and at times it churgles out of its bottle, all dark and oddly sweet. This music is also all sorts of terrifying and mysterious.

I’m not sure what the title is a reference to, if anything. There are hundreds of albums with “Dance Floor” (also “Dancefloor,” both seem to be grammatically in play) in the title — but you can already probably predict what most of those sound like. There’s also the meter of it: “lost on the dance floor” kind of sounds like “panic at the disco.” Not that there’s really anything in common between the two but, in a way, there’s something here underneath all the cacophonous collage and semi-saccharine groove that touches on deep discomfort and loneliness in that particular space; a person totally out of place, even if, briefly, happy.

Imagistic, I really get this state of mind. How fuggin’ creepy and abusive (and full of shame) are most dance floors!? And yet, when you’re out there with friends and sloppy, sweat beads swan-diving into each other’s gins n’ tonics, bouncing around with arms akimbo, that’s real joy. This album, I believe, strives for that sentiment, albeit in a nostalgic way and informed by anxiety, more than something you’d likely put on in peak clubbin’ mode.

On that note, “Late Is a Look” is the big mitt closer, the bubble-gum chewer, it proudly slow-walks out onto the mound to end this thing with aplomb. “Late Is a Look” sounds like being lifted up and crowd-surfed out of the stadium in slow motion after throwing one last strike right down Main Street, the visiting team back on the bus driving out of town, and suddenly the crowd parts and that shy hunky dude is right there waiting to be kissed.

Talk about nostalgia. Maybe the dance floor isn’t a dance floor at all? Maybe it’s home plate after the game, your friend’s shitty third floor apartment at 4am, your friend’s mom’s Volvo cruising on a somewhere highway covered with cheese puffs and Mountain Dew.

Wherever your dance floor is, you’re not lost, you’ve never been lost, you’ve always been right where you belong.

Listen and purchase here, please.