That Hot Chip's Joe Goddard and Greco-Roman's Raf Rundell are two burly, bearded dudes goes without saying, given the name of their duo. That they love dance music the way a five-year-old loves her teddy bear is obvious from the innocent, freewheeling charm of their debut LP. Over a rhythmic foundation of jacking house and U.K. garage, they bust out every trick in the house-party playbook, from pumping rave pianos to spoken-word encomia to the house heroes of yore, plus Caribbean and country detours. They may take the club seriously, but never themselves.
On their fourth album, Simian Mobile Disco leave behind their peppier electro-pop leanings to dig deep into a mostly instrumental set of moody, melodic house and techno. Their analog setup yields a rich, throbbing sound that occasionally nods to late '80s dancefloors, but they're less concerned with retro shtick than enveloping, immersive grooves that seem to stop time itself. "Put Your Hands Together" and "Your Love Ain't Fair" capture the club at its sweatiest (and swooningest); "Cerulean" and "Interference" prove SMD's mastery of their machines.
On his second album in less than a year, Ital radically expands his vision of hardscrabble, homespun dance music. It's still outsider as anything, drawing from house, techno, juke, electro pop, and breakbeat to create an amorphous, ultra-vivid fusion that overflows conventional genre boundaries; it has as much in common with noise (whether of the Cabaret Voltaire or Prurient varieties) as club music. But it's never difficult for the sake of being contentious. Raw, unhinged and alive with both ideas and visceral oomph, it's a reminder of dance music's ability to innovate and surprise.
Hamburg's Smallville label has a distinct sound. It's deep house distilled, with liquid pianos drizzled over artfully stripped-down drum machines, and you get the sense that the label's artists like to push their sound forward one miniscule variation at a time. So it stands to reason that Smallpeople, featuring label co-founders Julius Steinhoff and Just von Ahlefeld, would come with a hyper-distilled essence of the in-house sound. There are just enough skulking riffs to engage the brain in these hushed, hypnotic club tracks, which otherwise go down as easy as a nightcap, or morning coffee.
Vancouver's Konrad Jandav may take his alias from Juan Atkins' techno classic, but his music sifts through a much wider array of styles. It feels at times like an archaeological excavation of electronic futurisms, plunging through layer after layer: spongy '90s ambient, Detroit's hardscrabble electro-funk, Suicide's analog blues, Neu!'s motorik chug, and on down to a bedrock of early computer music. Originally released on cassette, it finds a wider release on Spectrum Spools, the synth/psyche imprint run by Emeralds' John Elliott.
Exo opens with a short track called "Imax" that samples the introductory music for the wide-screen cinema format -- a fitting reference for a duo inspired by what it calls "high-def culture." Like 2010's Giza, the record plants its flag somewhere between Aphex Twin and the Suspiria soundtrack, with acid techno and corroded breakbeats cloaked in horror-core dread. True to their media obsessions, their sonics are positively supersized, with beats crunching and bass rumbling like the special effects of a Hollywood blockbuster.
After four years of relative inactivity, Strategy (Portland, Oregon's Paul Dickow) returns with his finest album yet, effortlessly drawing together the elements that have always animated his music -- dub, Krautrock, techno, noise -- into an engrossing, organic whole. There are '60s-influenced psych-pop cuts like "Sugar Drop"; a heavy Afrobeat groove runs through "Objects of Desire" and "Baby Fever." The bubbling "Friends and Machines" might be disco for Deadheads, while "Saturn's Day" is a kind of dub blues. It makes sense that the album, his fourth, is self-titled; it feels like a rebirth.
Petar Dundov's sophomore album finds the Croatian producer continuing his mission to rescue trance from its kandi-raver connotations. Drawing from Krautrock, ambient, techno and disco, he sculpts layers of synthesizer into immersive, slowly evolving soundscapes that reference both Vangelis and Carl Craig. The album's sequencing flows as smoothly as the individual tracks, rewarding both deep and distracted listening, but "Silent Visitor" is the clear highlight, bubbling with energy and unusual tone color.
Like Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, The 2 Bears and SBTRKT, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs -- aka Oxford, England’s Orlando Higginbottom -- walk the knife’s edge between ebullient pop and classic club styles like deep house and U.K. garage, and his debut album is an appropriately dizzying display of balance. Track after track, his melodies are as catchy (and as fetching) as they come, rendered in a quavering falsetto and nestled in a bed of ruffled synths. His supple, bass-heavy grooves, imbued with the perfect sense of swing, distill dance-music history into something irresistibly now.
On their first album since 2010's Does It Look Like I'm Here?, Cleveland's Emeralds take a step back from their trademark billowing drones and turn their ears to sounds you don't often hear in experimental-music circles -- the wailing guitar solos of '80s soundtracks, or the proggy fusion of Jan Hammer. They're using drum machines for the first time, lending a synth-pop feel, and Mark McGuire's guitar solos are more emotive than ever, dipping into FM radio territory. But the title speaks for itself; the album is all about enjoying nostalgia's pinch, and then moving beyond.
Is it noise, or is it techno? Does it matter? Providence's Ren Schofield uses techno's conventional trappings and structures, coaxing throbbing, shuddering beats from his drum machine and rudimentary electronic devices, but his squalls of feedback and overdrive have more to do with the underground noise scene, where industrial electronics meet free-improv sprawl. Similar in feel to his first album (also called LP), this record is even heavier, rendering the raw sonics of influences like Drexciya and Pan Sonic in even more brutalist tones. It's lo-fi but high-impact.
Less than a year after his Six Cups of Rebel, Norway's Lindstrom returns with yet another album, his fourth, of brilliantly hued, prog-imbued, synth-soaked disco funk. Smallhans isn't quite as proggy as its predecessor, which could make Godley & Creme sound staid by comparison; its six tracks are more keenly focused on the dancefloor, with stabbing keyboard riffs and electro-funk bass over chunky machine grooves. At its most transcendent, it matches the offworld bliss of Lindstrom's "I Feel Space," re-imagining trance as an offshoot of Italo disco.
Taking his name from a Residents song, Hello Skinny (London's Tom Skinner) spins together a dizzying mixture of dubby post-rock, jazz and genre-agnostic electronic music on his absorbing debut album. The title track, featuring clarinets and a blistering sax solo from Shabaka Hutchings, sounds like Talk Talk and Massive Attack flirting with free jazz; "Crush" approximates the loosey-goosey house of Four Tet and Daphni, while "Me and My Lady" dips into Morricone-tinged Americana. It's a lush, deeply listenable album of experimental music that poses as many questions as it answers.
Deep, droning ambience is probably not the first thing you think of when considering old jungle mixtapes, but that's precisely what Lee Gamble has rescued from his own collection of moldering cassettes. Released on Berlin's excellent PAN label, this 27-minute mini-album is a masterpiece of re-appropriation, but it would be just as affecting if you didn't know the backstory. Pitched-down bell tones, like chopped-and-screwed Sonic Youth, overflow into a slurry of tape hiss and delay; the eerie tones of processed cymbals and sub-bass quiver in the fringes like the ghosts of rave past.
The rising British DJ Maya Jane Coles proves more than just her versatility on this 70-minute mix, which spans electronica, deep house, bass music and techno; she shows a unique point of view, an increasing rarity for dance-music DJs. Favoring dark atmospheres, gripping rhythms and an air of sensual melancholy, she excels at careful mixes that combine tracks into something far more than the sum of their parts; her blends are as urgent as they are subtle, and she wields even well-known tracks in ways you'd never expect. It's a refreshing reminder of true DJ artistry.
In this DJ mix, Levon Vincent turns London's Fabric club into an outpost for his brothers from the boroughs -- Joey Anderson, DJ Jus-Ed, DJ Qu, Black Jazz Consortium and Anthony Parasole. These New Yorkers' unique take on techno is ominous, darkly mechanical and yet somehow sensual at the same time. Drawing from New York house and Basic Channel, they've come up with a tough, stern sound where subtlety reigns, and Vincent's careful style of mixing plays up its delicate drama, as muted machine rhythms go corkscrewing through a haze of glancing chords and dub delay.
Chicago's footwork music, an heir to the city's ghetto house scene, is famously fast, cheap and out of control, with ribald vocal fragments looped over rapid-fire hi-hats and staccato samples. Footwork pioneer Traxman's Da Mind has that frenetic, off-the-cuff quality: "Callin All Freaks" is essentially Miami bass in a rock tumbler. But he also pushes footwork's polyrhythms to dizzy new heights, on the mbira-sampling "Footworkin on Air," and his sonic curiosities take him from circus music to AC/DC to Ofra Haza to Ronnie Laws.
On his debut album, Barcelona's John Talabot builds upon the Balearic house foundations of his earlier singles without ever getting tripped up in retro fealty or tropical affect. Instead, he lets his loops lead him towards pop's ballooning outline, hovering somewhere in the middle between hypnotic disco and full-on sing-along. Madrid's Pional sings and co-writes two of the LP's strongest songs, but the whole thing's meant to be listened to in one go, from dusky rainforest chants to all-out electro-pop reverie. This edition includes additional singles and remixes.
Contemporary dance music is obsessed with retro styles, and I:Cube is no different: His 2012 album "M" Megamix borrows tricks from Italo disco, acid, bleep techno, Spanish makina, Balearic electro-pop and '90s French house, and he wraps it all up into a seamless, 55-minute session that's reminiscent of the eclectic radio mixes of the late '80s. Deep electro-funk bass lines and slinky disco breaks play starring roles, but much of the action takes place in the wings, in a flurry of electronic squiggles and ambient brain-teasers.
Recorded in the 1970s at Bell Labs, Laurie Spiegel's The Expanding Universe is a Rosetta Stone uniting American minimalism, early computer music and the chiming harmonies of Appalachian folk in sumptuous, electronic fantasias in which seemingly repetitive structures slowly unspool in unpredictable ways. First released in 1980, the album's four original tracks ("Patchwork," "Old Wave," "Pentachrome," and "The Expanding Universe") are accompanied here by 15 sketches from the same period; they range from the droning "Wandering in Our Times" to the unexpected proto-techno of "Drums."
On his fourth album, London's Lukid builds upon his style of sample-heavy beat music by undoing it. Where his previous records displayed an obvious debt to Dilla and Dabrye, Lonely is murkier and more amorphous, with less emphasis on rock-tumbled breaks and a deeper, more diffuse swirl of synths, voices and spiky machine rhythms. The grayscale timbres and omnipresent veil of hiss are reminiscent of Lukid's occasional collaborator Actress; so is the all-pervasive air of mystery. Stern but also sensual, it's perfect for darkened rooms and horizontal listening.
Born and raised in Israel and long based in Amsterdam, Juju & Jordash have, since 2005, crafted long, spontaneous hardware sessions that invoke classic club music while reaching for the genre's lysergic outer limits -- part séance, part astral traveling. This, their masterpiece so far, goes far beyond traditional definitions of techno, folding in elements of dub, Krautrock and free improv; it's primitivist only in the sense that it taps forces seemingly beyond technology, language and conscious thought. It's sublimely psychedelic.
Daphni is the dance-floor Superman to Caribou's psych-pop Clark Kent. He brings the same wonderfully off-kilter approach to both projects, but the Daphni stuff is all muscle, whether it's the low-slung Afrobeat of "Ne Noya," the R&B-sampling "Yes, I Know" or the garage-gone-haywire squeals of "Springs." The huffing, pumping "Ye Ye," originally released on a split EP with Four Tet, is an instant classic of counterintuitive techno; "Jiao" is part Oni Ayhun, part St. Vitus' dance. It's not all so heavy, though; "Long" is a keening synth jam better suited for swooning than cutting rugs.
