Daniel.T. - Tetrachromat EP

Pitchfork 77

Over the past few years, L.A. has spawned an Internet-friendly coven of young dance producers. The growing label Friends of Friends and its offshoot, Young Adults, have helped shape a loose aesthetic, with the sub-label focusing on a more explicitly niche template of chilled-out, lo-fi house music, providing a home for releases from Suzanne Kraft, Marvin & Guy, and slow-mo house deity Mark E. Their latest release is an EP from Daniel.T., aka Daniel Terndrup, a SoCal house upstart who’s also put out a few promising nu-disco singles as one half of Cosmic Kids.

Tetrachromat is his sunniest and most musically varied offering so far, painting the producer as an enthusiastic cultural omnivore. Terndrup’s ear is tuned to a certain feel-good, typically Californian frequency: his favored warm and atmospheric sounds connect him to a nebulous lineage populated by Balearic pop, space disco, and SoCal neo-psychedelia. The EP begins with the warmly burbling "Mission Hill Morning", a track that calls to mind the gentle late-aughts disco put out by Oslo label Smalltown Supersound, and concludes with the slightly-too-on-the-nose uke-strumming of "The Sun & the Sky", which Terndrup fleshes out with genial whistling and sing-song vocals. It’s PCH music for commuting into the city for parties, a "Ventura Highway" for the laptop generation.

Wisely, Terndrup places his best track right in the middle. The woozy "Planetesimal" features the EP’s heaviest build-up and its biggest payoff, in the form of a giddy, insouciant synthesizer line that cascades over the sounds of sputtering engines like a stretch of Rainbow Road. This is exactly the kind of sound that often gets called colorful, and Terndrup seems to know it—the term "tetrachromat" refers to a person who possess an extra cone in the eye, leading to an enhanced ability to see color (a less-than-reliable test for the condition was passed around online earlier this year, after a certain meme got the Internet talking about color perception.) After the warm bubble bath of the first half, the chilly "Laced" comes as something of a surprise, though Terndrup incorporates enough equatorial flourishes to suggest a strong connection to the rest of the material.

Terndrup’s flexibility with his sound can sometimes project a lack of confidence—the title track, a mellow cloud of contentment disturbed by a wildly ebullient melody, suggests a more restless producer than the EP’s general mood describes. Still, the sense that he has further to go in terms of editing and honing his sound doesn’t detract from his ability to filter a wide range of influences into an appealing and well-crafted aesthetic.