eR DoN’s debut full length on Fourth City is an aptly titled affair. Built from the ground up on the dexterous ambling of Robert Nelson’s sampler wizardry, Subroutines is a construction of various jazz instrumentation samples. Though the sounds you hear—piano stabs, guitar plucking and woodwind swells—are the essential foundations of jazz, Nelson’s alterations turns them into something else entirely. Forgoing the traditional structure of jazz, or any other genre for that matter, Nelson and his purely electronic compositions look to dissect the machinations within which they operate. The result is a staccato that twitters anxiously from sound to sound, and the effect is a groove that doesn’t materialize through repetition or time structure, but through a more natural and subtle interplay between the organic instrumentation and it’s heavily programmed implementation. Though the samples are heavily chopped, and sometimes unrecognizable from the instruments from which they came, Nelson masterfully weaves them together into discerning, surprising melodies.

Standout track: “Tomorrow is Not a Promise”