Electronic

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.

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.

If Reflections - Mojave Desert proves anything, it’s that Floating Points 2017 is essentially an ongoing conversation between two different musical beasts who may share DNA and musical influences, but who end up in very different places.Floating Points 1 is Sam Shepherd, the electronic-music producer and DJ responsible for early Floating Points classics like Nuits Sonores and Sparkling Controversy and who is still capable of going back to back-to-back with Caribou/Daphni and Four Tet on marathon DJ excursions.Floating Points 2 is a group of musicians that Shepherd put together to promote his excellent 2015 album Elaenia. It is this group that made Reflections - Mojave Desert, an album that has its origins in recordings made last year when Floating Points traveled to the Mojave Desert to rehearse in between U.S. tours. Struck by the desert’s unique ambience, the band recorded a soundtrack that would reflect their arid, alien surroundings and also accompany a short film made with director Anna Diaz Ortuño.Reflections, then, is very much a band record, based around the two lengthy central tracks on Silurian Blue and Kelso Dunes. The former is a sparse, atmospheric guitar and synth number that brings to mind emotionally charged, classically expansive Pink Floyd numbers like “The Great Gig in the Sky” or the soft-focus, sun-blushed ecstasy of Slowdive’s “Souvlaki Space Station”; the latter is 13 minutes of nervous guitar propulsion that rides the kind of militant Krautrock beat that NEU! or CAN made their own. Both, however, are burned through with a scorching ambience that suggests the desert-noir stylings of Calexico or John Phillips’ soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth.Around these central poles lie three songs that set the album’s atmosphere. Opener “Mojave Desert” is pure ambience, a soundscape that combines the noise of the wind and the rustling of bushes with woozy synth chords, like Brian Eno hooking up with Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack to an apocalyptic Western. Album closer “Lucerne Valley,” meanwhile, is three and a half minutes of beat-free melodic noodling that gently guides the listener back to real life after their dreamy desert excursion.For all that it is a band record, Reflections isn’t entirely without electronics. The brilliant “Kites” sees Shepherd take a synth loop for a walk; as a swinging super-directional microphone captures the valley’s natural reverb, the loop gradually increases in speed, ending up as a wonderfully simple, atmospheric piece of electronics that recalls early Tangerine Dream.Reflections - Mojave Desert should not be confused for a formal follow up to Elaenia, an album that topped many end-of-year lists in 2015. It’s more jammy, less sculpted, more concerned with atmospherics and ambience than melodies, and you can feel the warm desert grit up your nostrils throughout. But as an example of what Floating Points the band can do with the bit between their teeth and an environment to inspire them, this album is hugely worthwhile.

By the early 90s, Brian Eno’s cachet was at its apex. I caught up to him the year he did more than produce U2’s best album, Zooropa: I discovered Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger, found a Nice Price cassette version of Another Green World, and bought James’ Laid. Then Roxy Music beckoned. Eno was right, as usual: Roxy recorded its best music upon his departure. Through four wonderful vocal albums—unmatched in their admixture of formal invention and gonzo humor—and a beguiling series of collaborations with Robert Fripp, Cluster, Harold Budd, John Cale, and others, Eno has approached rock with a dilettante’s amateurish glee and a sophisticate’s subtlety, bound only by the limits of his curiosity.So vast as to seem forbidding, his catalog is full of unexpected diversions, uneven by definition. I rank his 1990 Cale collaborationWrong Way Up with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Before and After Science but find the Jon Hassell co-recording Fourth World, Volume 1: Possible Musics a vaporous bore, while Discreet Music and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks are never far away from my stereo, notably around bedtime.I’m happy with my list: a compulsive miscellany. The songs include the collaborations mentioned above, plus a couple excellent ones from David Bowie’s Outside and a standout from his second Karl Hyde project. The differences between “songs” and “collaborations” is elastic though.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

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.

From Motown to Eminem, Detroit has long been a music city. For a certain, electronically minded type of music lover, though, Detroit will forever mean techno, a genre that (with apologies to Kraftwerk) originated in the Motor City around the turn of the ‘80s. Even now, seeing “Detroit” alongside a DJ’s name on a club line-up is like a guarantee of quality for techno fans, who recognize the city’s unparalleled history in tough, danceable electronic music.THE ORIGINATORSFor all its panoply of talent, Detroit techno will always be associated with the Belleville Three, a.k.a. the three Belleville High School friends—Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May—who helped give birth to techno with their groundbreaking electronic productions and DJ skills. Today, all three are still among the most respected DJs and producers in the global electronic-music community and, in 2017, formally began working together officially under the Belleville Three moniker, playing at the Movement festival in Detroit.And yet the history of Detroit techno goes back even further—Derrick May once compared the music to "George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator.” Another key influence could be found closer to home: Richard Davis, a Vietnam vet from Detroit who produced the stunning electronic soundscape “Methane Sea” in 1978.Atkins met Davis in 1980 and the duo formed Cybotron, whose 1981 debut single “Alleys of Your Mind” is sometimes referred to as the first techno record, in one of those late-night arguments that is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. (“Shari Vari” by Detroit electro group A Number of Names is another popular contender.) Cybotron’s third single, 1983’s “Clear,” is their classic cut and has been widely sampled, most notably by Missy Elliott on “Lose Control.” Atkins left Cybotron in 1985 over musical differences: Davis wanted to pursue a rock direction, while Atkins wanted to further develop Cybotron’s electro sound, a direction that was evident on Atkins’ first solo release, the brilliantly dark drive-time thrust of “No UFO’s” under the Model 500 name.Atkins may have been the first of the Belleville Three to release a record but it was (arguably) Derrick May who first produced something we would recognize as techno today, with Atkins’ productions hewing closer to electro. May’s debut as Rhythim Is Rhythim, “Nude Photo” (a collaboration with Thomas Barnett), was a hugely sophisticated record that sounded a step removed from anything else coming out of Detroit thanks to its jazzy syncopation. But it was Rhythim Is Rhythims second record, the yearning, iconic “Strings of Life,” that really lifted the lid on Detroit techno internationally. “Strings of Life” is still regarded by many as one of the greatest techno tracks of all time.Saunderson, meanwhile, is known for two very different aspects of his productions: The classic sound of Inner City, which married techno-influenced production to house vocals, and the harder-edged sound of his various Reese/E-Dancer/Tronik House productions, whose tough bassline style influenced the nascent jungle and rave scenes in the UK.

THE SECOND WAVEThe Belleville Three (alongside Blake Baxter, Eddie "Flashin" Fowlkes, and Chez Damier) were the key names in the first wave of Detroit techno, which ruled the late 1980s. The new decade then saw the emergence of the second wave of Detroit techno, which would be dominated by Underground Resistance (and its various constituent members) and Derrick May protege Carl Craig. Suburban Knight, a.k.a. James Pennington, was the link between the two waves. His first record, 1987’s “The Groove,” was released on Derrick May’s Transmat label, as was his classic “The Art of Stalking,” a lurching, rock-hard extraterrestrial groove still capable of slaying dance floors to this day. He later joined Underground Resistance.Carl Craig, Stacey Pullen, and Octave One aside, the Underground Resistance collective would at one time play host to pretty much all the key artists and DJs of Detroit’s second wave. UR was formed in the late 1980s by Jeff Mills and former studio musician "Mad" Mike Banks, and its members included James Stinson and Gerald Donald (later of Drexciya and, respectively, The Other People Place and Dopplereffekt), Robert Hood, DJ Rolando, and Claude Young.UR’s own music, released largely on the Underground Resistance and Red Planet labels under a variety of names, manages to mix seat-of-your pants insurrectionary techno (see: “The Seawolf”) with sky-scraping electronics (“Inspiration,” or The Martian’s “Star Dancer”), barn-storming gospel house (Galaxy 2 Galaxy’s “First Galactic Baptist Church”), and jazz (Galaxy 2 Galaxy’s “Hi-Tech Jazz,” a song that does more than any other in the history of electronic music to rehabilitate the saxophone solo). In a neat squaring of the circle, Underground Resistance would later remix Kraftwerk’s 1999 single “Expo 2000,” which evolved into “Planet of Visions,” a song that would be a staple of Kraftwerk’s live set in years to come.UR’s former members’ work also demands to be explored. Jeff Mills remains one of the biggest names in techno thanks to his thundering, loop-based productions and occasional excursions into theoretical ambience, as well as his exhilarating chop-and-change DJ skills. (He would also work with Mike Banks and Robert Hood as X-101.) Drexciya’s mixture of aquatic electro, vocal hooks, and Afrofuturist mythology has made them one of the most revered names in electronic music (with their career tragically curtailed in 2002 when James Stinson died). Robert Hood essentially invented minimal techno with his ground-breaking 1994 release Minimal Nation, a record that still sounds menacingly futuristic over two decades later. And DJ Rolando (as The Aztec Mystic) would give UR a global hit record in 1999 with the I’m-not-crying-it’s-just-dry-ice-under-my-contact-lenses, string-led revelry of “Knights Of The Jaguar.”For all that, if there is one artist that sums up the brilliant, emotive technological innovation of second-wave Detroit it is probably Carl Craig, an artist, DJ, and label boss who has produced everything from Kraftwerk-ian synth classics (“Science Fiction”) to chilling ambience (Psyche’s “Neurotic Behavior”) to screaming house bangers (Paperclip People’s “Throw”) to breakbeat elegance (69’s “Desire”) to proto drum ‘n’ bass (Innerzone Orchestra’s “Bug in the Bass Bin”).

THE NEXT GENERATIONDetroit’s influence is such that its classic artists continue to dominate the techno landscape today. But this hasn’t stopped a new generation of local producers coming through, post-second wave. The best known of these are probably Moodymann and Theo Parrish, although neither are exactly new, having debuted in the ’90s, while much of their work nods more towards deep house, disco, and jazz than straight-up techno.New generations of talent continue to emerge from Detroit, sometimes springing, quite literally, from the loins of the pioneers: Robert Hood is now working with his daughter, Lyric, in the wonderful Floorplan, while Kevin Saunderson’s sons Dantiez and DaMarii Saunderson DJ as The Saunderson Brothers, alongside their solo careers. Elsewhere, the raw, funked-up techno of Omar-S, the UK bass-leaning Kyle Hall, and the wonky jazz productions of Jay Daniel give further proof of the incredible wellspring of electronic-music talent in the Motor City.SaveSave

In 2015, Caribou famously posted a 1,000-track mixtape that served as a journal of his musical discovery over the past few years. It’s a lot to digest, to say the least. The Canadian electronic artist has omnivorous taste, for one. New Wave freakout king Gary Wilson bumps up against a particularly eerie track from jazz icon Nina Simone. There’s disco legend Cerrone on the groovy “Got to Have Loving” and also lots and lots of Velvet Underground (of course). You don’t have to make sense of any of it, of course, but, if you squint just so, you can piece together Caribou’s own aesthetic roots.The squiggling synth lines, and bouncy beat of “E.V.A” from Moog pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey reflects Caribou’s own tendency to reconcile more experimental strains of electronic music with an overarching pop sensibility, while the hanging-off-the-bone, mandela hip-hop of Madlib is a natural fit for an artist who started his career focused on lo-fi psych sounds. The delicate, understated intensity of Caribou’s most recent album, 2015’s Our Love, is captured in tracks from Radiohead, Koushik, and Shuggie Otis, and house and disco-derived sounds figure in heavily—in addition to Cerrone, the playlist also contains Sylvester, Derrick May, Moodymann, Larry Heard, and Chez Damier—which tracks nicely with Caribou’s own pivot towards more dance-friendly beats for his Daphni project.The original YouTube playlist was nearly one hundred hours of unsequenced music (in the note that came with the mix, Caribou suggests that it be listened to on shuffle), and it’s obviously sprawling. Even in this slightly abridged Spotify version—presumably, the 204 tracks not included here weren’t cleared for digital music services, sadly—it’s easy to get lost. Ultimately, this feels more like a radio station than a “mixtape” or a playlist. The listener lets it spin passively in the background, occasionally swooping in to figure out who exactly is doing what. The contextual editorial information that Spotify offers comes in handy—YouTube provides no similar key, and you’re constantly flitting between Google and YouTube to discover who the hell is Asa-Chang (a Japanese percussionist and leader of the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra) or Hal Blaine (Phil Spector’s go-to drummer). But this isn’t really an academic course as much as it is a party, or a celebration of the scattershot, sublime aesthetic of one of indie music’s most vital and unpredictable artists.

At the turn of the millennium, it seemed unlikely that an aging record nerd hollering about his favorite bands could possibly become the vessel for an entire angst-ridden generation—but that was before we had Sound of Silver. When James Murphy released his second full-length as LCD Soundsystem 10 years ago, he revealed the deeply sentimental roots behind all the dance-punk chic, the hopelessly melancholic critic who, no matter how many albums he might amass in his enormous collection, still can’t escape the simple truths of getting older and saying goodbye to all your friends. Though their short-lived retirement is now over, with the arrival of their first new album in seven years, it wouldn’t be LCD Soundsystem without gazing longingly towards the past. So we’ve taken the occasion to unpack James Murphy’s shining moment, the weepy behemoth of a dance record that is Sound of Silver.Murphy’s influences are as vast as they are easily traceable (all one has to do is look up the lyrics to the climactic band-listing outburst of “Losing My Edge”), yet the real magic of the album is how confidently it inhabits its own skin, effortlessly mixing the mechanic rhythms of Kraftwerk, the starry-eyed synth-punk of New Order, and the reckless rock worship of Lou Reed into something as comfortable in the club as it is at home on a turntable. Its endlessly looping electronics nod to the simple majesty of Detroit techno as well as the prickly brain-funk of the Talking Heads, yet what’s fascinating about Murphy is the way that he turns his love of these disparate artists into his own defining quality. LCD Soundsystem is a band of fanboys and fangirls playing for devotees of their own, celebrating the act of loving music and creating something entirely theirs in the process. Sound of Silver was the moment where Murphy’s band ceased to be a loving tribute to the many shapes of punk and New Wave, and became a fully-armed dance unit for the 21st century. Without further ado, we present our mix of the many sounds the fuelled one of our era’s most distinguishing voices.

Home to international stars like Hugh Masekela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and, um, Die Antwoord, South Africa has always been known for its music. Even during the days of apartheid, this country of 55 million people was a hotbed for pop, jazz, choral, and dance music. While Paul Simon worked with South African musicians back in the 1980s to make his career-defining album Graceland, these days it’s artists and label heads like Kode9 who are looking to the country amid the rising global popularity of gqom, the moody, broken-beat take on South African house that was first divined with the help of cracked Fruity Loops setups in the coastal city of Durban.Piotr Orlov, a writer for NPR, the New York Times, and The Guardian among others, has done an admirable job at offering an overview to a scene that is still largely unfamiliar to American audiences. A former editorial lead for now-defunct MTV streaming service Urge, Piotr intimately understands the playlist format, mixing a DJ’s ear for flow and sequencing with a musicologist’s vast knowledge and a critic’s natural discernment. Compiled after a recent trip to the country, the resulting playlist is illuminating, enjoyable, and erudite, and offers a glimpse at some of the best music coming out today.Highlights from the 24-track, 2.5 hour playlist (titled after the Xhosa word for South Africa) include Floyd Lavine’s smooth house jam “Saint Bondon” and Big Nuz’s kwaito party banger “Tsege Tsege”—the latter of which evokes pure sex with its shaking, moving, plucking, and pumping beat. There’s also more out-of-the-box fare, like Gumz’s unbelievably funky “Yoruba Brass” as well as “B U,” a cut from Okzharp & Manthe Ribana’s well-received Tell Your Vision EP, released last year on Hyperdub.Mzansi: Now! is bracketed by two tracks from the award-winning songwriter Thandiswa Mazwai, who began her career in the late ’90s as frontwoman of the kwaito pioneers Bongo Maffin. Just as nice is “Anonymous in New York,” a Mingus-y composition by the emerging jazz combo Skyjack. Alas, not every track on the collection is a winner—Thor Rixon and Alice Phoebe Lou’s twee electro-pop number “Death Pt II” lacks the charm of Rixon’s wonderfully weird “Fuk Bread” from 2015, for example.Still, there’s enough good stuff here to keep you engaged, and send you digging for more. And, ultimately, that’s the goal of a playlist that surveys scenes still largely foreign to its target audience. Mzansi: Now! makes a great case for both modern South African music and the professional curator class.

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.