Album Review: Andrea Parker

Nobody tells me to kiss her arp. But when she works lush electronic orchestrations like Andrea Parker does, I believe we can work something out. In any case, you really have no choise but to work something out with someone as brazen as Parker. Unfazed by the mob-wide surge for skippy techno, she announced her hatred of Fatboy Slim to the media (market self-sabotage--how will the masses relate?). Just as untimid in her work, she had Depeche Mode, Lamb, the Orb, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Steve Reich come under remixing at her hands before she began work on Kiss My Arp, her full-length debut. A session vocalist and classically trained cellist, Parker's Kiss (much anticipated after her glowing addition to the 1998 DJ Kicks series) brings her talents together in a brilliant torch of perfectly programed darkside downtempo. Cold vocals in "The Unknown" smart initially but burn grooves in the head, like all the stunning tracks on the album. "Some Other Level," especially, comes on like a disease--a thickened phat pulse, thudding blood and the toss-turn turmoil of heavy fever. Parker's "intellectronica" is like being strapped to a steel table and having your mind massaged by a tall woman with long nails--it's chillingly cerebral, it's ecstatic, and it's seduction by intimidation. A