A few years ago, while conducting routine experiments in their studio laboratory, German beat chemists Chris de Luca and Michael Fakesch (known together as Funkstörung) unwittingly stumbled across one of modern music's most addictive recipes. The exchange, for those who weren't there to witness it in person, went something like this:

Chris: Yo, Mikey, peep this shit I just wrote.

Michael: Good gravy! This is like nothing I've ever heard!

Chris: Yeah, dawg. We got some hip-hop influence up in this house. Now critics won't accuse us of being cheap Autechre imitators.

Michael: They'll accuse people of imitating us instead. Splendid!

Chris: Heil!

I would be remiss to credit these two, as so many critics have, with single-handedly pioneering the IDM/hip-hop fusion scene, but they certainly played a large part in popularizing it. Along with lesser-known artists like Push Button Objects and rap acts from Mush, Def Jux and Anticon who have bridged the same gap from the opposite side, Fakesch and De Luca have helped steer intelligent electronica down new avenues.

Funkstörung's music sounded fresh, but it left something to be desired. They helped hollow out a new arena in sound, but their musical shortcomings left other laptop jockeys with room to improve the formula. Over the last two or three years, a gold rush has ensued, of artists trying to do exactly that: Ninja Tune borrowed a cue and established its own hip-hop subsidiary, Big Dada; Push Button Objects' Edgar Farinas founded his aptly appointed Chocolate Industries imprint; Warp turned its attention to artists like Anti-Pop Consortium and Prefuse 73; and one day, Cex just up and started rapping in his underpants at live shows.

With so many contenders competing for the spotlight, it's easy to overlook the smaller players. But Machine Drum, a dark horse on Miami's tiny Merck label, is where I'd place my chips. Now You Know is perhaps the most promising and accomplished album born yet from the marriage of IDM and hip-hop, and it comes from an artist with only one other song to his name, a gem called "Izzy Rael" from Merck's Squadron compilation last year.

Now You Know, Machine Drum's debut LP, delivers on the promise issued by that single. This album is 70 minutes of street-smart, book-smart, beat-smart genius that melds caffeinated 8-bit dancefloor rhythms with sordid ghetto melodies and a shadowy sense of urban nostalgia. These could be theme songs for graffiti parks, street poets and New York subway stations-- chronicles of the culture that have risen from the rot of America's industrial dream.

"Wishbone Be Broken" sets the pace early on, dissecting a Company Flow rap joint and scattering its remains across a canvas of somber lo-fi harmonies. Effects abound, but they're woven in with such subtlety that they never call attention from the fuzzy basslines and synthetic melancholy of the tinny keyboards. "Hihowareyoudoingimfine" mines more of the same material. The canned beats, sour strings and bubbly chimes sound like they're being played on antique gramophones in varying stages of disrepair; the scratching comes through fiercely clear, with absolute immediacy.

Now You Know takes a detour to the dancefloor with "Reel Cleer," a syncopated stop-and-start melee of broken beats, truncated string samples and more cut-up vocal tricks. But the euphoric urban lullaby "Jewlea" easily steals the show, layering crystalline string punches over subdued beats and sleepy basslines, repackaging the refrain again and again into different stereo permutations, then slowly retreating out of earshot. This song sparkles with the same streetwise sublimity as DJ Shadow's "Midnight in a Perfect World" or Sixtoo's "Germ." The album could not have asked for better closure.

If you parse through Now You Know with enough scrutiny, you're certain to find flaws (as with any album); the stylistic scope of this disc is somewhat limited, and certainly not on par with the versatility of veteran electronic artists like Ken Ishii or Mouse on Mars. But what it lacks in variety it compensates for in simple compositional virtuosity. Machine Drum explore a relatively fresh musical formula and end up with some of the most memorable moments in the (admittedly brief) history of the genre. As one of the first wholly satisfying hip-hop styled IDM records, I hope Now You Know becomes the standard to which the next wave of imitators aspires.

-Malcolm Seymour III