Electronic

This playlist from Beatport imagines the perfect 10 tracks for a sunrise set at Berlins legendary Panorama bar. As you can imagine, these tracks are bright, anthematic excursions into deep house, nu-disco and funky house, and include Omar S, Pépé Bradock and Todd Terje.

No, Acid House isnt a reference to Timothy Learys flat. Rather, its the variant of house that originated from Chicago -- thanks to legends like Phuture, Bam Bam, and Armando -- and rapidly spread to Europe, effectively became that continents pop music for a short, beautiful stretch in the late 80s. The smiley face was the genres iconic logo, and anyone alive during that period (and actively going to raves) remembers the pounding, round basslines and those worming synth sounds (courtesy of the TB-303). In 1989 this music was fairly ubiquitous, in the UK in particular, and provided the soundtrack to the so-called "second summer of love." This playlist, from FACT, combines tracks from both America and Europe, and offers a good primer to the genre for the uninitiated (or for those us us whove simply forgotten the genre).

Founded in the late ’00s, Glasgow’s Optimo Music is the quintessential Scottish label, and that’s exactly the way JD Twitch wants it. The producer, DJ, promoter, remixer, and proud Scot has amassed a catalog that directly mirrors the freely flowing exchange between DIY, anything-goes rock and cutting-edge dance music that has long defined the country’s underground. After all, Scottish artists were some of the very first on the planet to (1) blend punk and discoid propulsion (see Fire Engines’ 1980 landmark “Get Up and Use Me”), (2) fold alt-rock into house/techno (Primal Scream, of course), and (3) pioneer ’00s dance rock (the crazy prescient Yummy Fur did it a decade ahead of schedule).Among the slew of vinyl Twitch released in 2016 (including those sides on the Optimo Trax and Optimo Music Disco Plate sub-labels), it’s on The Pussy Mothers’ The Number 1 EP, MR TC’s Surf and Destroy, and Junto Club’s Warm Me Up that these deliciously anarchic qualities are most in your face. Surf and Destroy is especially telling: the title track is a throbbing orgy of acid squelch, post-punk atmosphere, and psychedelic guitar wash.In contrast, these qualities become more subtle on those records that (at first blush, at least) tilt more toward orthodox dancefloor groove. A track like “In Turbine,” from Underspreche’s Invito Alla Danza Part 1, is minimal, electroacoustic drone rock (complete with warm organ hum) from a duo who are no strangers to pounding club jams. Noo is another revealing example: Their Optimo Music Disco Plate Five is all about 21st-century Italo awesomeness filtered through a scrappy, slacker basement vibe. Noo, it has to be noted, was founded by Christophe “Daze” Dasen and Sami Liuski, who hail from Switzerland and Finland respectively. You see, that’s a part of Twitch’s curatorial genius; he possesses a knack for teaming up with artists who, while they may not hail from the Scottish underground, create music that totally reflects its unique sensibility.Note: while my playlist is stacked with tracks from Optimo Music’s 2016 releases, listeners will also discover a handful of older gems. Truth be told, the label’s full catalog is never far from my turntable. For example, I probably jam Golden Teacher’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — a boisterous collision of future punk, acid, and all manner of tribal funkery released in 2013 — at least once a month. Like most underground music from Scotland, this stuff simply doesn’t age.

Source: Vulture, Piotr OrlovPiotr, a former colleague from Rhapsody, recently surveyed various purveyors of New York cool (Tim Sweeney, Star Eyes, Rich Medina, etc) for the quintessential list of New York party starters. Note that these arent songs by New Yorkers, per se, but rather tracks that the selected tastemakers felt were the key bangers. The results arent terribly surprising -- lots of DFA, Jay-Z, and Dip Set -- but its a really fun list with a lot of very enjoyable music. The Escort track "Cocaine Blues" is a satisfying mix of electro pop and nu-disco, with appropriately vaguely ironic lyrics about everyones favorite boogie powder, and the samba/afrobeat hybrid "Revolution Poem" is taken from a cool afro-beat compilation by Rich Medina and Bobbito that I wasnt familiar with. This article originally came out in June, but has gotten a second life thanks in part due to The Rub kicking off a new night at Williamsburg club Verboten with a mix inspired by Piotrs list. You can listen to the mix here.

In his intro for the "article," FACT editor-in-chief Joe Muggs makes an interesting distinction:

Well Indietronica, very pleasantly, isn’t really “a thing”. It’s not a scene, it’s not something with clubs or events dedicated to it, it’s not a marketing bracket or a pseudoacademic category, it’s never anything that people would think to say they’re into. It sometimes feels more an agglomeration of things that have fallen between the cracks of cool, an ad-hoc arrangement of dweebs, dorks and hobbyists all finding quiet corners of the music world where they can get on with their own tinkerings unmolested.

To an extent, "Indietronica" is a catch-all for both electronic music tracks with pop song structures, and, conversely, for indie pop tracks with electronic embellishments, both of which are made by musicians who are largely not within mainstream culture, but its a bit of a critical crutch that this list defines too broadly. Hot Chip and even Caribou definitely fit the mold, as where theres a lot more going on in tracks by clOUDDEAD or Sampha than just Indietronica. The latter belongs in the same electronic singer-songwriter tradition as James Blake (whose also included on the list), while cLOUDDEAD fall into the experimental hip-hop camp. Of course, you could also make the case that the point of bands are to resist easily classification altogether. Regardless, this is a really enjoyable and cohesive set of tracks.

Trip-hop took college campuses, or at least my dorm room, by storm in the mid-90s, and then very quickly fell out of view. A lot about the psych hip-hop genre still seems overcooked, underwhelming and redundant, but certainly not all of it. This is the sort of list that FACT usually knocks out of the park, and this is no exception. The list provides a good overview of the micro-genre, though well quibble with calling Meat Beat Manifesto trip hop. It also works great as a playlist as trip-hop songs have a uniformity of sound that translates well into this type of mix.Note: Some of the songs here simply arent available online, so we didnt quite make it to the full 50.

Throughout the fall of 2017, San Diego ambient post-rock architect Jimmy LaValle has overseen deluxe vinyl reissues of his back catalog on his own imprint, Eastern Glow Recordings. In the same industrious, self-sufficient spirit, he’s created a Dowsers playlist to celebrate fellow musical loners (and the partners with whom they commiserate). “Here’s a playlist of some of my favorite solo artists and duos. As a solo artist myself, I truly love discovering new (to me) music not made by a band. Multi-instrumentalists are kind of a musician’s musician at times, making music because it’s something we have to do. There’s a ton of material I’ve recorded over the years that’s never been released and it’s because I’m constantly creating. I admire these artists and songs, and it also reflects what I’m really currently into instrumentation-wise.”—Jimmy LaValle a.k.a. The Album Leaf

Khyam Allami, Ola Saad, and 47Soul are just some of the names associated with a rising generation of rockers, singer-songwriters, and electronic producers creating alternative music in the Middle East and North Africa. While Western news headlines tend to focus on the struggles of Syrian refugees and the protracted fight against ISIS, the past decade in the region has seen a paradigm shift in the fields of art and music. From Cairo to Tehran, artists have looked beyond borders and mass-market media sources, adopting wifi, social media and home production programs like Pro Tools to establish new networks of collaboration and distribution.Among the talents are the band 47Soul, who capture the spirit of Arab youth culture and speak to their Palestinian roots with their analog synthesizers, political lyrics, and Levantine dabke rhythms. There’s Khyam Allami, an artist of Iraqi descent who runs the influential label Nawa Recordings, who made avant-garde punk on the soundtrack for the 2015 Tunisian indie film As I Open My Eyes/À peine jouvre les yeux and explores the boundaries of Arabic oud with the avant-garde group Alif (which features members from Egypt and Lebanon). And there’s producers like Ola Saad, who engages with her surroundings through provocative ambient electronic music and sound art.There’s a long tradition of cross-cultural collaboration and avant-garde exploration in the Middle East and North Africa, but this music today is fundamentally unique — reflecting a time of conflict and global division but also of trans-national enrichment and creative possibility.

There’s a reason why Reddit users frantically threw together a playlist of the tracks that Aphex Twin spun during London’s Field Day just hours after the set ended. The U.K. producer named Richard James remains one of electronic music’s most cherished and mysterious figures. Part of this is due to his elusive persona, but there’s something inherently uncanny about the music he makes, whether the primeval futurism of 1992’s groundbreaking Selected Ambient Works 85-92, or the (relatively) more tuneful IDM classics such as “Windowlicker.” It’s easy enough to pick out precedents — a little bit of post-electronic jazz there, a touch of Eno’s ambient experiments here — but the final product remains opaque and uniquely his own. This singularity of sound and vision is one of the reasons that he’s developed the sort of fervent fan base that tracks his every movement.This playlist of songs is essential listening for those fans. The austere corporal march of Kamxilo’s “Splxcity” approximates a type of musical brutalism, and transitions nicely into the deconstructed synth stabs of “WARSZAMA” from Chino Amobi, the Virginia noise artist and co-founder of NON Records. The jarring, introductory portion of the set reaches an apex (of sorts) with the grinding gears of Shapednoise’s “Witness of a Heart Attack Death” before settling into a stretch of slightly disjointed electro funk that mirrors James’ own aesthetic. The set ends with a 90’s nostalgia trip: Underground Resistance’s “Nannytown”; a choice track from Squarepusher’s excellent ‘99 album, Selection Sixteen; and Alec Empire’s screeching Suicide-homage, “Everything Starts with a Fuck.”Still, listening to a playlist comprising tracks exclusively from the DJ set is an odd experience. As an unmixed, dangling historical artifact, experienced within the confines of headphones or home speakers, it’s not how or where James wanted the music to be heard. Conscious of this, your mind fills in some of the blanks: the 3D mapped light instillation; the entrances and exits of the segways; the sweat and flesh of the festival crowd. It’s an incomplete experience, but it’s also interactive, and feels less like you’re staring through a tiny peephole at a much larger world, and more like you’re parsing an ancient, oblique text. And you come away with that reading having heard, and discovered, some amazing music.

Few television shows in recent memory have managed to blend poignant social commentary with a delicate treatment of everyday lived experiences quite like Master of None, the brilliant Netflix comedy-drama created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang. For their second season, the creators have developed another 10 episodes that easily stand alone as individual vignettes. But in each instalment, music always takes center stage. Ansari and music supervisor Zach Cowies 69-song compendium mirrors this seasons emotional arc and sharp sense of humor, looking beyond the expected indie soundtrack choices for an eclectic array that includes John Fahey, Dorothy Ashby, and even the Vengaboys.Even if you havent watched this season, you can sense the extreme contrasts between episodes through this playlist—the neo-classical film scores of Ennio Morricone (which accompany the season’s black-and-white premiere) give way to the pristine Italo-disco of Ken Laszlo and Mr. Flagio that accompanies the technicolor vibrancy of the second episode. However, the playlists most sublime selections benefit from onscreen recontextualization. When Dev (Ansari) and Navid (Harris Gani) skip Ramadan prayer to attend a pork-filled barbecue to the tune of Poison’s “Nothin’ But A Good Time,” the track instantly morphs into their personal elegy for religious obedience. Strangely enough, it’s a very smart choice. Master of None has done much to rewrite the narrative surrounding the onscreen representation of people of colour, and Ansari and Cowie have discovered that mission extends to musical choices as well—regardless of how cringe-worthy they may seem. Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.