MUSIC DJ Sprinkles is one alias in a vast arsenal overseen by Terre Thaemlitz, who also makes records under the monikers G.R.R.L., Terre's Neu Wuss Fusion, and Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion, among others. Thaemlitz's approach to electronic music is playful and dead up serious about its capacity for political content. His (or her, depending on your preference; Thaemlitz's gender identity is fractured and fluid) current release as DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues (2009, Mule Musiq) opens with a thesis statement: "House isn't so much a sound as a situation." But something similar is implied in every one of his releases, including his prior full-length, the compilation You? Again? (2006, Mule Electronic).

Thaemlitz isn't so much interested in top-down, proselytizing political content ― his brand of house music makes no allowance for "issue" tracks ― but in contexts. If there's something professorial in the tone of "Midtown 120 Intro," Thaemlitz is a structuralist as opposed to a humanist. A bona fide Marxist, he's the sort of teacher who asks the listener to "problematize assumptions," rather than the type who wears socks with Che Guevara's image. (Though the late UC Davis professor and literary critic Marc Blanchard was known to do both.)

One doesn't have to be overly familiar with house music to understand that Thaemlitz's approach is unusual. Not that it has anything to do with the casual racism or homophobia contained in dismissals of house as "physical" rather than "intellectual" music. Instead, Thaemlitz attempts to position the listener at a vantage point where a transaction between hyper-specific club culture and the mainstream ― an unequal flow explored in "Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)" ― is as much about simple appropriation as a paradoxical need for acceptance among the transgendered community.

The intellectual rigor of Thaemlitz's music doesn't compromise its pleasure. Most of Midtown 120 Blues' tracks hover around the 10-minute range, and none are vocal tracks. As a producer, Thaemlitz has explored as broad a range of styles as anyone, from ambient on the Instinct label (Tranquilizer, 1994, and Soil, 1995) to electroacoustic experiments on the Mille Plateaux label, but the dominating sound here is deep house. With sustained, liquid jazz chords stretching out over an unhurried 4/4 pulse and expertly manipulated flute samples, "Brenda's $20 Dilemma" is headphone music that, while not formally ambient, inspires reverie rather than dancing.

More stylistically consistent than any other release Thaemlitz has had a hand in so far, Midtown topped dance music Web zine Resident Advisor's 2009 album poll ― something one imagines Thaemlitz might not be too comfortable with. Thaemlitz doesn't offer political messages for listeners to parse, preferring to insert ambiguities in the process of production itself. His 2000 release Fagjazz (Comatonse) is, as he described in an interview with the Advocate, about "the illusion of an acoustic improvisational jazz moment," arrived at through careful sequencing and zero instrumental virtuosity. Deep house's debt to jazz suggests one of many routes connecting these otherwise distinct projects. In attempting to corral all of the different positions Thaemlitz has occupied as a producer and DJ, we come around to the recognition that his true project is pushing against naturalizing claims about origins.

Much of the above would make for a solid explanation of what, exactly, Midtown 120 Blues does that little other music managed in 2009. Thaemlitz himself only offers to talk about issues that seem rather dated ― take the vogueing example above ― and is curiously mum about the current state of electronic dance music. The crises that Sprinkles runs down in the "Intro" have no bearing on house music's current status as a kind of luxury consumer product ― less an escape from the struggle of social ostracism than a micro-space within the great categorizing force of capitalism. Perhaps this rebuttal is stronger for its unwillingness to name names; maybe Thaemlitz doesn't want to seem like he's courting Hercules & Love Affair's fame by critiquing the tokenism of their embrace by Pitchfork. It's also possible he just doesn't follow the stuff.

Considering the hushed and tentative mentions of house music's influence on the consensus best-album-of-2009, Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino) and the shout-outs included in the liners of Panda Bear's 2007 winner, Person Pitch, it's hard not to feel like it's precisely house's rerouting away from crisis that's made it safe enough for rock music to touch. Midtown 120 Blues' unhurried, floating, almost serene vibe has little to do with overt struggle, but Thaemlitz has always been at his best when placing the hyper-specific into a larger context. It's the sort of space ― a reversal of the rabbit's-hole crampedness of the Internet ― that 2009 could have used more of.