Rare Breed. Daphni, Jiaolong.

It may only be Tuesday, but I can't help hypothesising on how special a week this one must've already been for Dan Snaith. Caribou play what are amongst their most sizeable covered shows across their no longer insubstantial history, as they open up for two nights of Radiohead at Greenwich's inordinately enormous O2. That's seismic enough for the Stoke Newington resident, although the début long-player under his DJ nom de plume, Daphni, yesterday got its long-awaited release via Snaith's very own imprint of the very same name: Jiaolong. If an aggrandising multimedial roster of the self of sorts, it's certainly infinitely preferable to that which Kanye proffered last month...

Indeed Jiaolong functions as may the most splendiferous of mixtapes: not purely concerned with the songs to have made the final grade but also with structure, it's quite feasibly the finest hybridised, and with it organic dance record since Swim. High praise. For Jiaolong could become the record we jive to when all limbs have been robotised; when all DJs have been done away with and been replaced by all-knowing jukeboxes. Meticulous to the point of hinging on the mechanical, it sets a new standard across all walks of dance music as it shuffles the length and breadth of myriad BPMs – accelerating, only to decelerate in such a way as to simultaneously disorientate and beguile.

Pairs, for instance, is as though The Chemical Bros. circa '02 stranded out in a Saharan wild inhabited only by predatory synths whilst the brooding microhouse of Ahora into which it segues errs rather more on the unerringly precise frenetics of latter-day Caribou. Again, as distant flutes chirp, Jiaolong is imbued with a faint exoticism, and this only heaps further conviction on the notion of the record representing a distinctly rare breed.

A respectful, and loveably scruffy recomposing of Togolese one track wonders Cos-Ber-Zam's one, and indeed genuinely only, Ne Noya daubs its initial moments with some vivid zest, the usage of remix immediately instilling a sense of familiarity. Moreover, that the Motown-trance movements of Yes, I Know and the cosmic Ethio-jazz bloopery of Jiao once backed up a limited release of the mix aforesaid keeps us au courant. Keeping with the theme of hunky slabs once etched into the profound grooves of black scratchers, Ye Ye too feels an old amigo: akin to much of Swim, it's a premonitory throb of grotty brilliance that's evocative of a prototypal, and with it gloom-laden Bowls, or Danilo Plessow's squelchy Leave House redux.

It's no mean feat for this record of complex contrasts to flow quite as frictionlessly as it unquestionably does, and that's in no small part down to Snaith's productional competence. Yet this is Caribou after hours, and the melodies are as formidable as they've been on any other day. Euphoric denouement Long, even, acquires as much from Melody A.M. as it does from a certain troupe of Scandi mafioso types, yet does so without ever disintegrating into FM excess etc.

Although it's instances such as Light that illuminate most acutely the scope of possibility here afforded Snaith: it's breezy, clean ambience one moment; grubby bass music the next; and then off on into a great thudding of gloopy bleep. Daphni is the sound of Dan Snaith freed from all constraint, and its outcome proves irrefutably celestial.