Will Long first became known as one-half of Celer, an American duo who issued an absurdly prolific stream of breathtaking ambient/drone releases laced with field recordings and acoustic instrumentation. Following the tragic, untimely death of his partner, Danielle Baquet-Long, Will continued Celer as a solo project, eventually settling down in Japan and starting a new life. While in Tokyo, he came in contact with Terre Thaemlitz, another American expatriate, who is best known in the dance music world for making provocative deep house under the name DJ Sprinkles. Long began translating his sparse but warm drones into a house context, adding a steadily kicking 4/4 beat as well as sporadic vocal samples that express concern and dissatisfaction with the state of the world. Long Trax appeared on Thaemlitz’s Comatonse Recordings in 2016, backed with a second disc of Sprinkles’ overdubbed versions of the tracks, and the album gradually received a decent amount of praise. Long Trax 2 does little to alter the formula: the tracks are all around ten minutes apiece; they all have a basic kick-drum pattern (sometimes accented by digital hi-hats, rim clicks, or bongos); they all have soft, meditative keyboard chords that change every few measures; and the occasional vocal samples still offer simple yet scathing insight into the corruption of society. Opener “Nothing’s Changed” features the terse, pithy words of Barack Obama; in addition to the frank titular phrase, he asks “Should we pretend that we’ve got a colorblind society?,” and at one point, his obviously edited voice states “I’m a very angry man.” Elsewhere, on “The Struggles, the Difficulties,” an African-American woman wearily sighs “We haven’t had it this bad in a long, long time,” and during a lull in “That’s the Way It Goes,” a man exclaims “I just think its part of capitalism to promote racism… and that separates people, so they keep people separated, and that keeps them from thinking about the real problem.” On the now-classic 2009 full-length Midtown 120 Blues, Sprinkles used more extensive samples and field recordings in order to probe deeper into issues relating to sexuality, race, drug abuse, and house music’s appropriation by the mainstream. That album also seemed far more designed for actual club play than Long’s tracks, which are nearly as meditative as his ambient work. His ideas are expressed in a far more succinct manner, but they offer similarly powerful commentary, and the album’s starkness works to its advantage, driving the tracks’ points so they hit home.