One word that's been cropping up lately when people talk about electronic music is "grid." It's been suggested that music that depends on sequencing technology is somehow limited because it lacks a human quality. MIDI clocks keep perfect time, and our internal ones do not. When sounds are strung up in patterns using such ridged geometry, perhaps they begin to sound a bit alike.

This phenomenon could have something to do with rising interest in glitch-- the sound of machines making mistakes. It's interesting, though, that so much music in this vein focuses on distortion of the individual sounds and not the rhythm. Part of this probably has to do with artists coming at the music from the world of minimal techno, where the nonstop pulse is valued above all.

Repetition is one of the central elements of Seattlite E. Blake Davis' debut album, Limit. As with musicians like Kit Clayton and Sutekh, Eblake latches on to the relentlessly skeletal beats that ping-ponged their way from Detroit to Berlin and back over to America's west coast, borrowing some production tricks from Jamaican dub along the way.

But where Clayton and Sutekh have also latched onto the surface noise aesthetic pioneered by Pole, Eblake prefers a more traditional sound palate. These loops have all the repetition of minimal techno, but the samples come from guitars, pianos and more "classic" sounding synth patches. Upon first listen, Limit reminded me a lot of Burger/Ink's Las Vegas in the way guitar patterns were chopped into tiny units and looped incessantly. "I Am the VJ," in particular, seems inspired by that Cologne offshoot.

In some respects, this sound/structure combination is problematic. Typically, music so locked into grids offers some small, barely perceptible changes to reward the careful listener. There's no such remuneration for those scrutinizing Limit. When the various loops fold in, they either stay put or disappear, and the gradual modulations are missed.

Fortunately for Eblake, though, he knows how to get the most out of his loops. It helps that there's a steady, rolling mood throughout the record. The stable house kick and upstroke high-hat make appearances on most tracks, and the riffs are generally even a bit catchy. "Bandol" makes good use of some woozy accordion samples, and "La Luz" is populated with sparkling ambient gurgles and piano samples that seem to drift from somewhere beyond Ultraworld.

Is Limit fenced in by the grid it seems composed on? Perhaps, yes. But I can hear this album another way, as a uniform train of sound that steams gradually by. And from that vantage point, Limit looks good.

-Mark Richard-San