It’s the sound of a child’s nursery at 3am, up under the covers with a flashlight when everyone else is asleep. “Deliver Us” is a sultry downtempo dirge, celesta and orchestral strings soaring over Ed Garro’s boom-bap beat. “A Doll’s Tale” highlights Kimi Recor’s vocals at their eeriest, pinned by a music-box keyboard line and fragmented samples of clinking teacups and chirping crickets. Lullabies for Insomniacs isn’t all shadows, however. Opening track “All Around Town” is a joyful, uptempo synth-pop treat, a breathless jaunt around urban streets. And then there’s “The Me in You,” a duet featuring both Recor and Garro on vocals, singing to each other about the ephemeral nature of innocence, of melted chocolate bars and mismatched socks.

This is music for the pre-dawn hours of the night: magical, solitary, capricious, and slightly macabre.

Eskimobot began in the summer of 2005 when Kimi and Ed moved to New York. The project was a response to dark times: breaking up for the final time, living together in a tiny, sweltering Brooklyn apartment, knowing no friends in an unforgiving city. Eskimobot were two lost children, perched on the bed with a laptop and a microphone, imagining a place where they could be safe. They create music like kids play catch: Kimi spins song lyrics from snippets of her own diary entries, then tosses her words to Ed for synth lines or distorted accordion samples, and back and forth, and on and on. Four years later, they are based once again in San Francisco, where Kimi is currently the front-woman for the San Francisco synth band Lilofee, and Ed continues to release solo material and remixes as UFO!. As Eskimobot, they have produced two albums—Lullabies for Insomniacs (2009, Sanguine Recordings) and the as-yet-unreleased Waltzes for Chorophobics—and moved into new musical territories (live guitar for Kimi, vocals for Ed). They remain, as always, musical soul mates.

Born out of a basic need for a space to rock some serious low-end frequencies, Son1ika offered up his studio for the two to make music together. The results are a sonic dance between Ed’s raw energy and breakneck velocity combined with Federico’s grounded energy and graceful intelligence.

“Our balance is that I come up with 50 ideas a minute, but don’t have the patience to ground one of them. He’s a real nerve in the studio, he grounds it, presses record, I play, he adds to it, and moves it around. There is no second guessing,” says Ed, who described their sessions very much fueled by well-made Costa Rican coffee, bread and butter.

Now both based in NYC, Son1ka and UFO! as Cosmetics are bringing the Costa Rican heat to a dancefloor near you.

A San Francisco native, UFO!—born Ed Garro—was musically baptized by hip hop in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Mixing and scratching alongside fellow DJs QBert, Shortcut, Quest, and D-Stylz, UFO! quickly ascended to the ranks of battle DJ. Next, Ed found himself enthralled with the new urban sounds of London: hardcore, jungle, and drum ‘n bass. Here he saw a portal into the future, wider than any before. He stepped through, and soon after formed San Francisco’s Phunckateck crew in 1996, performing alongside frontrunners such as Goldie, Dieselboy, Photek, and Roni Size at the collective’s seminal weekly events. He released more than two dozen singles on labels such as Thermal, Position Chrome, Phylum, Vortex, Commercial Suicide, Green, and Phunckateck Communications. He also released his first album, The Future Is Listening, on Thermal in 2001, one of the first full-length albums produced by an American drum ‘n bass artist.

A move to New York in 2000 brought UFO! to new musical terrains. Not content to ride on his past rep in drum ‘n bass, and dissatisfied with what he perceived as the genre’s stagnation, he began to delve into the city’s skyrocketing dance rock and electroclash scenes, dabbling as much with playing live bass as with the 808. During his time on the east coast, UFO! saw several of his productions featured in new media forums, including on MTV and the hit TV series, CSI:NY. After returning to San Francisco, UFO! released Logic Is Lunacy on Sanguine Recordings in 2007. The album marked his first venture into the 4/4 format, and his first time recording as a vocalist. While retaining his signature love of hard, loud distortion and meticulous sound design, Logic Is Lunacy traced a new arc across genres, from low-end techno to shattered electro-ballads to hook-laden synth rock.

In recent years, UFO! has shuttled back and forth between east and west coasts, birthing new artistic projects with increasing frequency. He formed Almost Human with his old drum ‘n bass cohort Alex Posell (DJ Abstract), and currently collaborates with vocalist Kimi Recor as Eskimobot. He also became involved in the growth of Sanguine Records, stepping in as head of A&R for the label in 2008. In 2009, UFO! released a follow-up EP, The Mission, which marks an exciting return into dance-floor territory.

UFO!’s world is one where music, painting, graffiti, photography, and DJing are not easily separated. Championing an idiosyncratic form of urban futurism, his work in all forms is defiantly rooted in the industrial shadows of San Francisco bridges and New York high rises, honed by the warrens of London’s Tube and the mechanistic biology of Los Angeles’ concrete arteries and veins. UFO!’s art rides these intersections with committed abandon, joyriding through the crumbling detritus of an industrialized society colonized by data and information—a place where the man is no longer easily distinct from the machine.

As its title implies, “Pachanga in Space” is a hip-swiveling Latin beat augmented with cybernetic technology, all festival horn fanfares and clanging trashcan percussion. Next up, “Now” updates the early ’90s dance-floor sound of Crystal Waters; the big-room house epic features a classic mantra—”This is what you want!”—a tubular bass line, and an army of high-stepping synth stabs. “Glop” closes things out with a massive soundsystem blast, dressing up a steam-engine beat in a dancehall’s worth of vocals.

On the flip side, UFO! recruits both old friends and new talents to handle remix duty. Recent Sanguine discovery Skin & Bones go all dubby in their re-edit of “Pachanga,” sanding off the syncopations and pouring meaty blobs of synth-bass all over everything. UFO! calls upon his frequent bandmate DJ Abstract, who jacks up the rhythm section of “Now” with pianos and old-school breakbeats. Finally, another longtime UFO! cohort, Jason Mouse, runs “Glop” through the bass wringer, trying on six different kinds of low-end, from gentle blips to acid squirts, before settling into a devastating groove and riding it for all it’s worth.

For all the ink that could be spilled over UFO!’s newest opus, it’s best just to hear it from the man himself, shouting as he leaps from atop the towering bass cabinet into the sweating crowd below… “Klingons bangin’ the walls of their own spaceships, blasting lasers and photon blasters at full warp speed, beam me up Scottie, I control your body, I’m as deadly as SARS when it comes toshockin’ the party!”

This is music for the pre-dawn hours of the night: magical, solitary, capricious, and slightly macabre…

Born out of a basic need for a space to rock some serious low-end frequencies, Son1ika offered up his studio for the two to make music together. The results are a sonic dance between Ed’s raw energy and breakneck velocity combined with Federico’s grounded energy and graceful intelligence.

“Our balance is that I come up with 50 ideas a minute, but don’t have the patience to ground one of them. He’s a real nerve in the studio, he grounds it, presses record, I play, he adds to it, and moves it around. There is no second guessing,” says Ed, who described their sessions very much fueled by well-made Costa Rican coffee, bread and butter.

Now both based in NYC, Son1ka and UFO! as Cosmetics are bringing the Costa Rican heat to a dancefloor near you.

Logic Is Lunacy finds UFO! turning even further down a new artistic corner—making him the perfect first artist to sign with the future-gazing label. The album is UFO’s most dance floor-ready output to date, and his first venture into the 4/4 format. While retaining his signature love of hard, loud distortion and meticulous sound design, the album traces an arc that incorporates a myriad of new forms and styles. From low-end techno to shattered electro-ballads to hook-laden synth rock, UFO! deconstructs and re-fabricates various genre influences in the forge of his imagination. Logic Is Lunacy may also be UFO!’s most personally intimate release, featuring the artist in the role of vocalist for the first time. Ribbons of darkness weave through his lyrics, glittering dimly against his tracks’ pop melodies with emotional musings on loves and loss reconciled.