Langzeittauglichkeit. The Germans love their compound words. This one means fit for the long term. It encapsulates íntimo's core attraction. If your music library either hosted locally or raining down from the cloud includes many lesser productions because your primary search parameter isn't sound but music quality, EJ's chosen balance is a life saver. I should know. I buy plenty of Pop from the Gulf states, Azerbaijan and India/Pakistan whose voices I love but whose production values can get prickly, steely, bright and edgy. Now an injection of gravitas, tonal heft and deeper colors makes such fare far more agreeable.

Yet over íntimo, better recordings filled with rapidly picked arpeggios and layered rhythmic complexity like the title track from the sixth Rafael Cortés album Cagiñi lost none of their brilliance. This deck clearly conveyed the many different tone modulations the maestro's Spanish guitar is capable of in such hands.

And once the blooming bass pedals rise like fog lights from the deep at 4:18 then are complemented by quicksilvery downward guitar runs like flashes of lightning, I had precisely articulated resolution, spatial expanse and powerful bass, simultaneously. Nothing felt over-shadowed or obscured. This showed how bottom-up perspective coexisted with good separation and speed.

For some Algerian Rai-meets-Reggae mash, I spun "Mektoub" from The Third Planet to observe tightly pounding bass beats with proper club bounce that didn't interfere with the bloated reverb around the vocals.

The very well-recorded "Apacheta Heaps" from G.E.N.E.'s KatChina album was next. Unlike other Cléo de Malli efforts under her Grooving Electronic Natural Environments banner, this one is filled with the presence of many studio musicians. They make for poly-rhythmic groovy intricacies and many varied percussive signatures which all appreciate snappy timing and high separation to sort out. A very inspired intro has what seems to be a marimba juxtaposed with synths which were programmed to sound like hammered strings. No matter the system, I've never yet been sure what exactly these two players used to arrive at their exotic timbres and textures. But it's fascinating stuff I adore nonetheless.

The next juxtaposition would be on hardware again.