What do Lawrence Kansas, Bloomington Indiana, and the Catskills have in common? Well, for the time it takes you to listen to Tracey Trance’s “The American Heartbeat,” you can dig the electronic and keyboard fragments that he recorded and cut-up while drifting through those parts of the country. These two untitled tracks won’t necessarily make you feel good about the heartbeats of those areas, but they will make you aware of the growing genius in your midst.

Trance teases with sharp, evocative grooves created on cheap keys and organs, grooves which restlessly blend into and crash into each other. Static adds a certain timelessness, and is really the only unifier at work here.

Dreamlike and almost profound, “The American Heartbeat” is an unsettling but deliberate journey into what is overheard by a stranger in public and in private. Tracey Trance seems to focus on the whimsically forboding, and I say right on. 7/10 -- Mike Wood (2 December, 2009)