Electronic

Arca’s profile is strange and eclectic: Although featured on albums by Kanye West and Björk, the Venezuelan producer’s solo work lives mostly in the shadows, existing as cult favorites of electronic musicians and intellectuals. His expressionist, synth-based tracks stream into the headphones of people in cafés and living rooms, studied like Johnny Marr studied Marc Bolan; a frequent thought of listeners might be: “How does he do it?”“Vanity,” from 2015’s Mutant, opens with the sounds of profoundly distorted mallet percussions echoing into magnetic eternity, which are quickly usurped by a bassline so smooth and boundless it spills beautifully into the rest of the mix. “Anoche,” which will appear on his self-titled record due April 7, brilliantly doubles detuned synth notes on top of one another as meticulous percussion enters and exists with free will. The lyrics are pure romantic splendor and despair.Of course, Kanye West’s Yeezus, from 2013, must be mentioned here, as the record benefits from not one but four tracks produced by Arca. “Hold My Liquor” and “Blood on the Leaves” are arguably the two most reflective and emotionally explosive tracks on the album: The former centers around a pristine, slow-burning synth pulse, while the latter features spectacularly placed samples and monolithic bass. Arca’s work on “Meditation” by Babyfather (a.k.a. Dean Blunt) feels more vintage and laidback, like a modern Ghostface Killah beat, while FKA twigs’ “Lights On” is a dissonant, palpitating seduction.If the trajectory of his previous works are any indication, Arca’s self-titled record could go down as his masterpiece. Brace yourself for it with this playlist of tracks spanning his luminous career.

The Kompakt label deserves some kind of cultural service award for Box. Released in the fall of 2016, this highly welcomed package collects the bulk of Wolfgang Voigt’s output under his GAS alias: the Zauberberg, Königsforst, and Pop albums, plus the Oktember 12-inch. Roughly 20 years after their release, these sublime recordings sound as if they were produced only yesterday. At times throbbing, and at other times profoundly glacial, they hover over the abyss between spellbinding beauty and subconsciously relaxing wallpaper, an aesthetic originally articulated by Brian Eno in the late ’70s.There’s very little ambient music created in the 21st century that doesn’t owe the GAS titles a deep debt of gratitude, and after a 17-year absence, he’s set to redefine the medium once again with his new album, NARKOPOP. Yet as influential as he is, it’s hard to frame Voigt’s output as definitive ambient techno. In fact, it’s hard to cite any album as definitive due to the genre’s ambiguous identity. Like its fuzzy textures and formless expanses, from its very birth, ambient techno exists in a state of nebulousness.Rewind to the first half of the ’90s—when the genre emerged as something of a cerebral chill-out tonic to rave’s relentless pounding, and artists as diverse as Aphex Twin, Biosphere, The Orb, Higher Intelligence Agency, Orbital, and µ-Ziq were all creating vastly different iterations of ambient techno. While the Aphex Twin classic “Xtal” is minimal and ethereal in ways that were extremely modern (and still are), HIA’s “Spectral” already felt nostalgic for dusty Jean-Michel Jarre albums when released in 1993. And then there are dub techno heavies like Basic Channel and Monolake—do they count as ambient techno? On the one hand, their explicit debt to dub reggae’s bass culture seems to place them in a parallel universe with it, yet what could possibly be more ambient than the time-expanding crackle, squelch, and hiss soaked into Basic Channel’s “Quadrant Dub I”?Rather than attempt to lock ambient techno into a rigid definition, our playlist embraces this nebulousness. Prepare yourself for a deep and expansive journey, or since this is ambient music we’re talking about, simply press play and forget about it. That’s what Brian Eno would do.

British experimental pianist Tom Rogerson is set to release his debut album on Dead Oceans, but his isn’t the only name on cover—Finding Shore is billed as a full-album collaboration with avant-rock emissary Brian Eno, who threads Rogerson’s meditative playing through pulsating, droning electronic soundscapes. Prior to the album’s arrival on December 8, we asked Rogerson to compile a playlist of his favorite Eno tracks. "Instead of trying to create an Eno Greatest Hits Ive gone for the pieces that have meant the most to me over the years, including some of the most iconic songs with which hes associated, whether because of their commercial success or their conceptual influence. Ive tried to even it out so its not too tilted towards any particular decade or style. (NB: Unfortunately, Spotify is missing some of the crucial collaborations, notably those with David Byrne and Robert Fripp.)"—Tom Rogerson

Mere minutes before sitting down to write this post, Dais Records announced its plan to drop reissues of Psychic TV’s Pagan Day and Allegory & Self—stone-cold classics of ’80s psychedelia—in July. This is exactly the kind of record nerd–salivating news I’ve come to expect from label co-founders Ryan Martin and Gibby Miller (who started the operation in 2007). On what feels like a weekly basis nowadays, they revive some long-forgotten synth/ambient masterpiece or a vintage industrial jam that’s exquisitely dark and dreary. If you’ve never soaked up Annie Anxiety’s Soul Possession, a fringe art-pop album from the post-punk era, prepare to have your skull cap unscrewed and brain turned upside down. (Seriously—“Turkey Girl” manages to sound like outsider hip-hop recorded inside an intestinal tract.) Same goes for Hunting Lodge’s Will. It may have been forged in the raging fires of Michigan’s ’80s industrial scene, yet its hell-encrusted hypnotism, stuttering bass thuds, and minimalist dread is so damn prescient, it may as well have been recorded yesterday.Dais isn’t just an archival label, however. In the spring of 2017, the pair unleashed The Gag File, American noise artist Aaron Dilloway’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2011’s Modern Jester. Easily a contender for experimental album of the year, it employs murky, surrealist electronics and violently contorted samples to capture the fear and loathing suffusing our Trumplandia nightmare. In addition to Dilloway, the Dais catalog features churning brutality from hardcore-troublemakers-turned-EBM-fist-pumpers Youth Code, and Sightings, the most important noise-rock band of the 21st century.But not everything Dais puts out seeks to obliterate eardrums: on top of their taste for the ugly and abrasive, they have a deep love for the beautiful and sublime. To date, they’ve released two albums from Scout Paré-Phillips (pictured), a gothic singer/songwriter whose imposingly austere sound falls somewhere between folk music and art rock. At first blush, Drab Majesty’s gauzy and undulating darkwave feels worlds removed from Paré-Phillips’ guitar-driven theater, but when you sit down and spend some quality time with the former’s Careless and The Demonstration, it becomes apparent both explorers share a love for intricate songwriting with lyrics balancing the cryptic with the emotional. Quite honestly, most modern darkwave artists don’t even come close to touching Drab Majesty in terms of compositional originality. Then again, most modern experimental labels don’t even come close to touching Dais in terms of quality, so it’s a perfect fit.

All my conversations with electronic-music heads have had a common theme recently: Everyone agrees that there was little consensus in dance music this year. It’s been that way for a while, really. Every year, there are more scenes running in parallel, fewer standout anthems that everybody can agree on. But this year, even dance music’s broad, diffuse overground felt scattered. Plenty of reliable figures kept doing what they do best—Four Tet and the Caribou side project Daphni turned out well-regarded albums, for instance—but aside, perhaps, from Bicep, there were few emergent artists with wide crossover appeal.The good news, though, is that there were plenty of pockets of brilliance across the underground, both in terms of micro-scenes and individual artists boldly blazing their own paths. In terms of the former, the most exciting was a nameless corner of the UK bass spectrum, largely headquartered in Bristol, encompassing labels like Hemlock, Hessle Audio, Timedance, Livity Sound, and Whities. Even here, there’s no single rhythmic signature or sonic feature that unites them all, the way there is with dubstep or techno. Instead, it’s a shared predilection for highly abstracted sound design, deliriously drawn-out patterns, and twisted arrangements that turn on a dime. Minor Science’s shuddering, jewel-toned “Volumes,” Mosca’s wild, whip-cracking Latin-dub raver “Peyote Stitch,” and Batu’s feverishly repetitive “Murmur” were all standouts here, alongside stellar tracks from Lanark Artefax, Airhead, Ploy, Hodge, Parris, and the artist known simply as Joe.If that’s the “scenius” end of things, the genius end was just as fruitful. Confidently sailing far beyond the known limits of Chicago footwork, Jlin continued to melt minds with her own brand of dazzlingly polyrhythmic, ultra-vivid, triplet-riddled club tracks. Laurel Halo, never one to repeat herself two records in a row, hit upon the strangest, squishiest sounds she’s conjured yet—an enveloping amalgam of funk, affectless electro-pop, and musique concrete. Errorsmith, designer of Native Instruments’ popular software synth Razor, put his creation through its paces on a head-spinningly intricate album of synthesized percussion and needling sound design that, despite its wanton experimentalism, is also one of the most giddily enjoyable records of the year. And as far as singularity of vision goes, few could touch Fever Ray, who returned from a eight-year absence with the brilliant, challenging, sometimes sexy and sometimes confounding Plunge. “IDK About You,” highlighted here, was one of its wiliest curveballs: a 160-BPM co-production with the young Portuguese batida producer Nídia Minaj (also included here with her own “Underground”) that put an unprecedentedly breathless spin on Karin Dreijer’s creepy, out-of-body pop.The link between electronic music and pop is practically as old as electronic music itself, but this year there were still artists who made the relationship feel fresh. The Korean-American singer/producer yaeji turned out a heady, low-lit fusion of house, ambient, and trap music. Sophia Kennedy, an American living in Hamburg, brought her experience writing music for the theater to an odd and deeply infectious album for DJ Koze’s Pampa label. And even TORRES, best known as an indie rocker, broke new ground on “To Be Given a Body,” the absorbing final track from her album Three Futures: It’s a captivating fusion of storytelling and wispy-yet-weighty ambient production, and I couldn’t stop listening to it this year, often cueing it up multiple times in a row. It’s an outlier on this list, but it also feels like a jumping-off point. Hopefully, 2018 will bring more songs like it—fresh energy and fresh ideas from artists way out on the margins of a deeply decentered genre.

A caveat: This is a personal list, not a purportedly objective overview of electronic music in 2017. Would such a thing even be possible? It’s doubtful, if only because there is no single overarching scene that unites all electronic music. It’s not just about the divide between commercial EDM and everything else; even within the underground, electronic music’s fans are fragmented into innumerable overlapping niches according to subgenres, stylistic quirks, cities, clubs, and cliques. Fortunately, one of the perks of my job—and one of the perks of going out a lot less than I once did, if I’m honest—is that I feel less compunction to pledge fealty to any single tribe. As a critic, I get to eavesdrop on them all. So while I can’t promise that this list is comprehensive, it does encompass a broad array of sounds, from Mark Barrott’s Balearic ambient to Jlin’s flickering post-footwork to Demen’s claustrophobic goth.Given that range, I’ve sequenced the list with listenability in mind, not in any sort of ranked fashion. There are a few principal threads. The first is the strain of jewel-toned, bittersweet house music heard in tracks by DJ Koze, Project Pablo, and Young Marco; for daydreaming dancers, 2017 has delivered in spades. Then there’s a range of heavier, beat-oriented fare, like Proc Fiskal’s brittle, fidgety grime, or Sinjin Hawke’s choral trap. And finally, I couldn’t resist fleshing out my list with ambient tracks like Visible Cloaks’ “Mask” and Kara-lis Coverdale’s “Grafts.” Ever since the disappearance of chillout rooms, ambient has tended to remain at arms’ length from dance music, but with incredible records coming along at an unprecedented clip, there’s never been a better time to close the gap.

How fitting that James Murphy released his last album in 2010, for LCD Soundsystem lives in a climate-controlled space where college students and post grads, downloading songs onto their new smartphones, got excited about voting for Barack Obama. To say the music is “dated” is redundant—all music sounds like the time in which it was recorded. Also wrong. If anything, the collar-loosening white boy boogie of “Dance Yrself Clean” and “Daft Punk is Playing in My House” predated the ways in which the Silicon Valley ethos of app-ready affluence established itself in the last three to five years: dancing to “I Feel It Coming” after a few pints of the local microbrew. LCD’s 2010 show at the Fillmore presented the act at its best, with Murphy and Nancy Whang trading instruments and losing themselves to the music. He started losing me with the singer-songwriter material that won him praise a decade ago: all that “In My Life” stuff. I included a couple moments anyway because I won’t renounce my past.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

For electronic fans of a certain age, French Touch (or, as it’s also known, “French House) owned the 90s. Marrying the plop disco with the peaking phaser effects, Ed Banger, Daft Punk, Kavinsky, and Cassius provided the soundtrack to many late nights (and early mornings). The music was sexy and fun, and was the most commercially dominant type of electronic music in the States until EDM reared it’s ugly head in. This Apple Music playlist is a little jerky in terms of its flow and pacing, and “Heatwave” if from ‘00, but it contains some great remixes from the genre and succinctly sums that particular time and place.

All of us have our own personal soundtracks, the streams and playlists that run through our heads, especially in situations that demand a more deluxe treatment. For some, ideas about what that sound had to be was forged by obsessive viewings of the very coolest ‘80s cinema on worn and battered VHS tapes. Driven by sleek machine-made rhythms and slathered in washes of vintage synthesizers, it’s a sound that evokes the sight of neon lights reflected on rain-slicked city streets as you drive through the night in a black Maserati (though a Ford Focus will do if there’s nothing left at Hertz).That’s certainly the sound favored by Daniel Lopatin, the Brooklyn-based musician and producer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. The sibling movie-director team of Josh and Benny Safdie tapped him to score their 2017 film Good Time, a grubby, thoroughly New York-y crime story that stars a plausibly messed-up Robert Pattinson as a small-time crook trying to take care of his mentally disabled brother during a long night of bad luck and worse decisions. While the film’s visual style evokes the grittiest ‘70s flicks of John Cassavetes, Lopatin’s music might’ve been perfect for a Michael Mann thriller. Indeed, the soundtrack demonstrates Lopatin’s love for Tangerine Dream, the German synth pioneers who famously scored Mann’s 1981 movie Thief and whose epic “Phaedra” was memorably repurposed for the Safdies’ 2014 drug-addict drama Heaven Knows What.Good Time is also part of a wider resurgence for the moody, menacing synth-rock sound that was de rigueur for movies of an earlier era. The electronic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre have become touchstones for a new generation of scorers, along with Vangelis’ sumptuous music for Blade Runner and Giorgio Moroder’s more propulsive accompaniment for Midnight Express, American Gigolo, and Scarface. Of course, the god of the form—partially because he was the rare filmmaker who created his own soundtracks—remains John Carpenter. Such was the worship and influence of his minimalist synth scores in recent years, Carpenter felt compelled to begin a full-fledged music career in his seventh decade, recording two albums for Sacred Bones.Lopatin’s hardly the only contemporary musician to believe that nothing sets a movie’s mood better than a synthesizer arpeggiator. Other new masters of the aesthetic include Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things), Richard Vreeland a.k.a. Disasterpeace (It Follows), Cliff Martinez (Drive), and Jon Hopkins (Monsters). It’s been further explored by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, whose mesmerizing Drokk comprises their rejected score for the 2012 sci-fi thriller Dredd, and Zombie Zombie, a French electro-garage duo with a penchant for roughing up Carpenter themes in much the same way that Lopatin sandpapers the pristine surfaces of Tangerine Dream for Good Time.So even though it’ll never be 1985 again, there’s no better time for you to get behind the wheel of the hottest car you can find and drive into the night.

Staying a step ahead of the competition is always tricky business, but electronic music presents a particularly unique challenge. As a genre dependent on the advancements of technology, it markets itself as the sound of the future, yet as we continue to develop advanced machinery at an increasingly frantic pace, this music has a tendency to date itself more rapidly than other forms. What’s more quaint than listening to music that purports to be cutting edge long after our cultural standards have surpassed its once-lofty goals?Warp Records has never had an issue with releasing timeless music. Formed in Sheffield, England, in 1989, Warp has built one of the most imposing and consistently challenging catalogs, not just in electronic, but in all types of music. Although Warp does pride itself on exposing strange, exciting new sounds, the artists it fosters are equally concerned with creating work that stands on its own two legs, regardless of what instruments were used to produce it. It’s music built as much for the dance floor as for your living room, not to mention Warp’s various detours into schizo-rap, indie-prog, dance-tent EDM, and whatever the hell Gonjasufi is supposed to be. Most of all, Warp has gracefully avoided the trap of desperately chasing after bandwagons to hop on, choosing instead to take chances on radical voices from the underground and give them plenty of room to push their work to wild new extremes.Though electronic music is at the mercy of technology to some extent, the human imagination has no limits. Take a tour through Warp Records’ expansive legacy, and remember that the future is always now.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.