tp Dutchkiss is the solo moniker of LA-based producer Spencer Hartling. His debut full-length, high functioning, out now on Leaving Records, is a probing eleven-track collection teetering between jittery beats and experimental songwriting. Imaginatively high-functioning, but also just functioning while high, it turns to an array of unorthodox recording techniques to build melody into the very structures of dance music it straddles. high functioning works it all out, breaking through to a new place of earnestness.

Though technically presenting a first effort, Hartling is no beginner. Owner and operator of Wiggle World recording studio, tape loop experimentalist and co-author of zine Show Invisibles, or How to Make a Tape Loop, his solo live performances are workshops in improv ambient and dubbed out, forward-thinking hardware play. A member of “rock” band Harry the Nightgown, the fledgling experimentalist thrives in collaboration, having lent his chops to ventures with artists like Colloboh, Cherry Glazerr, Ohr and Qu’ran Shaheed.

high functioning itself wasn’t born in isolation. Conceived and recorded not only in Hartling’s home city of Los Angeles, but crucially also on the road across the world, in Lithuania and on the Mediterranean, its protean sounds feel like notes to people far and near – buzzed, maximalist, often touching, especially when less than clear-headed.

And yet, high functioning is also a showcase for Hartling’s unique approach to songwriting. Not quite cocooned in the collection’s jagged soundscapes, the emphasis on harmony at its core emanates outward, shining through melody-carrying bass chord changes and halting arrangements. It is more a form of illumination than of lucidity: high functioning’s compositions may jerk and flutter, as analog gear and glitching drum machines grind and warble into each other, but they reveal a loving care for melody that is irregular to the straighter genres the record inhabits.

Rooted in Hartling’s years of sound-first experimentation, high functioning’s upper-downer, unorthodoxly pop-driven take on dance music is never too intelligent for its own good. As it starts, stops and pivots over and over, it makes way for what much music of similar ilk doesn’t get to express: an almost vulnerable intimacy, “sweet like everything.” Alexa, bump up the warm jets.