Hearts of Darknesses/Girl Talk

This is what happens when hyper extroverts get their mitts on newfangled gadgets: Four-fifths of hell breaks loose and sonic comedy ensues. Cleveland gadfly/Bard College student Frankie Musarra (a.k.a. Hearts of Darknesses) just released a 24-track, 36-minute blurt of spazztronix that probably had his laptop's motherboard crying uncle. HOD's music splutters and careens in a flurry of fractured tones and diarrheal beats, with Musarra bleating over the top like his scrotum's getting tattooed. If late-'70s no-wavers like Mars and DNA had been born 25 years later, they'd likely sound like Hearts of Darknesses's certifiably insane debut album for Schematic, Music for Drunk Driving.

Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis), by contrast, uses Billboard chart fodder (and '60s psych-rockers the Creation) as funhouse springboards to forge his demented sampledelia. Like Kid606's The Action-Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fuckin' Jams, Girl Talk's Unstoppable (Illegal Art) accelerates beats, distorts textures, pitches up flows, and sets up strange juxtapositions to render absurd the sexed-up aura of hip-hop and dance pop. Flouting copyright law with impunity, Girl Talk gleefully recontextualizes recordings ("Shake that azz, bitch, and let me see what you got" is the general level of discourse here) to create a hella-rad party album for post-postmodern pseudo-ironists. This joint record release party should be off the hook -- and full of them.