Hudson Mohawke

To lump Hudson Mohawke in with the current crop of R&B-obsessed laptop-strokers seems right, but a bit too broad. As contemporaries Burial, SBTRKT and the Weeknd utilize '90s new jack as a template, Glaswegian Paul Birchard (aka Hudson Mohawke) chooses to employ the Kanye West-perfected method of liberally peppering songs with soul sounds like dried macaroni to construction paper. On the Satin Panthers EP, the follow-up to his 2009 debut LP, Butter, Birchard comes off even less conceptual and just a bit more representative, mining the vaults of both '90s booty ("Thunder Bay") and drill & bass ("All Your Love"), all while creating a set of songs that sound obsessively modern, in a retro sort of way. It's a good thing that Satin Panthers is merely an EP, as songs like the Fairlight CMI-swell of "Octan" and the Ween-goes-electronic "Cbat" hint at headier things to come from.