Brandon Bussolini

The instrumental music San Francisco's Scott Hansen makes as Tycho splits the difference between post-rock's melodic architecture and pop ambient's immersive, uplifting environments. Hansen's aims felt a little harder to grasp on the sprawling Dive, the 2011 predecessor of his fourth album as Tycho, Awake. The latter is a slickly ...

Funk isn't exactly a high priority in contemporary music — spiritually, conceptually, or in the music itself. But 7 Days of Funk, a collaboration between two extravagantly funky Angelenos — producer Dâm-Funk and rap icon Snoop Dogg, billed here as Snoopzilla — celebrates this hard-to-pin down, yet unmistakable quality.

In ...

Stefan Kozalla, a.k.a. DJ Koze, isn't shy about foregrounding his personality — a rare trait for a techno producer. The cover of the Hamburg DJ's new album, Amygdala, has Koze hamming it up atop a caribou, decked out in a smock and motorcycle helmet, all set against psychedelic pink hills.