San Francisco/Paris-based label Spring Theory is back with its fourth release. Called Sweet Bitter Love, it's a four track EP of manic sample-driven house from Keita Sano, a Japanese producer who's been on a roll lately with releases for like-minded imprints Discos Capablanca, Mister Saturday Night, and Strictly Groove Recordings.

Sweet Bitter Love kicks off with the tripped-out flair of "Once I Found a Diamond." It's an uplifiting bongo-led cut with dubby melodics that sound like the kind of thing Sleeping Bag Records would have put out in the early '80s. Jacques Renault provides a leaner peak-time version — complete with hard-hitting snares and growling bass — via his "Once I Found a Diamond (Jacques Renault Trouble Funk Remix)."

Things take a turn for the delightfully weird on the EP's namesake "Sweet Bitter Love." Starting like a straightforward house cut, it explodes into a psychedelic collage of spaghetti western guitars, tribal calls, displaced jazz fills, and other forms of cleverly sampled soundtrack exotica. The release wraps up with yet another curveball on "Bouzouk." Here Sano lays out a subwoofer-knocking NY garage house rhythm that takes a left turn with frenzied bouzouki playing charting arpeggios through a haze of echoing foreign voices.

Taken as a whole, Sweet Bitter Love is that rare idiosyncratic bomb of an EP that will keep your dancers moving and your trainspotters guessing — In other words, it's Spring Theory through and through.

Bouzouk

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make ∇Δ

It's much less picturesque without her catching the light