The best new music to hit Dave Segal's inbox. by Dave Segal This column was called Inbox Jukebox until the pandemic disrupted, well, everything. When the column resumed, it assumed a different, wordier name, due to a former editor's preference. Now, Inbox Jukebox is back, by popular (?) demand. Every day, I sift through the hundreds of tracks that bombard my inbox. Here and every two weeks, I will discuss two artists whose music most impressed me. This time it's adventurous LA-via-Australia jazz bassist Anna Butterss and Seattle organic-techno phenom tondiue, whose new releases merit deep listening. Anna Butterss, “Dance Steve” (International Anthem) LA-based multi-instrumentalist Anna Butterss has emerged as a key figure in the West Coast experimental jazz renaissance—while also doing sessions with mainstream artists such as Phoebe Bridgers and Jason Isbell. Best known as a bassist who also plays with the great SML collective, Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, and Makaya McCraven, the Australia-born Butterss also sings, programs drums, plays guitar, flute, drums, synths, and piano. Butterss's strong solo debut album, 2022's Activities, reveals their deft compositional skills within a minimalist framework, as unusual, moving melodies waft over intricate rhythm matrices. The LP's most popular track, "Doo Wop" weaves an evocative "ooh wah ooh wah ooh" reprise through a spectral, dubby post-rock trawl; the results are at once unconventional and catchy as hell.  Butterss's fingerprints are also all over SML's cerebral and full-bodied Small Medium Large (2024), an innovative melding of Jon Hassell's Fourth World music, chamber jazz, and experimental electronic music. Now with their sophomore album, Mighty Vertebrate, Butterss further burnishes their rep as an important boundary-pusher. Eventful intricacies fill every second of it.  The album gets off to a fantastic start with "Bishop," whose faint afrobeat rhythmic undertow locks in with Far East Asian percussive timbres, Ben Lumsdaine's robust drumming, and Butterss's vibrantly bubbling bass line. "Shorn"—which may be titled in honor of Butterss' close-cropped haircut—places their inspirational flute solo and Josh Johnson's mellifluous alto sax over a fascinating rhythmic procession. The track's gorgeous, exotic, and alluringly unclassifiable.  While "Ella" proves that Butterss can write a straightforward, tender ballad and "Counterpoint" reveals their facility for morose, ECM-ish meditativeness, they're at their best when fusing unlikely elements. For example, "Pokemans" exists at that odd nexus where post-rock aggression and ambient-jazz serenity meet, and the placid "Lubbock" pits Gregory Uhlmann's Tortoise-like circular, spaghetti-Western guitar riff against Johnson's languid sax lament. On "Breadrich," huge, funky beats and a lascivious bass line power a song that's the closest Butterss comes to pop—although its chord progressions and timbres are too weird for the charts. Nevertheless, it builds to a maximal celebratory anthem.  Mighty Vertebrate attains a peak with "Dance Steve," on which Parker gets off a pointillistic guitar solo that's as cool as a Wes Montgomery/Pat Martino jam session. The track seems at once non-Western and rooted in the fusionoid funk of '70s Weather Report, with Lumsdaine's drums smacking with a satisfying rotundity. "Dance Steve"'s strange combination of elements coheres into a highly distinctive sound. Here's hoping a Butterss—and/or SML—tour is on the horizon. <a href="https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/mighty-vertebrate">Mighty Vertebrate by Anna Butterss</a> tondiue, “Mind” “Dubman Dub It” (Kelp Roots) Part of the multifaceted Seattle record label/event organizers Apt E with Max Washburn, tondiue (aka Cameron Kelley) strikes me as one of the most talented producers in the region's underground-club sphere. This was apparent from tondiue's first release, 2021's Painted Creature. An aptitude for creating distinctive, psychedelic techno and ambient music that radiate an unclichéd spirituality shines hard throughout the tondiue catalog. Kelley has described their creative impulse as deriving from "exploring the sacred roots of afrofuturistic sound design."  Those attributes build to a peak with the new album, Word to the Centipede. Opening track "Mind" (not a Talking Heads cover) begins with an intriguing, resonant drone before staccato beats and wonky bass pressure enter the frame. A hazy, humid synth upends your equilibrium while electronic lizard-tongue snip-snips and enigmatic bird and animal utterances crowd the midrange... and we're off on a bizarre techno safari. I've heard a lot of electronic music over the last five decades, and "Mind" ranks highly in the pantheon of consciousness-altering specimens.  Elsewhere, "Chickadee"'s dank, deep dub-centric dance music lunges at skewed angles, leading to contorted, spasmodic movements. Kelley wreathes the ill bass jabs and renegade snares with hyperreal jungle vibes—the ecosphere, not the genre. On "Glyph," tondiue forges funky, chunky, and distinctive dub techno that beats the Orb at their own game, with no need for goofy vocal samples. This music is earthy yet anything but earthbound. The question is, does Seattle have an audience adventurous and limber enough to dance to music this sick?    If you like your techno euphoric and strange in an understated way, you'll dig "Dubman Dub It." Listening to this track feels like having MDMA injected into your main vein and striding weightlessly. The nearly 13-minute "Chocolate" is odd, organic acid-techno that feels refreshingly free from the grid's strictures. Here as elsewhere on Word to the Centipede, Kelley liberates techno from rote mechanics and imbues it with a healthy biome of psychedelic tones and effects. It behooves you to follow tondiue's next moves closely. tondiue performs at Groundhum Sessions 3 with Huggy Pillow and IVVY featuring THC.XLR at Fremont Abbey on October 17, 7:30 pm, $20 adv/$25 DOS, $15 students, all ages. <a href="https://kelproots.bandcamp.com/album/word-to-the-centipede">Word to the Centipede by tondiue</a>