Depth of Soul

Dance as meditative contemplation, dance as hyperactive floor filler — the two seeming extremes are more closely related than might be guessed, and the codification of any number of styles over the years has helped underscore their essentially mirror-like nature. Thus the Martin Schulte album, a brisk, prog-tinged, ambient-heavy, IDM-spiked release that aims to have its cake and eat it too, does so enjoyably enough. The core of Depth of Soul is ultimately the kind of endless echo familiar to anyone who ever loved dub, and while saying Schulte is something of the second coming of Pole stretches it a bit, there's no question that the earlier figure's visionary reworkings of Jamaica's legacy for the musical world finds even clearer echoes here. Schulte tends to give over to straightforward dance pulses and beats amid the beautiful depths, and the album's relative sameness makes it less one to enjoy song by song than in toto, which perhaps was the intention to start with.