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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.