Derek Vincent Smith, best-known as Pretty Lights, knew the creation of his innovative new album, “A Color Map of the Sun,” would be no easy feat. Rather than collecting samples from records, the electro hip-hop artist created original samples: 20-plus hours of tape — recorded on era-specific instruments — pressed to vinyl and then sampled to build the album’s 13 tracks. The result is electro with real soul, a genre-hopping mix of Smith’s influences. There’s the trippy ’70s funk of “Go Down Sunshine,” the computerized blips that dip into the deeper electro of “Prophet” and the Talib Kweli-assisted soul jam “Around the Block.” A bonus: The two-disc set features a second live album (“Live Studio Sessions From a Color Map of the Sun”) of compositions as they were originally recorded, providing an inside look at the method behind Smith’s sampledelic madness.
