By the time Kirk Degiorgio released this in 2001, he’d firmly established himself as an artist comfortable occupying spaces between genres that others would find disparate, successfully hybridising techno, jazz fusion, broken beat, funk and more. 21st Century Soul is a sumptuous, gorgeous-sounding album, a spotless, mostly-instrumental collection of glittery, stary techno, futuristic, squelching synth-funk and space-age modern jazz. It’s an album that refuses to acknowledge differences between jazz and techno, with straight-up early-70s era Herbie Hancock-ish “Amalia” sandwiched between the beatless semi-New Age synth burblings of “In The Arms of You” and “Like No Other”, a clinical, precise, acid-robot jam. 

With only a pair of vocal tracks to tie it to planet Earth, 21st Century Soul’s sonic location was the asteroid belt, the solar system, the Oort cloud; it was a soundtrack to places of the future.