Telefon Tel Aviv
Fahrenheit Far Enough
(Hefty Records)

Money Mark
Change is Coming
(Emperor Norton)

Perhaps because New Orleans has fought modernity with the ferocity of the French knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a lot of musical trends have either been turned away at the city limits or relegated to the cultural margins. One such musical style is electronic music, which is particularly heretical in a city that can’t imagine a keyboard beside the piano and the B-3. New Orleanians Joshua Eustis and Charles Cooper had to go to Chicago’s Hefty Records to record Telefon Tel Aviv’s placidly engaging new disc, Fahrenheit Far Enough.

The music on the disc doesn’t rock and it doesn’t groove, despite the presence of programmed drums. If there is any movement in these pieces, it’s the gentle ripples on the pond that radiate away from the stone thrown into the water. Tracks are built around delicately attractive, meditative melodies, then the trappings of techno enter to add texture more than energy, with percussive sequences of quick, skittering sounds giving them a dub-influenced trippiness. Obviously, this isn’t a disc to rock a party. It is essentially ambient, but like the best music of this type—whatever that type is—it is rewarding when you pay attention, but it drifts dreamily into the background when you don’t.

Money Mark, sometimes-keyboard player with the Beastie Boys, has recently released a third disc of electronic-based music with Change is Coming, and it may be more in keeping with New Orleans’ tastes. Like Fahrenheit Far Enough, the disc is all-instrumental based in early ’70s jazzy funk, though there is also “Another Day to Love You,” performed with Los Lobos. That aside, the results sound more like Billy Preston tracks or like they belong on the soundtrack to a Pam Grier or Fred “The Hammer” Williamson movie. There is an electronic element, but it is subtle and often used to simulate traditional instruments, whereas Telefon Tel Aviv make the sounds themselves a theme. Like soul soundtracks, the melodies are rarely memorable, but the pieces are evocative and make driving late at night in the city seem melancholy and dramatic.