10 Of The Best Releases In Electronic Music This Year
It was a good year for electronic music. Artists like Skrillex and Fred... reinventing pop music using modern production techniques, experimentalists like Lee Gamble pushing boundaries, leveraging years of advances in artificial intelligence, creativity and innovation are everywhere.
So much creativity, in fact, that compiling a list of ten versions was no easy task. Here we present a selection of ten of the most amazing, imaginative and innovative electronic albums and songs of the year. If you're looking for inspiration for your next project, this would be a great place to start.
Oneohtrix will not beat the clock again.
Daniel Lopatin has come a long way in the 15 years since his debut: he's the man who released Dawn FM, The Weeknd's multi-million dollar, platinum-selling streaming series, avant-garde steamwave synths on a secret indie label.
True to its experimental approach, its breakthrough into the mainstream is a major achievement, but its star is not just his solo work, but the balance achieved by a producer known as Oneohtrix Point, Never, who appeared as a guest. Plus twenty critically acclaimed films and collaborations with Charli XCX, Arca, Rosalia, Nine Inch Nails and many more.
Once again, Lopatin's latest and tenth studio album represents a dialogue with the 41-year-old artist, bringing his teenage musical influences (post-rock, shoegaze, modern classical music) into a strange, dissonant world. Strings, plucked guitars and AI-generated vocals. This rich and left turn forms the meat of the album, as always, Lopatin is not known for working with synthesizers.
No matter what you add to his expansive sound, it remains the most compelling aspect of any Oneohtrix project: a brilliant arrangement of broken horns from the instrument and the talent to sing them, combining beauty and bass in a meaningful arrangement. . . Magnificent in hospitality and authenticity.
Tirzah - Trip9love...???
In the 10 years since the release of her debut EP, London-based singer Tirzah has found a fruitful creative partnership with former school friend and producer Micah Levy. Tirzah's understated, soulful vocals pair perfectly with Levi's brutal beats, which has never been more evident than in their latest and greatest collaboration.
It's not easy, but it takes real expertise to create such balanced music.
Trip9 Love everywhere...??? They hiss and distort, while a broken piano loop fights for space with booming drums and a crunching metal hi-hat. It's a testament to the skill of the musicians involved that it doesn't sound like a jumbled mess, and that it doesn't avoid Tirzan's often wandering vocal lines. It's not easy, but it takes real expertise to create such balanced music.
Interestingly, the same piano sounds and drum machine patterns pop up multiple times throughout the 11 tracks, each time subtly distorted or modulated slightly differently, making the album seem like a variation on a theme: openers F22 and Promise, for example, are almost identical in function but Amazingly different emotions.
These repetitions appear on Beatless or looser songs, including the album's highlights, notably the distorted piano ballad The Love. General Trip9love...??? It's the hardest album the duo has ever made, but it's also very rewarding.
Barker - Not specified
Berlin producer Sam Barker's 2019 album Utility was famous for completely avoiding one of the genre's key words, offering a pioneering approach to techno: The Kick.
For his latest EP, Barker turned the idea on its head, creating four tracks built around synthesized instruments originally designed for Kick Designs. Sonically, it's a vague concept: although four tracks deliver a rhythmic performance, you can't take the concept for granted.
But the results are just as creative. Birmingham Screw is a high-energy distorted modulation stutter, with a catchy sustain that transitions from a strummed rhythm to a soulful, resonant soundscape.
Tumba - leaves
Club pioneers and acclaimed electronic label Hesle Audio expand their horizons with Petals this year with Jordan producer Tomba, a four-track EP. Hessle's signature music is understated, pushing boundaries and defying expectations. The EP explores elements from the Middle East, combining microtonality and Levantine rhythms with the structure of contemporary club music.
The opener features our pick Estibatan, a club-ready traditional Jordanian wedding song. Filled with a wonderful sub-tense, the song is built around a matching accordion riff and crisp, precise melodies that weave into a melodic and melodic middle. Now there is a wedding we want to attend.
Skrillex, Flowdan and Fred again - Rumble
Produced in collaboration with Mashinen's ever-jolly producer Fred Again, Skrillex's Rumble is lean, mean, minimal trap and dubstep that revolves around bass and vocals - everything else is just window dressing. The accessories here have to go to Flodan, who clearly understands what it takes to transform a great piece of equipment into something that absolutely destroys the dance floor.
There are inevitable comparisons to The Bug's Skang, another of Flodan's mid-period club instrumentals, but where the former leans towards the dark, smoky atmosphere of dub music, Rumble takes on a dopamine EDM track, Flodan's style. Security Bar, High Volume and Detailed Sound Design.
Holly Waxwing - New Shepherd
A stunning adventure in sound design, Holly Waxwing's The New Pastor is one of the best (and weirdest) things we've heard all year. Hard to categorize, Wakewing's music can best be described as bubbly IDM: frenetic patches of staccato rhythms filled with sweet, ear-pleasing vocals, as if the producer were running through the bank of his pre-production. It was heard. . At lightning speed
One can only imagine the hours that went into filming this amazing collection of zap, thump, stab, scream and poop.
The album found a good home on PC Music, a label known for combining a fun and unconventional approach to electronica with 90s pop and trance. Waxwing fits into this tradition, albeit a very unique one: the most fitting comparison to the album would be with artists who strongly resist comparison. Iglooghost is a project with producers Visible Cloaks and Proc Fiscal, who harness the creative power of computer music to create the unimaginable.
At its core, the new Pastor is a composed record: imagine the hand-twisting hours that go into creating a collection of picks, beats, hits, stabs, screams and bloops that produce an impressive sonic palette. . Tracks like Meridian and Soft Corner invite the listener on a sonic safari of sorts, unleashing timbre clusters tuned to mimic the deep pleasure centers of ASMR.
But for all its complexity, the music is surprisingly satisfying and fun in its experimentation: it can be bold and strange, but also a little fun. Offering the best of both worlds, New Pastor puts you in a world of its own.
Clark - the dog
What's new from Chris Clark: With ten albums and more than two decades of work in progress, he's one of modern electronic music's most prolific artists. So it's no surprise that Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is a fan. Yorke served as "executive producer" on Clarke's last album, and although she sings on the treatment, it's Clarke's voice that draws here.
A drummer, programmer and synth wizard, Clark is not known for singing his own material, and Sass Dog is the first album to feature his own voice. It's a bold move, but he pulls it off brilliantly, and his talkative, poised timer pairs so well with the deep-touch beats, breakdowns and haunting synth lines that you'll wonder why he didn't do it sooner.
Lee Gamble - Model
The pros and cons of AI technology is one of the hottest topics in the music world, but with all the debate over the validity and dangers of AI, it's easy to imagine creative applications and how they fit into the panorama. The music itself. However, in recent years, innovators like Patton and Holly Herndon have helped show that these new technologies can be powerful tools for experimental musicians.
British Hyperdub regular Lee Gamble is the latest artist to make the list. A proponent of deconstructing the basic structures of electronic music, Gamble's latest album, Models, is based on synthetic sounds created by feeding short sung melodies into a series of neural networks.
Xith c Spray falls into a strange, haunted valley that falls somewhere between a Lana Del Rey video game fantasy remix and a fake.
The results are largely linguistically unrecognizable: the album's print game likens the score to the dreaminess of Elizabeth Fraser or the self-paced mutterings of Soundcloud Rap. Similarly, the result is to hear an emotional voice in an often unspoken language; Even if the meaning is not clear, the desired feeling cannot be lost.
Sometimes the source material used is quite obvious. Xith c Spray falls into a strange valley of wonder somewhere between Lana Del Rey's video game remix and bootleg. Essentially, Gamble lets these vocals serve as the star of the show, backing them up with sparse, dynamic synths, sampled guitars, and digital reverb textures.
Thanks to this controlled production, the results are often as impressive as they are technically interesting. Models is an album that can be replayed even after it loses its initial novelty.
Nikki Nair and Hudson Mohake - Raising the Roof
We love unexpected collaborations. This surprising relationship brings together Scottish legend Hudson Moha and Atlanta music producer Nicky Nair. The result of their combined talents is Set the Roof, a three-song EP, which is the first in a series of joint efforts.
Lately, there's been honest analog techno and Demuro's paying homage to the French touch. We're fans of both, but it's the title track that connects us. Airy two-step drums and syncopated beats add to Tela Perks' vocal line-up to a dizzyingly sugary pace, but just when you think you've got it under control, the track doubles down on the attack, moving the key skyward. Session. Before returning the hole to the ground.
Courtesy of Sophia - Madras
When Sofia Cortes left La Perla in 2021, it was clear she was going elsewhere. Two years later, the Peruvian producer signed with Ninja Tuni and released a fantastic debut album that adds a lot of joy to the experience and celebration of dance music.
Although it contains hits (how music can make you feel good, the title pretty much sums it up), it's the album's deeper moments that stop us in our tracks. A tearful Vajkosi, paying tribute to the surgeon who saved his mother's life, floats clear vocals and vivid dialogue over a heavy house beat. It's an interesting example of dance music's ability to not only move our feet, but also make us move.