Electronic

The word "ambient" literally means "encompassing"; it etymology derives from the Latin for "going around." But one of the genres most captivating strains might better be described as going into the mist, the water or even the earth. This strain emphasizes the grain of sound, the rumble of resistance, the thingliness of the recorded medium itself. This school of thought is best exemplified by William Basinski, whose album Disintegration Loops famously captured the sound of years-old piano sketches being played back on crumbling magnetic tape; it also comprises the full-bore intensity of artists like Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Fennesz, who whip up shoegaze-grade distortion and then grind it down to dust.

Subscribe to Cloud Daze here, an regularly updating playlist that features a heady mix of ambient house, cloud disco, recombinant techno and other genres that we’re making up on the spot. This week’s offering revolves around the latest Koze release, Knock Knock.Over the past five years, DJ Koze has become one of electronic music’s greatest narrative producers. All songs tell a story, to one degree or another, but instrumental electronic music tends to evoke a vibe or push its listener towards the ecstatic highs or darker recesses. It’s rare that this emotional coloring gains nuance and texture or shifts from track to track or second to second. But Koze knows this track. This world-building, narrative-driven approach was there in the woozing shifting textures of the German producer’s epochal 2013 album Amyglada, and it’s evident on his two remix compilations -- 2009’s Reincarnations and 2014’s Reincarnations, Pt. 2. His 2018 Knock Knock finds the DJ as technically capable as ever, but it also marks his evolution as a storyteller. This maturation is clear in the album’s first two minutes. On lead-off track “Club der Ewigkeiten” (roughly translated, “Club of Eternity”), tangled strings, bubbling synth taps and a squealing vocals conjure a taught, anxious space before a warm, round melody appears and the track takes on different, brighter characteristics. Throughout Knock Knock, there is a constant ebbing and flowing. Like the best psychedelic music, the music creates its own internal logic, and it uses that logic to guide the listener through a journey. This isn’t to say that Knock Knock is a difficult listen. The songs congeal and groove, and the tension is generally soft-lit -- a warbling dissonance creates a creeping, unnamed anxiety that cuts through the smeared slice of Bon Iver vocals in “Bonfire,” while “Pick Up” positions a lovely and sad sample of Aretha Franklin next to the euphoric disco beat from Melba Moore. For long stretches, things are light and breezy, and the album frequently achieves lift-off, especially towards the end. The opening stuttering, boom bap-era rhythms of “Lord Knows” sounds like a lost, mid-’90s Pete Rock joint, while the space-age modular synth lines of “Seeing Aliens” is sublime and ecstatic. It’d be easy for Koze to end the album on that high note, but then he cuts to “Drone Me Up, Flashy” -- 6 minutes of floating disjointed Kraut ambience that feels heavenly and lost. It may not be exactly the place we wanted to land after this 78-minute journey, but it feels honest.

Four Tet (nee Kieran Hebden) has said that he wants his music to tell the story of his life, and his tracks do occupy the same psychic space as a certain class of Instagram pictures: the sun-dappled portrait taken on a mountaintop, or the early morning shot of the steam rising off an alpine lake. These are the sort of moments that are too slippery to adequately capture in a caption, though, invariably, we try. A lot of musicians spend their career chasing a sound, and while Hebden does have a certain sonic palette -- one that is inordinately taken up by anything that chimes -- the listener gets the distinct impression that, more than anything, the British producer is in search of a feeling.This is true of the work he does on remixes. Hebden is not only one of the most prolific remixers of his generation, but also one of the most catholic. He’s remixed Riri as well as the Australian avante-electro-jazz quartet Tangents. And while his remixes generally correspond to the stylistic shifts and whims of his own work, there are times when they precede his own transformations, seemingly blurring the subject and object. In many ways, these remixes provide an alternative history of Hebden’s own music.One thing you’ll notice is that while Hebden’s sound is unmistakable, he rarely transforms the tracks he remixes, at least not entirely. There is an occasional bit of brinksmanship with the source material -- for Bonobo’s early track, Pick Up, Hebden takes the originals dusty breakbeats and adds a stuttering, polyrhythmic pounce; and the fact that he would remix half of Madlib’s Madviliany album feels somewhere between an homage and a dare -- but, for the most part, Hebden’s remixes are retellings of the original, albeit a bit refractured. Hebden latches onto a specific idea, melody, vocal line, or beat in the source material, and tweaks that according to his own muse. He’ll add a bit of electronic swirl to the spacial post-rock of The Drift, draw out the pinging keys of Matthew Dear’s “Deserter,” or tuck a thumping disco beat and skronky sax line beneath Nenah Cherry’s after hours swinger “Dream Baby Dream,” though, ultimately, the focus of that remix remains on Cherry’s smokey voice. Similarly, his remix of The XX’s 2002 “Angels” adopts the original’s chimy key drops and maintains the vibe of post-coliatal emotional surrender, but Hebden flips the melody and adds in airey textures that make the track more tender than sensual. It feels as if two artists are viewing the same scene -- lovers, naked, intertwined, near daybreak -- and coming to slightly different, though complimentary conclusions. Hebden is also very savvy when it comes to selecting the tracks he remixes. It’s easy to understand why Radiohead commissioned him to remix “Scatterbrain” from the band’s 2003 album, Hail to the Thief. With its spare, hypnotic guitar figure at its core, the original sounds like a daydream -- albeit a particularly dark one -- and in many ways it matches with the more pastoral, delicate electronic music that Four Tet was making at the time. But Hebden has mentioned that he very quickly came to resent the folktronica tag that critics and fans applied to his 2003 album Rounds, and he quickly pivoted to a new sound. This remix could be a early indication of that transformation His remix takes the track into an entirely different direction.Thom Yorke’s vocals are sliced and reprocessed, and paired with a jittery drum pattern and (towards the end) atonal, skronky sax outburst, which hints at the IDM-tinted free jazz experiments of Hebden’s middle period work.As Hebden’s own sound evolved, from the more acoustic/organic work of Rounds to the dancefloor-ready tracks of his later work, his remix work gained a fuller, more bass-heavy sound. A great example of this is his remix for Scandinavian nu-disco DJ/producer Todd Terje. The track starts out with a swell of chiming synths (of course), and the motif pops up repeatedly through the track, but the song soon settles into a four-on-the-floor dance groove, giving the track an immediacy that balances out Hebden’s more delicate tendencies. In some ways, Hebden’s work as a remix is just as satisfying as his own solo work. Yes, the latter feels more high-stakes and substantial, but his remixes are oftentimes more playful and experimental, as if Hebden is testing out ideas and aesthetic masks. Yes, to an extent, the payoff for these are his full length albums, but, as with many things in life, the journey is oftentimes more fascinating than the destination.

Whats This Playlist All About? The LCD Soundsystem mastermind and pals David & Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax and 2ManyDJs got back to spinning vinyl (and only vinyl) at their 2018 Despacio party residency at Queens Knockdown Center. If you were there, you may have enjoyed the set while sipping on wines from Murphys restaurant, Four Horsemen. If you werent, Brooklyn Vegans Arielle Gordon graciously compiled this mix featuring highlights from the first of three nights.What Do You Get? A whole lot of classic disco, New Wave, and house, all on the headier end of the dance spectrum. It kicks off with one of Paul McCartneys weirdest (and best) synth experiments ("Check My Machine"), then digs into classic Bowie, Byrne, and Carly Simon, alongside a few Soulwax remixes of French artistes Charlotte Gainsbourg and The Peppers. In between, theres just enough dance-floor cheese sprinkled about (including some "Jungle Boogie") to keep the mood pleasantly lighthearted.Greatest Discovery: The 1983 collaboration between French composer Hector Zazou, Congolese singer Bony Bikaye, and electronic duo CY1, who mixed analog synths, krautrock, funk, and African influences into entrancing tracks like "Lamuka."Guiltiest Pleasure: Lyn Christophers slinky, sexy funk-pop sizzler "Take Me With You."Best Surprise: Black Sabbaths psychedlic slow-burner "Planet Caravan." It glues together the surrounding disco beats and funky grooves surprisingly well.Toss Up: James Murphy Spinning This Mix or an All LCD Soundsystem Set? Were going to go with the former here, if only because were getting a little older and hearing these classics alongside a couple glasses of that wine sounds pretty nice right about now.

This is our track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far)for regular updates."Opal - Four Tet Remix," Bicep What It IsConsidering that Belfast DJ duo Bicep took their name from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Pumping Iron, there music isn’t nearly as cheeky as you’d expect. The tracks bounce between Chicago house and Italo-disco and have a nice sheen that belies a mid-period Detroit influence. They’re also quite well known for their influential blog, Feel My Bicep, which is a destination site for fans of underground electronic music. What It Sounds LikeThe original “Opal,” from Bicep’s self-titled 2017 album, is a sludgy chunk of flangy, metallic synth sounds and downtempo drums that is surprisingly melodic for the duo. Four Tet doesn’t tinker too much with the formula. As is his wont, Four Tet adds whirring ambient textures and isolates the track’s melody, adding a layer of distortion that draws out the tracks blurry qualities. The track takes a minute to build, but, by the end, it’s vintage Four Tet: both transcendent and completely ephemeral. Suggested Playlist PlacementHedonist Hangover Music.

Whats This Playlist All About?: The Radiohead icon continues to thrill die-hard fans and alienate casual ones with this woozy, wordless sound manifesto curated for Pitchfork’s Day for Night Festival in 2017. In his words: “Its not this years music, its just the music that comes out of my walls at home.”What You Get: Exotic blips, beats, and strips of sound laced, looped, and left to disintegrate (sometimes literally) into moody ambient and avant-garde pieces. The mix is bookended by Dutch artist Machinefabrieks aqueous world of rippling drones, but in between it slips through dark, entrancing dream worlds (like John Luther Adams "The Light That Fills the World") and eclectic sound sculptures molded from our most deep-seated anxieties (William Basinskis "dlp 2.1"). Think "Treefingers" translated through advanced alien technologies.Greatest Discovery: A Winged Victory for the Sullen—the name itself is perhaps more Thom Yorke than Thom Yorke could ever be. But even better is the European duos gorgeous, string-soaked, ambient-neoclassical arrangements, two of which are featured here. (By the way, their song titles are just as awesome.)Will This Playlist Bore You? Lets say theres a 50/50 chance that, yes, it will. Keep in mind: This is mood music that can move you to the core, but only at just the right, reflective moment.

Whats This Playlist All About? The Dutch DJ extraordinaire reveals all: These are "tracks that I love to listen to at home or play out at a party." Its safe to say this spunky upstart totally brings the party with him everywhere he goes——even in the comforts of his own home.What Do You Get? An ever-changing weekly collection of buzzy, bass-y feel-good anthems, dizzying dancefloor-fillers, and——if the feel is just right——some frayed, frenetic house and bass experiments. Like any DJ worth his/her salt, Garrix is both calculated and playful with his selections, slipping in some esoteric sounds between poppy earworms.Biggest and Best Surprise: James Blakes sticky, splintered cosmic-electro-soul single "If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead."Can You Pull This Off As Your Mix At Your Next Party?: Nope, sorry. This is expert DJ stuff. No way your friends will believe you have such hip, eclectic tastes.

Remind us of why we were supposed to hate electroclash? Because it was cheap and disposable? Because it celebrated amateurism over art? Because it was a crude simulacrum of past musical innovations? Well, they said the same things about punk when it first hit. And, like punk, electroclash is the passing fad that never went away. For a sound that supposedly died out sometime in late 2003 in the clogged-up bathroom at some Vice-sponsored after-hours party in Williamsburg, electroclashs cocktail of primitive synth-pop, ripped-stocking attitude, and sexually charged provocation has become a permanent strain in the DNA of post-millennial indie.In its primordial late-90s state, electroclash represented the playfully scrappy antidote to the increasingly slick and aggressive nature of popular electronica, and a flirtatious, fashion-forward affront to the deliberately drab, self-effacing nature of wool-sweatered indie rock. Following a decade where A&R scouts were desperately seeking the next Seattle in Chapel Hill, Halifax, San Diego, and all points in between, electroclash represented perhaps the first instance of a post-internet, non-localized scene, with adherents springing up everywhere from New York (Fischerspooner) and Toronto (Peaches) to Munich (Chicks on Speed) and Liverpool (Ladytron). And by foregrounding female and queer voices, electroclash initiated a crucial early step in chipping away at the boys clubs that have traditionally dominated both indie rock and electronic music, a process that continues to this day.Like any hyped-up movement, electroclash was rife with flash-in-the-pan phenoms that time and Spotify have forgotten. (Pour out your complimentary energy drink of choice for W.I.T. and Ping Pong Bitches.) But you can also draw a direct line from electroclash to some of the most important artists of the 21st-century. This playlist compiles electroclashs definitive names alongside the established bands that stripped down their sound in response (Elastica, Broadcast), the seasoned DJs who embraced the neon vibe (Felix da Housecat, Ellen Allien), and the game-changing artists (M.I.A., The Knife) who elevated electroclash into a permanent feature of the modern musical lexicon.

Whats This Playlist All About? The London DJ and producer offers an ever-expanding mix of "the music in his head," and, thankfully, it doesnt just stop at 2017.What Do You Get? Much like Averys own moody, minimalist translations of classic club sounds, this lengthy collection is all about harnessing negative space to create dark, disturbing, sometimes disorienting, alien atmospheres. As the playlist takes several celestial detours, current tracks (including selections from his own 2018 EP, Slow Fade) seamlessly mix with older classics from New Order and exotic gems like the dizzying 808 experiments from Hypnobeat.Greatest Discovery: The rare, rather inviting voice comes from Australian singer/songwriter Carla dal Forno, whose hypnotizing track "Clusters" is dark and dreamy, all while laced in a soft lo-fi buzz.Will This Playlist Ever End? Currently at 103 songs and nearly 11 hours, it does have its moments of seeming endlessness, where beats and loops refuse to cease. This may admittedly cause some slight anxiety, but theres enough transcendent bliss in between to set you at ease. In other words, the real answer to that question is: We hope not.

Nicolas Jaar has commitment issues. His music slithers between psych-speckled post-rock, world-building ambient, minimalist techno, hip-hop-inflected house, and reconstituted pop. Sometimes it’s slinky and sexy, other times it maps out a cavernous space that is icy and foreboding. As an artist, Jaar can be thought of as an arch conceptualist or a sharp-eyed technician, a festival-headlining electronic music god or a museum-dwelling avant garde knob twiddler.He’s all these things, of course. Regardless of the medium, the most interesting artists are the ones who spend their careers negotiating contradictions. Jaar is no different. He’s the NYC club kid, the omnivorous intellectual, and a product of South America’s political unrest. His tireless pursuit of Born in 1990, Jarr came up in the late-’00s NYC house scene, playing Brooklyn’s Marcy hotel parties. Gadi Mizrahi, who hosted the parties as one half of the legendary NYC house duo Wolf & Lamb, heard Jaar’s early compositions — which veered toward experimental atmospherics — and suggested that he add a 4/4 house beat beneath them. Within two years, Jaar had become one of the hottest DJs in NYC’s house scene, releasing his first EP (The Student) and starting his record label (Other People). At the end of this hot streak, he turned 20.Making a playlist of Jaar’s best music is difficult, to say the least. Figuring out how to sequence the euphoric house of his A.A.L. project with the austere techno of his Nymph EPs is a fool’s errand, while blending the Southwestern inflected psych twang of Darkside’s “Golden Arrow” with the sorrowful piano tones of his 2013 Leonard Cohen cover, “Avalanche,” is near-fucking-impossible.And what does one do with Pomegranates? The 2015 release was intended as a soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 Soviet-times movie The Color of Pomegranates, and combines scraps of electronic debris to approximate noisy ambient music. The music at the beginning of the collection is largely abstract sound design — the whizzing harmonics of opener “Garden of Eden” gives way to the clattering, gear-crunching ambience of “Construction” — but this leads to some of Jaar’s most beautiful music: the twinkling, near-East melodies of “Tourists,” the pastoral sheen of “Shame,” and the haunting piano ballad “Muse.”It all makes a little more sense if you’ve seen the movie. Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates is considered one of that era’s definitive underground films. In it, as well as its predecessor, 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Parajanov bucked the state-sanctioned aesthetic of social realism — a stylistically rigid movement that celebrated the nobility of the proletariat — for an hallucinatory style that veered between esoteric, Freudian examinations of a vast innerspace and oblique, symbolist critiques of Soviet politics and society. Upon release, Parajanov’s films were generally panned by native critics and banned by the censors, and Parajanov himself was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Siberia (ostensibly for his homosexuality).In many ways, Parajanov’s sideways agitprop is a fitting corollary to Jaar’s own work, but Jaar has definitely had an easier go of it. By the time Pomegranates was released in 2015, Jaar was one of the most celebrated producers and DJs in the world. He had a teaching gig at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His collaborative side-project Darkside had released their critically acclaimed debut, 2013’s Psychic, and became a touring powerhouse, treating audiences worldwide to their loose, spaghetti techno. And Jaar formed an interdisciplinary arts collective called Clown & Sunset Aesthetics that performed inside a geodesic dome at MOMA’s PS1 contemporary art museum. His 2012 BBC Essential Mix was named Radio 1’s Essential Mix Of The Year, while his 2011 debut, Space is Only Noise, was named album of the year by Resident Advisor, Mixmag, and Crack Mag.But Jaar’s breakout composition was 2010’s “Mi Mujer,” which remains his most streamed track on Spotify. It was a song that was never intended to come out — Jaar had laid down the Spanish language vocals of his mother, somewhere between a tribute and a joke — but Jaar released it after bemoaning the appropriation of Latin music samples in electronic music.This is not the only time that Jaar’s family showed up in his work, nor the only time that he has engaged with the issues surrounding the Latin American diaspora. Jaar is from New York, but his family is Chilean. His father, the celebrated multimedia artist Alfredo Jaar, was born in the Chilean capitol of Santiago in 1956. Alfrado’s family soon moved to Mozambique, but they were devoutly liberal, and when the socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected in 1972, the family returned to Santiago. Unfortunately, Allende’s reign was short lived, and the following year, when Alfredo was 17, Allende was assassinated as Augusto Pinochet rose to power in a bloody coup.Much has been written about Pinochet and Allende, particularly of the CIA’s involvement, but the net of it was that 3,000 were killed and many more “disappeared,” tortured, or imprisoned by the Pinochet-backed Chilean death squad the Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte). Jaar’s family stuck it out in Chile for nearly a decade after Pinochet took power before moving to New York in 1982. Pinochet himself held onto power until March 11th, 1990, when he was disposed following a country-wide referendum. At this time, Nicolas Jaar was 3 months old.Nicolas Jaar has never been an explicitly political artist, but this particularly gruesome chapter of history shows up in his work, particularly on Sirens, from 2016. That album is both his most personal and political work to date. If Pomegranates and the Nymph EPs found him exploring particular strains of his music — musique concrète and fractured techno, respectively — then Sirens is a synthesis, blending the warbling post-rock wanderings of his Darkside project with the textural elements of Pomegranates and the conceptual, cinematic framework of Space, while adding a veneer of pop to give the songs more structure. The collection also, perhaps tellingly, abandoned sampling, and was solely constructed with live instrumentation and Jaar’s voice. “The Governor” and “Three Sides of Nazareth” have a presence that’s lacking in his other work — in particular, the cowpoke vocals and driving baseline of “Governor,” which are juxtaposed with the swirling, subterranean sound effects.The spectre of violence and political unrest hangs over all of Sirens, but the most pointedly political track is “No.” It contains one of the albums few samples — a clip of Andes folk music — and its title references the 1988 referendum that would eventually bring down Pinochet (the choice was, effectively, “yes, he stays” or “no, he leaves”). Speaking to Pitchfork, Jaar noted, “What interested me a lot was that, in 1988, there was a referendum that asked the Chilean people: ‘Do you want Pinochet to stay for eight more years?’ That simple, yes or no. So the resistance—which was artists, leftists, activists—created a campaign for the ‘no.’ They effectively turned a negative message into a positive message, which seems like the most elemental change that you can do.”The track ends with a snippet of sampled dialogue between Nicolas and Alfredo Jaar taken from when the former was a child. It can be translated as such:“Alfredo: Stay against the wall. Put yourself against the wall. Go there and tell others. The one you like, tell a nice story.Nico: Once upon a time there was a little bird that was flying. And there, there was a man with a very big gun and did like this (gunshot).”It’s tempting to view Sirens as a culmination (or synthesis) of Jaar’s approach — the marriage of the personal and political; narratives built from scraps of memories and noise — but 2012 – 2017, his 2018 release under the moniker A.A.L. (Against All Logic), displays yet another side of Jaar. The tracks are hedonistic, transcendent, and eerily (for Jaar) coherent. “Rave On U” builds off clomping high-hats and smeared synth textures for a banger, while “Cityfade” comes outfitted with gospel handclaps, a streaking piano line, and a submerged children’s choir, and is his most accessible work to date. “I Never Dream,” meanwhile, is pure dancefloor euphoria, building off shuffling rhythms and lightly processed female soul vocal for a finish that’s as pretty and blissful as anything Jaar or any of his contemporaries have ever made.When building a playlist, the curator always tries to find the center of an artist or a genre. With Jaar, that’s nearly impossible; his work is endlessly digressive and varied. There are strains of ideas and sounds that appear and reappear, but putting a finger on one feels impossibly reductive. The journey may be bumpy, but it also includes some of the most important and idiosyncratic music created this decade.