Silent Movie (!K7)

If you’re the type of person who fancies mai tais and roasted pig, you might recognize Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village” as the best Hawaiian song ever, its plinking vibes, saltshaker percussion, and nature calls soundtracking a slow-motion beachside tiki scene in the mind’s eye. The English producers Matt Edwards (aka Radio Slave) and Joel Martin (aka DJ Zeus) derive their band name and overall mojo from Denny’s masterpiece, cribbing the American composer’s carefree pacing and smudged atmospheres for what might be called hipster lounge music.

There’s a whiff of pornography on Silent Movie, a collection of soft-focus instrumental jams that sounds like Boards of Canada on a massive Herb Alpert kick. The aptly-titled “Too High to Move” distills Quiet Village to its essence, the producers recasting the best bits of cheesy ’70s-era songs (in this case, Giorgio Moroder’s “Fly Too High”) as the sedated, heavily-effected backdrop to the horizontal activity of your choice. The neatest trick here might be “Pillow Talk”, which bathes guitar and synth parts from two songs by the Alan Parsons Project (“What Goes Up” and “Voyager”) in dubwise radiance, giving the originals an air of gothic mystery, and of damned near transcendence. Fans of Air’s The Virgin Suicides soundtrack will find much here to adore.