Recently in Concentric Pleasures Category

Dance music isn't immune to photosynthesis; club culture itself follows a kind of annual rhythm. Every year, the summertime months give rise to an explosion of anthems, vocal tracks, Latin instrumentation and "Balearic" classics, so termed for their invocation of a mythical golden age on Ibiza.

Sure, it's kind of a cliché. But I'm not going to pretend I'm immune, either. If you're going to dance all night on a beach somewhere — something I don't do as often as I'd like, admittedly — you'd rather hear something uplifting. Even in Berlin, where I live, DJs rearrange their crates come June or July, setting aside wintry whoomp-whoomp-whoomp in favor of slower, sultrier tunes. (Then again, it might actually be easier to dance outdoors in Berlin than it is in many Mediterranean cities, given the number of riverside bars, clubs with walled-in gardens, and open-air parties in public parks — the city's reward for surviving yet another winter here.)

What is the essence of funk? It's really a know-it-when-you-hear-it proposition, always has been, no matter how it gets codified in degrees of squelch and swing. You gauge it the same way you determine the humidity of a summer day: not by the numbers on some barometer, but rather by how much it makes you sweat.

The artists I've assembled below don't have much to do with each other in terms of scene or sound. London's Actress and Ikonika both inhabit the far fringes of club music culture, and they both get booked to play the same sort of European festival — a kind of credentialed highbrow affair with dirty basements, characteristic of countries with high tax bases and a creative underclass — but their similarities end there. Ikonika belts out a blippy, double-time racket that sounds like dancehall played on robotic music boxes, almost relentlessly perky; Actress' muffled beats and high-frequency drones suggest a two-dimensional dystopia, a world squashed between glass. But they've both got that perverse, libidinal lurch.

London's Rusko represents dubstep's crossover contingent, the side that's broken the genre for amped-up American bros, Burning Man attendees and the A&R folks behind Britney, Rihanna and M.I.A. But his debut album moves past the cartoon menace, hopped up on hormones and '80s electro-funk flourishes, and wearing a manic grin.

Floating Points hails from London, too, but his slow-motion house epics look to Chicago and Detroit for inspiration; his sheer musicality sets him apart from scads of downbeat imitators. And L.A.'s Dam-Funk revives obsolete strains of R&B with bright keyboards and clunky drum machines, melting off the cheese with the heat he brings.

Read more on all five artists below, and listen to selected tracks on this Future Funk playlist.

There's recently been a spate of classic '90s electronica acts returning with new albums after considerable absences.

Funki Porcini, a member of trip-hop's second tier, just released On, his fifth album and his first since 2002, on his longtime home of Ninja Tune. Mark Van Hoen, who plied the dark underbelly of ambient and pop on records for Touch and Apollo in the '90s, has also just released his fifth LP, Where Is the Truth, for Berlin's City Centre Offices. And, most visibly, James Lavelle's UNKLE project is at it again: Where Did the Night Fall is his fifth album as well, excepting the B-sides comps and filler drills of which he's so fond.

Admittedly, grouping these together in part hews to the coy journalistic logic that three's a trend. I'm not trying to be reductive. "Nineties electronica" could mean lots of things, and there are plenty of legacy acts that never let up: just take Autechre, whose recent album Oversteps is their 10th album in 17 years and whose idiosyncratic style flies in the face of determinism by decade.

He's a tricky one, James Murphy. We knew that, of course—his whole career as LCD Soundsystem has been, in some ways, a performance of swaggering self-deprecation, a carefully calibrated balance of cool and anti-cool. He's an admitted provocateur, even telling one interviewer that he started playing disco in his DJ sets "as a way to make people more uncomfortable." It's probably not a coincidence that he appears on the album's sleeve looking a little like James Chance, hipster culture's orneriest antihero.

Their album's not out for another three weeks, and all ears are on LCD Soundsystem, whose forthcoming LP, This Is Happening, is currently streaming in full on the band's website. But that's hardly the only thing going on over at DFA HQ.

The label has turned out a number of strong singles this year, many of them either newcomers or from among the roster's lesser-known acts. We probably shouldn't take James Murphy at his word when he sings "You wanted a hit, but maybe we don't do hits": the Friendly Fires vs. Holy Ghost! EP is all about hits, with the two bands covering each others' respective anthems. But DFA doesn't stop there. Following in the tradition of the Juan MacLean's "Happy House" and Runaway's "Brooklyn Club Jam," the new crop of records bosters the label's bona fides as a source for house music that's rooted in tradition but still restless — and relevant.

The music of Deadmau5, Jamie Lidell and every other artist mentioned here is yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. If you don't have one, click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

If SXSW is where bands prove their mettle, Coachella is where they strut their stuff. The polo grounds are a place for victory laps, a sign of having made it to the coveted next level of indie-to-pop crossover, content in the knowledge that your backstage onlookers will be Hollywood's hippest stars and starlets, slumming it in the desert with PBRs in hand.

One thing that well-heeled backstage crowd can expect to see a lot of is screens — computer screens, to be precise. Laptops, long a fixture in electronic-music performance, have recently been making their way onstage in indie rock — most noticeably, with the recent "chillwave" phenomenon.

They're not quite ubiquitous yet — although reading Jon Pareles' festival wrapup, I had a brief, incredulous moment of thinking that even roots rockers Son Volt had gone all MacBook Pro on us, until I realized that he was writing about Son Lux. But we're getting there. Even Erykah Badu leaned on a laptop in her recent L.A. show. Then again, Badu was using one way back in 2008, as Sasha Frere-Jones noted in a fascinating New Yorker article addressing the role of P.C.s onstage.

Is this cause for alarm? Not necessarily. Sure, it's harder to pull off a dynamic performance when you're concentrating on a cursor. (The techno world has long buzzed with jokes about performers simply checking email on stage; one artist, Pimmon, even has a live album titled Electronic Tax Return where, at the end of the set of divine glitch and hum, an announcer shouts, "That was Pimmon! Pimmon! And while he was doing that, he launched his tax return electronically. And the good news is, he's getting $86 back.") But it's just as easy to look bored while drooped over a mic or a guitar. Hell, early in her career, Cat Power probably could have benefited from a laptop to distract her — maybe fire up a game of Tetris when the stage fright got too bad.

Here's a selection of artists that have incorporated laptops into their live sets — some for the better and some, perhaps, not so much. But it gives you a sense of the diversity of approaches possible. Some performers have created their own live-sampling software. Some are using the computer to extend and remix tracks on the fly. And others may just be logging onto TurboTax. At least Coachella falls after April 15.

Oneohtrix Point Never, Jonas Reinhardt and the other artists mentioned here are yours to listen to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. If you don't have one, click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about. For fans of synthesizer music — including yours truly — these are bountiful times.

While the majority of the electronic-music-making world has moved on to using laptops and software as instruments of choice — many of them, surely, will soon be cradling iPads onstage — a handful of artists have been plugging away with good old hardware, cabling together vintage analog synthesizers (as well as modern gear built on old-school designs) and teasing out remarkable sounds to expand on a tradition that stretches back through '90s ambient, progressive rock, Krautrock and academic computer music.

Goldfrapp, Bonobo and every other artist mentioned here are yours to listen to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

It's a great month for happy returns: Goldfrapp are back with Head First, a vivacious follow-up to 2008's subdued Seventh Tree, while Ninja Tune's eclectic mood-manipulator Bonobo returns from a four-year album break with Days to Come, easily his best record so far. Then, coming back just to say goodbye, the noise duo Yellow Swans signs off with a final album that's extreme only in its beauty.

Reunite with all those artists, and dive into Deadbeat's dub-techno mix opus Radio Rothko and more.

The music of many Trouble & Bass artists is yours to enjoy whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Helmed by the dashing, occasionally duck-tailed New Yorker Luca Venezia, the Trouble & Bass label is a crop of new-school upstarts with old-school attitude. Like Diplo's Mad Decent or the French label Institubes (for whom Venezia has recorded as Curses!), Trouble & Bass is all but singleminded in its pursuit of the adrenaline rush of the rave, but open-minded enough not to get bogged down in retro pieties. Drawing from acid house, electro and breakbeat hardcore as well as dubstep and kuduro, the Trouble & Bass catalog is an extended love letter to overdrive, sub-bass and swing.

To celebrate the label's 25th release, it has collected its highlights so far with the appropriately named Trouble & Bass 25th Release, a collection of shamelessly peaktime-focused jams with wobbly bass, diva vocals, piano riffs and rave sirens firing on all cylinders.

Check into detention with these creative miscreants, and listen to some highlights in the playlist below.

Isan, F.S. Blumm and every other artist mentioned here are yours to enjoy whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

If there's anything I've learned from living in Berlin, it's that Germans like a cozy home.

Windowsills spill over with ceramic figurines and plastic doodads; garden plots are festooned with painted gnomes and polka-dotted toadstools.

Whether you view such things as kitsch or charm, the pleasures of hearth and home rank highly here. (One of the first words I learned in my German course was Heimat, or "home.") Appropriately, the living room is the source of one of Germany's key pop-music movements.

Oval, SND and every other artist mentioned here are yours to enjoy whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Another essay on glitch music is probably the last thing the world really needs. Over the years, gallons of ink have been spilled regarding the phenomenon — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a lot of pixels have stacked up.

Glitch music, also sometimes known as microsound — a style that emphasizes clicks and pops, whirring micro-loops and other digital effects over traditional instruments, or even synthesizers and drum machines — had its heyday in the late '90s, and it just happened to coincide with the massive spread of the Internet throughout mass culture. It was perfect timing: at the same moment that we all were becoming accustomed to the modem's screech and gurgle, along came a form of music to match — all digital hiccups and dial-tone pings. Everyone had heard the stutter of a stuck CD player; now, musicians were using it as the basis for a new musical form.

Bomb the Bass, Dan Black and every other artist mentioned here are yours to groove to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Like Punxsutawney Phil, electronic music moves out of its dark, clubland burrow on a trio of albums that explore pop songwriting and daylight-friendly vibes. Bomb the Bass' Tim Simenon gets some help from co-producer Gui Boratto and a host of vocalists on the shimmering Back to Light; London's Dan Black fashions a new kind of bedroom Britpop fueled by hip-hop beats and a laptopper's insouciance; and Memory Tapes' Seek Magic explores chillwave's dizziest frequencies. Read on for reviews of those records and more, plus a playlist of key tracks.

Hot City, Julio Bashmore and every other artist mentioned here are yours to enjoy whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Various, Elevator Music
With dubstep giving way to "future garage" and "U.K. funky," bass music is mutating faster than language can keep up. Drawing from house, hip-hop and electronica, its beats are changing shape at a wicked pace; no wonder everyone from Rihanna to Ke$ha is tapping underground producers for a dab of bass-heavy cred.

The first in a new series from London's Fabric nightclub, Elevator Music surveys the jagged edges of the dance-music spectrum, a shifting field where jacking house, pummeling techno and broken dubstep variants are evolving at a frenetic pace. Don't let the title fool you: this compilation is anything but easy listening.

Scattered in with the heavy-hitters (rave kings Caspa & Rusko, dubstep-techno crossover Martyn, Planet Mu's irrepressible beat fanatic Starkey) is a host of up-and-comers like Hot City and Mosca, who are twisting the forms of U.K. garage back toward its roots in Chicago and New York house music. Borrowing syncopated percussion from Caribbean soca and generally favoring a broken, lurching feel, much of this is loosely related to the polyglot genre known as "funky," though the selections here — like the Hyperdub label's forays into funky — have a darker vibe than the style is generally known for.

Even if none of the above means anything to you — and sometimes it feels like you need a second home in the blogosphere just to keep up with this stuff — the rude beats and imaginative synth work are plenty immediate on their own. This is visceral, thrilling stuff.

Since half the fun of a compilation like this is using it as a stepping-stone to discovering new artists and new labels, I've created an extensive playlist interlacing tracks from Elevator Music with other tunes by the record's featured artists, along with still more related material. Check out the playlist here, and read on to learn more about some of the principal players.

Hot City
Testing the limits of time and geography, London's Hot City makes tunes that sound like dead ringers for the tracky, jacking house music that came out of Chicago and New York in the early '90s. Between the bashing 909 snares, canned string vamps and Todd Edwards-style vocal cutups, it may be a pastiche of bygone styles, but that doesn't make these sweaty club jams any less visceral. Further listening: Ike Release VS Hot City EP.

Julio Bashmore
Bristol's Julio Bashmore calls his music "an awkward mix of house, disco and dubstep." He may have the ingredients correct, but the results are far more elegant than he lets on, with synthetic bongos and tight drum programming laying out a trim, robotic funk with ample crossover appeal. (No wonder he's signed to Claude VonStroke's Dirtybird label.) Further listening: Julio Bashmore EP.

Untold
Cofounder of the advanced dubstep label Hemlock Recordings, Untold (Jack Dunning) is the maker of some of the slinkiest beats ever to grace a nightclub; his bass often feels like a solid mass, and he counterbalances it with arrays of spindly percussion, staccato synths and clipped vocal samples, giving his tracks the suspended motion of a Calder mobile. (Bizarre factoid: Untold recently remixed Ke$ha for a U.K.-only edition of "Tik Tok.") Further listening: "Test Signal" from ~scape's Round Black Ghosts compilation.

Octa Push
Lisbon's Octa Push only have a couple of records out, but they've already remixed Buraka Som Sistema featuring M.I.A.'s "Sound of Kuduro," and they count Thom Yorke among their fans. On their Elevator Music contribution, "Doctor Bayard," buzzy synth bass underpins rattling, polyrhythmic drum programming suggestive of a kind of acid house Afrobeat; stranger still is the way they turned sampled coughing into a kind of percussion instrument. Further listening: Debruit, "Let's Post Funk (feat. Om'Mas Keith)."

Shortstuff and Brackles
Between their collaborations and solo joints, the U.K.'s Shortstuff and Brackles have racked up records on some of the leading labels in left-field bass music: Ramp Recordings, Peverelist's Punch Drunk, Apple Pips and Planet Mu, among others. Here, Shortstuff's "Behave" resolutely refuses to do just that, with synth lines that hopscotch all over a rhythmic grid chalked in wild, angry strokes; the duo's "Melvin Blue" mellows out with airy vocal samples, chest-massaging bass and a nimble, 2-stepping groove. Further listening: Brackles, LHC and Rawkus EPs.

Mosca
I've only heard three tracks by Mosca so far, including "Gold Bricks, I See You," which appears here. But on that slim evidence alone I'm ready to suspect that he's a talent to watch out for this year. "Gold Bricks" rides an easygoing 2-step beat knitted together from bleeps, metallic pings, unvarnished drum machines and dozens of pointillistic vocal shots; its cadence bends wickedly at the knees, moving with a kind of scattershot precision. From his EP, "Square One" and "Nike" are even better. The former arrays zigzagging synths over a loping, tambourine-driven groove and sculpts weird shapes out of helium-filled vocals; the latter is a dazzling, 10-minute tour de force that begins with knuckle-dragging electro-dub before seamlessly morphing into a kind of rollicking, dub-techno/soca fusion. Roska, Julio Bashmore and L-Vis 1990 all contribute excellent mixes, as well. Further listening: Square One EP.

Martyn
The Dutch DJ and producer Martyn has gone in a few short years from making limber drum 'n' bass to lithe drum 'n' bass with a heavy dose of Detroit techno; "Friedrichstrasse" finds him digging into the guts of his grooves to draw out hidden melodies played out on tuned toms and plinking keys. Further listening: "Yet," from Tectonics' Tectonic Plates Vol. 2.

Vista
I know virtually nothing about Vista, but "Elixir" — a flicker of stuttering drum samples and kaleidoscoping chord stabs — makes me want to find out more. Like Joy Orbison, his take on dubstep and dub techno has an unusual lightness of step for either genre. Further listening: "Tek 9/Ukodus/Clientelle."

Om Unit
Bobbing along at less than 96 beats per minute, Om Unit's "Encoded" feels closer in spirit to the slow-motion disco of Mark E or the Revenge than anything from the dubstep spectrum; it follows a housey 4/4 throb, but everything between the kick drums is all slack collapse. Further listening: "Lightgrids/Lavender."

Starkey
Philadelphia's "street bass" king, Starkey, usually goes for the jugular, with video-game bleeps tracking the jabs and feints of bare-knuckled beats. But "Black Monolith" finds him unusually subdued, with mournful synth leads raining down over a rushing 4/4 rhythm and a buzzing, viscous bass rush; it wouldn't sound out of place as the climax in a Michael Mann film. Further listening: his Planet Mu album Ephemeral Exhibits; the recent single "Knob Twiddler."

Pantha Du Prince, the Juan MacLean and every other act mentioned in this article are yours to jam whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Last week I checked in on some of the bigger electronic releases of early 2010; this week I want to talk about some of the records that slip under the radar but are every bit as deserving of mention, promising plenty of surprises. Animal Collective's Panda Bear turns up on moody minimal techno from Berlin's Pantha Du Prince. L.A.'s hip-hop mainstay Stones Throw indulges a fetish for bleak, bleepy New Wave. Lukas Ligeti (the son of modernist composer Gyorgy Ligeti) continues his exploration of African music with his multinational ensemble Burkina Electric, while Ninja Tune's Jaga Jazzist stretch acid-jazz fusion to the breaking point. And if it's dancing you're after, your next house-party playlist isn't complete without four incredible new remixes of the Juan MacLean, taking the DFA housemeister into the peak hour and beyond.

Hot Chip, Massive Attack and every other band listed in this article are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

The new year gets off to a rousing start with a wave of new albums from across the electronic-music spectrum. Downtempo veterans Massive Attack, returning from a seven-year absence, are the elder statesmen of the bunch, and while Heligoland may not break much new ground, the smart collaborations and production help them hold their own. Far bolder is a pair of albums from two artists quickly becoming standard-bearers for left-of-center pop music. Hot Chip ease into a kind of gangly maturity with One Life Stand, while the Knife deliver their most avant-garde statement yet with Tomorrow, In a Year, the score to a Danish opera about the life of Charles Darwin. (Who else but Scandinavians would come up with that?) Charting a different path under the noonday moon, Norwegian disco duo Lindstrom and Christabelle treat us to icy, Italo-inspired electronic funk with their expansive Real Life Is No Cool. And Four Tet delivers his strongest solo effort yet with There Is Love in You, a delicious distillation of his interests in psychedelia and dance music. Read on for full reviews plus links to hear all these albums and more on Rhapsody.

Owl City, Postal Service, Brokencyde and every other band listed in this article are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Take a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Owl City’s Adam Young may be only 23 years old, but he’s already beginning to look old-fashioned. The Billboard-topping artist, who was still living in his parents’ basement when he began recording music, established the foundations of his fan base via MySpace. (Remember MySpace?) Modeled on the sparkly electro-pop of the Postal Service, Owl City might even be considered a kind of retro undertaking. OK, it’s a stretch, but just think: the Postal Service’s lone album came out in 2003. That’s eons ago, in Internet years. In any case, Owl City’s blend of electronic production, emo songwriting and Web 2.0 community-building signaled a major aesthetic shift for the American underage set, reuniting punks with synths and bringing together the whole Hot Topic Nation under a cheerfully post-everything umbrella.

Now, nipping at Young’s heels comes a slew of musicians raised on the diversified diet that substitutes for monoculture these days: dance pop, emo, crunk, trance. Some of them, like Owl City, stick mainly to a twinkly sort of shtick you might call “tweemo”; others take pages from Lil Jon and Insane Clown Posse. But no matter whether they come across as shrinking violets or smirking violent offenders, they love their synths and their Auto-Tune. Whether you call it emotronica, crunk-punk or crabcore, it’s a crazy new world of American synth-pop, one that even Suicide surely never imagined. Check out a playlist, and read on for a who’s who in the bleeps ‘n’ bangs scene.

Chillwave, glo-fi, "hypnagogic pop": in a year that many critics agree didn't provide much in the way of musical innovation, the main novelty in indie circles flew under names that sounded awesome but meant … well, what the hell did they mean, exactly?

The music -- made by bands with evocative names like Neon Indian, Memory Cassette and Washed Out -- sounds much like you would expect something called "glo-fi" to sound: luminous and lysergic, grounded in '80s pop, but with echo, reverb and fuzzed-out harmonies trumping songwriting and lyrical expression. (Imagine the soundtrack to Ghostbusters gone avant-garde.)

Like so many fly-by-night styles, I'm not sure that is a "real" subgenre; the music is too variable, the layers of influence (shoegaze, ambient, lo-fi, electro-funk, house, '60s pop) too porous to build anything durable or even particularly coherent. A wide gulf separates Ganglians' noisy garage pop and Pictureplane's bedroom rave. Many of the acts associated with the fad might bristle at their inclusion, in fact. But it's precisely that unstable quality that makes the phenomenon so interesting. It's less a genre than a meme: call it hashtag music, with a slew of acts all repping for an unmistakably woozy kind of effect, without necessarily agreeing on how to get there.

There are plenty of precedents, of course, from Dan Deacon's last few years of loony tunes to the mid-'00s "folktronica" of Four Tet and Caribou, and all the way back to the beginning of the decade, with the Avalanches' Since I Left You, a high-water mark of super-saturated sampledelia.

And there are even more outliers, artists whose music bears some relation to the queasy roller-coaster rush this stuff induces but tilts more in the direction of ambient drone, freak-folk or other strains of in-betweenness: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Grouper, White Rainbow, Lucky Dragons, Animal Collective, even polychromatic post-dubstepper Joy Orbison -- the list goes on and on.

But I don't think we have to commit ourselves to a strict definition of glo-fi and chillwave (or even keep using those terms for too much longer) to agree that a whole lot of indie acts and bedroom producers are currently drinking from the same punchbowl -- and that the combined results add up to something that's way more interesting than mere microgenre hype.

Read on for a handy cheat-sheet of artists associated with the phenomenon, broken out into stylistic subsets, and check out a three-hour playlist of their muddled sounds. As always, you can listen to the playlist and all the albums mentioned here (plus about 6 million more) by simply signing up for a free Rhapsody trial subscription.

There are three really cool things about my job. One of them is getting to turn people on to the music I'm most jazzed about: it's a license to pontificate, really -- a pulpit for strictly musical evangelism. But, recognizing that my own tastes can be, shall we say, peculiar, I also try to listen with open ears and the humble reminder that what doesn't float my boat (a rather cramped dinghy, it sometimes appears) may carry another listener's craft all the way to shore. They talk about the critic's role as a "filter," but I'm really more like a theater usher, lighting your way to the appropriate aisle.

The likely pick for my favorite album of 2009 is looking to be the self-titled debut from the xx, a co-ed London quartet of 20-year-olds whose self-produced album is a masterpiece of sensuality and restraint. Even I'm surprised at my enthusiasm for the record: it doesn't necessarily reach out and grab you on first listen, favoring atmospheres over hooks and suggestion over immediacy. Still, I have a hard time listening to it only once in a given sitting (one of the pleasures of a 39-minute album).

One of the things I like about the record is how it distills so many influences into such a simple, unassuming form: there's a vintage rock 'n' roll patina borrowed from Sun Studios-era Elvis and, less authentically vintage, Chris Isaak's "Wicked Games" (which serves as the barely disguised foundation for the xx's "Infinity"). The welling bass is reminiscent of dubstep and UK garage, and the sullen ambiance recalls post-punk and early goth; the song structures suggest the molasses Americana of Galaxie 500 and their prot�g�s, like Low, Yo La Tengo and Mazzy Star.

The more you listen, the more references you can spot, floating like drops of oil on the surface of the xx's inky, glistening infusion. Since I can't just keep listening to their album on a constant loop (can I?), I put together a playlist that pulls together a number of possible xx influences—as well as a few contemporaries who achieve a similarly dark, viscous bliss in their music—including all the above plus Slowdive, Hugo Largo, David Bowie, Massive Attack, David Sylvian, Cocteau Twins, Seefeel, Brian Eno and many, many more. Listen to a sampling below, and check out the whole playlist here at Rhapsody's Playlist Central.

The fall release schedule has kicked in, in earnest, and the electronic-music world is humming like an overheated Theremin. From Basement Jaxx' cyborg pop to the nether reaches of the underground, here's a selection of recent records that don't require a PhD in electronic subgenres to appreciate.

You have to give DFA credit for not resting on their laurels. The label's a figurehead of this decade's indie-dance scene, with an almost unnervingly astute sense for the nuances of 21st-century cool. And yet, aside from certain hallmarks of the DFA style -- ropy bass lines, disaffected vocals, judicious use of cowbell -- they have yet to settle into a pattern. (Black Meteoric Star's psychedelic, home-soldered acid house isn't exactly par for the indie course.)

Their habit of reaching outside their own scene when commissioning remixes is equally commendable. In addition to marquis names like Soulwax and Franz Ferdinand, DFA also tap artists -- like Carl Craig, Baby Ford and Luomo -- who resonate with house and techno die-hards, but have little foothold in American indie circles. It's not just a question of credibility; the stream of new input keeps DFA's mutable sound continually refreshed.

A stellar new collection of remixes of LCD Soundsystem's 45:33, James Murphy's Nike-sponsored album from 2006, is a case in point. Theo Parrish, Prins Thomas, Runaway, Trus'Me, Prince Language, Padded Cell, Pilooski and Riley Reinhold all take the ball and run as far as they can, touching down everywhere from Detroit downbeat to Norwegian disco. Read on for a rundown of the parties involved, with recommendations for further listening from each.

 

El Guincho (photo: Oliver Faig)

This week's column has no explicit theme, but there might be an implicit one: all five of these albums explore what happens when you combine traditional acoustic and electric instruments with electronic processing and production. Three of them make heavy use of vocals. Four are new, another is a decade old, and one of them sounds way older -- in a good way.

El Guincho, "Antillas" remixes: EP1 and EP2

El Guincho's music is so full of energy and ideas, it's often hard to believe that it's the work of a single artist: listening to his 2008 debut, Alegranza, feels like standing on a hilltop equidistant from three or four different stages at a world music fest, with soca, Afropop, tropicalia and psychedelic rock swirling in the air and shifting with the winds. Now the Spanish musician has reissued "Antillas," one of the album's standout tracks, to a diverse crew of remixers who take his ideas even farther afield. Most of them stay true to the sunny-day spirit of the original, homing in on Highlife-inspired guitars and delirious, Animal Collective-styled chants. Spank Rock's XXXchange comes up with a dazzling slab of Technicolor exuberance in the spirit of DFA or Carl Craig. Norway's Prins Thomas, a master of hypnotic disco, seems to have come across a few of the helium-fueled balloons that once floated above the floor of David Mancuso's Loft; full of bluegrass guitar and manic hand claps, it's as unstoppable as a five-year-old's birthday party. Cee, of Germany's dub outfit Al-Haca, takes the opposite approach, layering atonal voices over quavering bass and stripped-down percussion halfway between dubstep and the bleakest techno: it's "Antillas" all right, but as heard from the other end of a black hole.

 

Sally Shapiro

Summer's all but officially over, and boy does it feel like it. These three albums may be grounded in libidinal sounds like disco and punk, but there's nevertheless something coolly distant, even alienating about them. (That's part of their charm.) They might make for an entirely unscientific sampling of the current indie dance landscape, but from their heightened affect to their stylistic feints, I think all three speak to a creeping sense of anxiety in the pop underground, both explicit and unconscious.

Sally Shapiro, My Guilty Pleasure

If the term "ice princess" wasn't invented for Sally Shapiro, it's entirely possible she was invented for it. (And she is, let's not forget, an invention: Sally Shapiro is only the nom de microfon of a Swedish shrinking violet whose real name, she demurs, is "something else.") Even singing songs like "Love in July," she sounds about as summery as a steel-blue shock of glacier: her breathy, oddly translucent voice rises up from the mix like the vapors from a frostbitten kiss. Of course, much of the credit for My Guilty Pleasure's deep-freeze aesthetic goes to producer Johan Agebj�rn, whose Italo-disco-inspired arpeggios feel as sharply limned as the edges of a snowflake. All the gleaming surfaces can get a bit dizzying after a while -- Royksopp's Junior, a similar attempt at cryogenic disco, sounds positively tropical in comparison -- but there's a thawing respite in the trance-tossed "Dying in Africa," which summons visions of the Field's disappearing horizons.

YACHT, See Mystery Lights

YACHT's full-length DFA debut sounds almost like the work of a different band than the one responsible for I Believe in You. Your Magic Is Real. On the Portland, Ore., band's new album Psychic City, the skittery electronic touches of earlier albums cede the center ground to more muscular guitar-drums-and-bass arrangements. Instead of sketching around the outlines of pop, Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans now home in on the shape of their songs in bold strokes. YACHT aren't shy about their magpie tendencies: "Pyschic City" and "It's Boring" take cues from the Pixies and Pylon, while more futuristic joints like "I'm in Love with a Ripper" open their arms wide to encompass '80s synth-pop and '00s R&B, via ZTT-inspired sampling and delirious flights of Auto-Tune. (There's even a trace of the Durutti Column in the limpid guitars of the opening "Ring the Bell.") It's far more engaging than fellow Portlanders Glass Candy, whose No Wave disco wants for YACHT's irreverent, inquisitive spirit. From the low-slung bass to Evans' slouchy delivery, the album's a no-brainer fit for DFA, currently running this corner of the indie dance scene. But despite the obligatory grounding in the punkier side of disco, it still sounds unlike anything else on the label.

Health, Get Color

Health's machinic rhythms and queasy oscillators, laced with digital tics and freaky effects, draw an imaginary line from Sonic Youth's swollen amplifiers to the nether space of the motherboard. Like Liars, Animal Collective and Battles, the L.A. band pulls at rock's ragged edges in both style and sonics. The new album, Get Color, is both heavier and trickier than their debut: songs like "Death+" sound like a cross between Helmet and Aphex Twin -- part death march, part angels' chorus. The band's tendency to lock into a trance-inducing churn sometimes leaves you wishing for more in the way of songwriting; maybe that last, as-yet-untaken leap is what gives the music such a palpable sense of struggle -- witness the fiery permutations of "We Are Water," where the band wrestles with the ghosts of prog rock, hardcore and techno; the song's imbued with a sense of almost incendiary frustration as it twists and turns.

August is a slow month for record releases, so I thought I'd highlight some upcoming news. Don't worry, we've got plenty of new music for you as well -- scroll down for a playlist featuring the Hyperdub debut of Global Communication's Mark Pritchard and Sa-Ra's Om'mas Keith; breakbeat maven Si Begg and bleep veterans Unique 3; an Autechre new remix of the Black Dog; offbeat house from Who Made Who and DJ Koze; a new Boys Noize-approved banger from D.I.M.; club-ready remixes of classic Fatboy Slim; a brief introduction to the Troubled Mind of the Gaslamp Killer, the newest signing to Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint; and a new track from downtempo stalwarts Zero 7.

Grizzly Bear by Tom Hines

As you may have noticed, I've been on something of a Warp kick lately. To me, Warp will always be first and foremost an "electronic" imprint -- after all, the label served as my main introduction to contemporary electronic music 15 years ago, via Autechre's Amber and then other Warp artists like Aphex Twin. (I wrote at some length about my first encounter with Warp eight years ago, when the label's cofounder Rob Mitchell passed away; you can read that piece here.)

But in recent years, Warp has arguably had its most surprising successes outside electronica, in hip-hop, avant-pop and indie rock. I've already talked about Jamie Lidell, Battles and Flying Lotus. Here are a few more crucial albums from the guitar-wielding weirdos warping Warp's aesthetic in wild, white-knuckled ways.

England's Warp label achieved its crossover status -- bridging the worlds of hardcore bleepheads and, you know, normal people -- thanks to a roster filled with names like Aphex Twin, Prefuse 73 and Boards of Canada, artists adept at combining electronic mischief with broad pop instincts. (What else could explain the way that Jamie Lidell went from playing abandoned buildings to opening for Elton John?) But Warp, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, hasn't quit tickling the fringes of modern music. Consider these artists the conductors on the label's regular shuttle to the outer limits. Who knows: they might just become its next big names.

Mira Calix
Warp's resident conceptualist, producer/composer Mira Calix uses the stuff of everyday life as her inspiration and source material: car horns, insect flutter, the ambient buzz of wide-open, rural spaces. She mixes these with vintage synthesizers and odd electronic gizmos as well as piano, cello and other acoustic instruments. The Elephant in the Room: 3 Commissions collects work commissioned for gallery installations and contemporary opera, but don't let that scare you off: heard at home, these quiet, patient soundscapes subtly color everything around you.

Jackson and His Computer Band
Around the time that Justice were starting to take off, another Frenchman released an album that shared many of the Ed Banger duo's characteristics: blistering distortion, shuddering rhythms, church choirs, bloody synths. But Smash doesn't beat listeners over the head the way Justice do; its disco breaks and electro synths are tempered by brooding moods and cottony ambiance.

Jamie Lidell

What do hypersoul crooner Jamie Lidell, futuristic beatsmith Flying Lotus and psychedelic math-rockers Battles have in common? Aside from their shared penchant for turning traditional forms inside out, and the ability of all three artists to combine experimental-music rigor with refreshing good cheer, they all make their homes on Warp, the iconic U.K. label that turns 20 this year. Despite a roster heavy on electronic agents provocateur like Aphex Twin and Autechre, no single sound dominates Warp's catalog, which ranges from bleepy electronica to mind-bending hip-hop to smart, snappy rock 'n' roll. Here are 10 Warp artists you need to hear now.

Daft Punk tower over their indie dance acolytes like, well, a giant, gleaming pyramid. So it's only appropriate that some starry-eyed statesiders would eventually borrow not only the French duo's filters, but even one of their album titles. That would be Discovery, perhaps better known as the duo comprised of Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles. (Perhaps to compensate, they named their debut album simply LP.) Their buzzing, gleaming layers of filtered synthesizers would be unthinkable without Daft Punk's influence, but they take just as much inspiration from contemporary R&B, favoring jiggling, syncopated drum-machine beats and scads of breathless falsetto, often run through vocal effects like Auto-Tune. At their best, as on "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," they remind me of Hot Chip or even His Name Is Alive's experiments in electronic R&B; elsewhere, as on the highly questionable Jackson 5 cover "I Want You Back," an instinctive indie aversion to execution saps the force from their music, rendering it kitschier than it probably wants to be.

Irony Doesn't Kill People, Curmudgeons Do
Being allergic to most things ironic, I half-expected to get some kind of rash from rubbing up too close to Guns Don't Kill People, Lazers Do, Diplo and Switch's kinda-sorta concept album about a one-armed commando from Jamaica named Major Lazer. (It's all very Gorillaz meets, oh, I don't know, Dr. Alimantado or something, or Rex the Dog meets rockers uptown.) But the record's actually kind of awesome. The first track alone features surf guitar; horse whinneys and clip-clopping hooves; Nokia ringtones; cash-register bells; a hyperactive Santigold loop; and gruff, absurdist chat from Mr. Lex. The album's first half offers a solid stretch of dancehall bangers and earnest lovers' rock; Major Lazer achieve genius with "Baby," a 67-second sketch featuring the roly-poly-voiced Prince Zimboo waxing philosophical to a newborn. (The baby has "built-in Auto-Tune," wouldn't you know.) For all the goofiness, Diplo and Switch flex considerable muscle with tracks like the supercolliding "Anything Goes" and the martial, minimalist "Pon De Floor." To make the latter beat, one imagines the producers having rigged up a Whac-a-Mole game with those toy cans that moo when turned upside down. As The Hudsucker Proxy's Norville Barnes would say, "You know, for kids."

Phoenix are a pop band, plain and simple: a little bit Sloan, a little bit Fleetwood Mac and a little bit Daft Punk. At least, it feels like there's an unmistakably "electronic" element to the French band's records, even if it's just something about the goose-pimply detailing of their sound. (That could also describe the Fleetwood Mac influence, of course.) In any case, they take it back to the dance floor with a new set of "Lisztomania" remixes for Kitsune, the French label that recently released Phoenix's odd, appealing Kitsune Tabloid mix CD.

DFA's Holy Ghost! do a kind of chugging arpeggio thing that sounds an awfully lot like their own song "I Will Come Back." (Like their label mates Hercules & Love Affair and Black Meteoric Star, they clearly love old house and disco, but their take on it is way glossier.) LA's Classixx give blips their due on a spacy, slow-motion remix, and Manchester's Der Die Das dig into a gooey techno groove that reminds me the slightest bit of old Laurent Garnier. None of them are a patch on the original, nor for that matter upon Phoenix's recent album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which is very good indeed, if you like that kind of thing. (By "that kind of thing," of course, I mean sunny-day singalong guitar pop that sounds like it's been squeezed from a tube full of rainbows and honey -- and who doesn't like that?)

In other recent indie/dance crossover releases, Strangelets (Supersoul Recordings' Xaver Naudascher and David Ducaruge) remix two of Sebastien Tellier's recent hits, gussying them up in tumbling, Italo-inspired arpeggios stretched to nearly eight minutes apiece. "Sexual Sportswear" is particularly good: brittle, pumping and moody. And, refreshingly, done without a trace of irony: these bleeps mean business.

Fever Ray's "Triangle Walks" is the new single from the Knife's Karin Dreijer-Andersson, and a diverse crew tests its malleable mettle. Tiga's is the oddball of the bunch, a low-slung electro number with booming 808s and a Neptunes infatuation. Elsewhere we find brooding downtempo (Ben Hoo), steely minimal techno (Spektre, Allez-Allez) and stately synth-pop (Tora Vintner, James Rutledge). Despite the stylistic range, they tend to bleed together under the weight of Dreijer-Andersson's almost overpoweringly processed vocals. Maybe that's why Allez-Allez's remix -- which all but erases them, stripping back the vocal track to a lone, repeated tone -- is one of the EP's most successful.

Finally, Moby has a new album out; following just a little over a year after Last Night, Wait for Me plots a considerably different course. While its predecessor was an uptempo celebration of New York's downtown dance legacy, the new one eases into a cozy, intimate vibe that's flush with guitars and vocals. Angelo Badalamenti, Beth Orton and maybe even Mazzy Star all serve as inspiration at different points across an album whose only real constant is its warmth. Taking a few cues from Joy Division (via Interpol), "Mistake" is fine, brooding guitar rock, while "Scream Pilots" sounds almost as though it might be a Plugz outtake from the Repo Man soundtrack. The album's best moments are its short, spontaneous instrumentals, fleeting moments when a musical idea flashes up in a smoke of tube glow and tape hiss, and is gone.

This week, Ghostly International's Spectral sublabel releases Immune, the impressive new album by Bodycode. Inspired by the classic deep house of New York and Chicago, it nevertheless sounds little like anything else from the recent deep-house revival. That might have something to do with the background of Alan Abrahams (pictured). He was raised in a South African township, where he began producing after he discovered Chicago house music -- not so unlikely, considering the music's centrality to South African kwaito. He moved to London in 1997, recorded a handful of EPs and founded his S�d Electronic label; today his discography includes releases on Perlon, ~scape, Musik Krause and Spectral, which signed his Bodycode alias. But unlike most of his peers, he didn't wind up in Berlin. Instead, Abrahams relocated to Lisbon, whose qualities -- a postcolonial city on the periphery of Europe -- are evident in the way he comes at dance music from the margins. His shuddering machine rhythms and balmy chords don't break radically with house traditions; his tough, rubbery basslines come straight from Larry Heard, via Luomo, and there are plenty of pumping chords, woozy leads and soulful vocals. But like Pepe Bradock, Move D and DJ Koze, Bodycode manages to make the music sound unusually alive and refreshingly weird. It's flush with hazy, underwater melodies and electronically treated tribal percussion, so you're never quite sure what's really going on -- just that the music makes perfect sense, once you're deep inside it.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the deep end, England's Faze Action recently released their first album in five years, Stratus Energy. Following a handful of recent singles (and a nice boost last year from Carl Craig's remix of their reissued single "In the Trees"), the new album continues to mine the same vein of classic disco that they've been working for a decade. Chugging Italo synths and Gamble & Huff strings are all over this thing; the sound of it is enormous, a mammoth amalgam of live instruments and dubby studio smarts. For highlights, check the happily overblown "Danae's Journey," the Bullitt-worthy thrill ride "Stratus Energy" and "Keep It Coming," an invigorating fusion of cocksure string vamps and fibrillating Clavinets.

That rather purplish prose makes as good a transition as any to the last album I want to discuss, Kotchy's 89. I don't know if he's explicitly down with dudes like Gemmy, Guido and Joker -- who have settled upon "purple" as the working title for their shared approach to dubstep and hip-hop -- but his knock-kneed beats and garishly colored synths certainly bear similarities. The Brooklyn musician's lurching beats lean closer to boom-bap: Prefuse 73, Dabrye, Flying Lotus and of course Dilla are obvious antecedents. But Kotchy's mix of electro-acoustic samples and buzzy synths doesn't sound much like anyone else, and the vocal tracks are even weirder, suggesting an accidental fusion of Mouse on Mars and the Sea and Cake over clomping, clunky breaks that seem to reassemble themselves with every bar. Just because this funk is far-fetched doesn't mean it won't make a believer out of you.

Photo by Sabine Mirlesse

Purple is gaining traction. No, I don't mean that Caterpillar has released a line of pastel backhoes. Rather, a handful of slippery synaesthetes on dubstep's margins have fixed upon the term to describe their garish perversions of the form. Throwing fluorescent G-funk leads over swollen, drunken drum programming, these mischievous types excel at combining brash hooks with beats that happily flaunt dubstep convention; with their video-game blips and almost comical riffs, they turn rebellion into child's play.

The Guardian's Dan Hancox recently profiled the Bristol trio leading the lilac revolution: Gemmy, Guido and Joker. Gemmy's recent "Supligen" single offers a good approximation of the form. Steeped in 8-bit blips, it stacks cheap, buzzy synth lines one atop the other until they mass into something almost rich, like creamed plastic. Neither beat on the record is quite as out-there as the pulses conjured by artists like Untold and Ramadanman (both of whom you can hear on the ~scape label's Round Black Ghosts). But there's a cheeky insouciance to his cadence, which goes glide, glide, splat over and over.

The label responsible, Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu, is a major force behind some of the most exciting sounds in "bass music" right now. Planet Mu has been tossing spanners in the breakbeat works for 14 years, across jungle, breakcore, IDM and grime. With recent releases from Boxcutter, Pinch, Neil Landstrumm, Jamie Vex'd and others, it has paralleled the elliptical orbit of Kode9's Hyperdub label around the outer edges of dubstep's stratosphere. New Yorker FaltyDL is the latest to enter the fold, and his Love Is a Liability is a corker, encompassing fizzy 2-step skip, smothering bass, melancholic sampladelia and synth melodies that verge on the baroque. As with Burial or Landstrumm, there's a palpable sense of nostalgia on tracks like the garage-y "Human Meadow" and "Dionysos," but like those artists, he's got a way with blending sound that's all his own. Just listen to "Enuia," which splits the difference between Rephlex and ECM in its water-drop rhythms and billowing acoustic ambiance.

FaltyDL's Human Meadow Remixes EP is also worth your time. Boxcutter, Luke Vibert and Mu-Ziq (aka label boss Mike Paradinas) all deliver radically different reworks, from Vibert's unabashed acid-house/Italo-disco mashup to Boxcutter's glazed rainbow crumble. (Honestly, I don't know what to call it; it sounds like the kind of music that, in the future, will serenade spaceship greenhouses, the 23rd-century equivalent of Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants, perhaps). But my favorite is Mu-Ziq's remix, which employs a breakbeat so slow, you'd be reaching for the 33/45 switch if you were listening to vinyl. Lush, dubby synth bass saunters beneath like a cat rubbing table legs, and sped-up vox are run through cistern reverb, with a net effect akin to floating in space, filled with helium yourself.

For all these and more recent Planet Mu madness, check the playlist below.

Now would be as good a time as any to jot down Kate Simko's name in your mental playlist. The Chicago musician has been slowly building a name for herself over the past couple of years with a handful of singles and compilation tracks for Ghostly's dance-oriented Spectral Sound sublabel. She's gradually sculpted an austere, minimalist template to fit a personal style that becomes more apparent with every release. Her grooves are hypnotic but never stifling, her melodic and harmonic sensibilities supple but never overbearing -- a sensual economy. Her upcoming Take You There EP, featuring a remix from Berlin-based former Seattlite Bruno Pronsato, is the best thing she's done yet: tough, confident, dark minded. While you wait for that, though, experience a very different side of Simko with Music from the Atom Smashers, her full-length soundtrack to a documentary about the physicists behind Fermilab's particle collider. Even if the search for top quarks and the Higgs boson sounds to you more like a hungover hunt for unidentifiable but inexplicably compelling fried foods, Simko's score makes plenty of sense on its own, punctuating rich, glitch-infused synth swells -- echoes of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, as processed by Oval -- with the occasional foray into terse, brooding tech-house.

"Terse" and "brooding" could equally describe The Paranormal by Voodeux, a duo signed to Claude Von Stroke's Mothership label. But there's nothing hushed about their debut longplayer. Influenced by Matthew Dear's sickly undulations as Audion, their music is unremittingly dark, but they lavish their attention on flickering points of light. On "Enter the Voo," hi-hats and hand claps and buzzy, high-tension vibrations light up like fireworks against an inky backdrop of bass. "Frank the Janitor" is jacking house as horror-film score; "Deadend Motel" uses reverb like Silly Putty, imprinting finely detailed percussive patterns and stretching them into absurd, even comic shapes. You do begin to wish for more; the B-movie kitsch ("The End") and "spooky" effect ("The Paranormal") don't always compensate for grooves that tangle up in needless fills and frills. But on a track like "Just a Spoonful," which updates the pumping chords of deep house with playful sound design and one twisted rabbit hole of a breakdown, they easily rise to meet widescreen proportions.

Electronic music doesn't seem to generate as many polarizing records as rock and pop do. Maybe that's because of electronic music's peculiar tendency to splinter into new subgenres whenever a potentially polarizing element presents itself. But Damian Lazarus' Smoke the Monster Out is likely to spark conversation and maybe raise hackles. Lazarus (pictured above) is best known as a purveyor of dark, lean house and techno, both via his DJ sets and his label, Crosstown Rebels, home to underground club favorites like Jamie Jones, Dinky and Butane. Smoke the Monster Out veers at a 45-degree angle away from that baseline, wrapping oddball pop experiments around house-inspired grooves. That's not without precedent, of course. Michael Mayer and Superpitcher's Supermayer project evinced a similarly madcap vibe, tweaking techno convention (and purists' noses) with a left-field, slightly unhinged pop sensibility. (A year or two ago, Lazarus partnered with Mayer to promote Stink, a short-lived Ibiza party whose crosswise, rebel spirit apparently wasn't a good fit for the island's megaclub marketplace.) I'm not sure that all of Smoke the Monster Out, Lazarus' full-length studio debut, entirely works; the short sketches feel like they want to become longer tracks, while some of the longer tracks are too stuffed with ideas. The tone feels off, as well. The subtle grandeur of "Moment" is let down by "Memory Box," a plodding electro-house number assembled around a spoken-word vocal: "I don't like this game/ Trying to remember your name/ I don't recall what you said/ My memory box is dead." Most likely conceived upon returning to the studio after a long, lost weekend behind the decks somewhere, it probably seemed like a good idea that Monday. Still, for a kind of happily addled merrymaking, the record shows ample charm.

When Baltimore's Rye Rye guested on Blaqstarr's "Shake It to the Ground," it wasn't what she sang but how she sang it that grabbed people's attention. High-pitched invocations to "Shake it to the ground/ Move it, move it, move it, move it" bobbed in the air like helium balloons weighted by lead ballast, imbued with the curious energy of the Chipmunks sucking on sizzurp. (It didn't hurt that Blaqstarr's woozy production served the weirdest aspects of the adolescent rapper's gangsta hiccup.) Rye Rye's distinctive delivery found its match on "Bang," a match-up with M.I.A. in which Blaqstarr's samba-school breaks spread like a nest around the singers' nasal birdcalls, and now Buraka Som Sistema and DJ Sega have remixed the track to sound even loonier. The "Buraka Carnival Remix" offers an explosive mix of soca-inspired drums, carnival whistles and gleefully cheesy rave stabs, while their "WTF I Asked for a Kuduro Remix" is a rave-y slab of breakbeat hardcore mayhem. Sega, meanwhile, strips back the backing track to nothing but rough-cut snares, the better to isolate Rye Rye and M.I.A.'s a cappella face-off.

Bloc Party's Intimacy Remixed shows how hard it is to give an entire album the remix treatment. For a band whose albums hew to the classic longplayer format, the piecemeal approach to different sounds — melancholy IDM, adrenaline-heavy electro, tech-y drum 'n' bass — is too disjointed. Face it: in the age of playlists, no one is going to listen to this thing all the way through.

Franz Ferdinand (pictured above) take a different approach with Blood: rather than recruiting a dozen buzz names to sex up Tonight, the band invited album producer Dan Carey to give selected tracks the dub treatment. If the resulting kaleidoscope of free-floating guitars, vocal fragments and echo-chamber drums recalls Mad Professor's elegantly convoluted rework of Massive Attack's Protection, No Protection, that's not entirely coincidence: Carey apprenticed with the respected dub figurehead. Eschewing teenage kicks, Blood invites a less frenetic engagement with the music, extending even to cryptic titles offering little hint as to the versions' respective sources. From the opening squalls to the final, fading echo, it's a surprisingly immersing listen, even (or especially?) for those who aren't necessarily fans of the Glaswegan dandies' jagged guitar sound.

Mark Templeton's Inland similarly gathers its full head of steam from the combustion of rock instrumentation meeting bewildering studio treatments. Electric and acoustic guitars and keening vocal harmonies turn to a fine mist when poured through the Canadian producer's software sieve; it's easy to hear references to Fennesz and Grizzly Bear in the songs' psychedelic high-tide lines, marked by a foamy trail of droning harmonies and glitched artifacts. It's just the latest in a line of excellent releases from New York's Anticipate label, which is responsible for albums from Nicola Ratti, Morgan Packard, Klimek and Ezekiel Honig. From this kind of digitally degraded freak folk to explorations of the Rhodes keyboard at its most liquid, all those releases are well worth your time.

From Here We Go Sublime, the 2007 debut album from the Field, set the bar pretty high: after all, where do you go after you've hit sublime? I'm pretty sure that "more sublime" is a logical impossibility -- although, if he were Spinal Tap, there would always be "none more sublime," I suppose. Sensibly, the Field, aka Sweden's Axel Willner, don't seem to have pulled any muscles trying to outdo their last album's out-of-body bliss-out. (I can confirm this firsthand: Willner lives across the street from me in Berlin, and last time I saw him at our neighborhood watering hole, the demure, bearded redhead was walking upright as usual. For all the otherworldly qualities of his music, it's hard to think of a musician who looks more, well, normal.)

Like the Field's debut, Yesterday and Today takes bright, shimmering samples of pop music and then stretches them over driving drum-machine rhythms that are in it for the long haul; running 8 or 10 or even 15 minutes long, these tracks are as sensuous as heat mirages on a sun-baked freeway plateau. Their repetitions become almost delirious, conjuring more fantastical images with every mile. For the most part, there's no telling where Willner got his starry-eyed source materials, with two notable exceptions. "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime" uses huge chunks of the Korgis' song of the same name (perhaps better known from Beck's cover version, used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind); "The More That I Do" whips Cocteau Twins' "Lorelei" into a creamy froth that makes the most of Liz Fraser's heavenly coo. It might seem a little easy -— after all, the Cocteaus' dew-jeweled shoegaze is one of the most obvious precursors for the Field's Ambien ambient. But then, there's something refreshingly honest about it as well, suggesting that Willner has gotten over the clever irony that led him to turn Lionel Richie's "Hello" into "Over the Ice," Willner's signature track to date. Indeed, the most surprising thing about Yesterday and Today might be the fact that Cologne's minimalist kingpins Kompakt licensed it to Anti Records — since when was Ani Difranco a techno fan? But if the Field are a one-trick pony, Yesterday and Today shows off a luscious coat of fur — and the stamina of a thoroughbred.

Despite his home on Ninja Tune, Fink, aka Fin Greenall, doesn't really make electronic music — at least not under that particular alias. As Sideshow, he's responsible for deep and dubby downtempo on Will Saul's Aus and Simple labels. But Fink, despite the kinda creepy name, is all about acoustic heartbreak. Greenall's got a gravelly, resonant voice that will make you weep, and his songwriting only gets stronger with every record. On Sort of Revolution, the fourth Fink album, it's mostly just Greenall and his guitar, with delicately multitracked vocals and subtle electronic details to flesh out skeletal atmospheres reminiscent of Nick Drake or Elliott Smith. Just don't listen to this alone, if you find yourself in a funk. Actually, I take that back. This is music made for wallowing.

John Daly's debut album, Sea & Sky, comes closer to dance music, but it's still plenty moody. Having appeared more or less out of nowhere in 2006, with two releases on his own Feel Music label, Ireland's Daly has steadily built a rep for delivering emotive, hypnotic, disco-influenced house music, both there and on labels like Plak, Drumpoet Community and Francois K's Wave Music. Sea & Sky gathers those tracks and more for regular folks that don't buy 12-inch vinyl, which turns out to be a wise move. While Daly's music is calibrated for warm-up sets and chillout sessions, it works wonders at home, where Italo-disco synths and coolly plucked guitars stretch out with the inviting shine of a plush sofa. He keeps the tempo slow, the key minor and the melodies yearning, like some luscious combination of Giorgio Moroder and Massive Attack. Whether you're washing up or making out, Sea & Sky ought to make domestic comforts feel even cozier.

The official start of BBQ season cries out for just the right soundtrack, and Concentric Pleasures abides. From the hits of '89 to hipster-friendly disco, let these playlists put the fun in your social function.

Dance Hits: 1989. Properly applied, nostalgia is to social functions as lighter fluid is to a fat stack of charcoal. (Caution: in both cases, a little goes a long way.) So kick things off with a trip 20 years back in time. In 1989, disco balls spun fast and loose, beaming with positive vibes. In the U.K., rave's "Second Summer of Love" was in full swing. New York tricksters like the Jungle Brothers spoke in native tongues. Chicago's electric acid test was bubbling hot, and for a brief moment hip-house looked ready to take over the world. From Soul II Soul and Neneh Cherry to Lil Louis and Ralphi Rosario, 1989 was a shining moment for dance music at its most fun -- and most inclusive. Even the hatingest hater can't be mad at these feel-good grooves, up to and including "Batdance."


Dance Hits: 1989

Norwegian Disco Bliss. Of course, if your backyard is full of beards, you can play it cool -- or play at cool -- with a little Scandinavian oonce-oonce. For some inscrutable reason, the best disco is coming out of Norway these days. (Maybe it has something to do with dancing under the midnight sun.) Artists like Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje turn boompty beats otherworldly and put a curious, psychedelic twist on acts like Bebel Gilberto, Franz Ferdinand and Jose Gonzalez. If you dig the DFA, you'll flip for these starry-eyed soul providers.


Norwegian Disco Bliss

Tosca: Hassle-Free Beats. Finally, when the grill's burned down and the intimacy is heating up, cozy up with Vienna's Tosca. The duo of Rupert Huber and Richard Dorfmeister (of Kruder & Dorfmeister) don't break any sound barriers on new album No Hassle, but that's precisely the point. They've retained cruising speed for 14 years now, across the hills and dells of dubby downtempo, and No Hassle opens up an even wider vista, with live instrumentation misted with a subtle electronic haze. Along with selections from the album, our overview of the band's back catalog surveys 44 tracks from these mood-music mainstays, including remixes by Faze Action, Beanfield and Lindstrom & Prins Thomas.


Tosca: Hassle-Free Beats

Phoenix are the rare pop band that understand the dynamics of dance music. So it may be more than a little surprising that their Kitsune Tabloid mix, for the painfully hip Parisian music/fashion/lifestyle concern Kitsune, sounds nothing like the dance music of their hometown. Kicking off with KISS' "Love Theme from Kiss," the unmixed collection proceeds to blow through a curious array of chestnuts and semi-obscurities from the Red Crayola, Elvis Costello, Tangerine Dream and even D'Angelo. (Where else are you going to find the Dirty Projectors sharing space with Ritchie Valens?) It comes off a lot like the modern-day equivalent of a much-loved Maxell cassette with a smeared ballpoint track listing and unidentifiable bits of goo stuck to the cover, from that time it spent a month under your car seat, squashed up against the remnants of a Happy Meal. Does Kitsune Tabloid unlock the hidden secrets of Phoenix? No, but it sure makes a road trip sound tempting.

Another surprising release this week comes from Moderat, the collaborative effort between Modeselektor and Apparat. Aside from a record label (bpitch control) and a mutual love of severe syncopation, there's not a lot these artists would immediately appear to have in common. Modeselektor specialize in a kind of blistering, full-on assault fueled by electro, techno, dancehall and dubstep -- the kind of amalgam that Sasha Frere-Jones calls "lazer bass," and the name seems particularly apt for their whizzing, zapping barrage. Apparat, on the other hand, is something of a softy. With his aching vocals and yearning chord progressions, there's something decidedly emo about his music. And yet, behind that fluffy veil, there's a wall of sound easily as sturdy as Modeselektor's neon parapets. From the appearance of their eponymous debut album, the collaboration seems to have freed each from their respective branding, allowing Modeselektor to ease up on the madcap antics and allowing Apparat to get his hands a little dirty. The album's final shape is a bit odd, as is to be expected from something that draws simultaneously from Boards of Canada, the Bug, Burial and, at least in the case of "Sick With It," Peter Gabriel. But that oddness is half its charm. (The sheer, gushing rush of the synths and drums takes care of the rest.)

Finally, while I'm on the subject of the unexpected, may I register how deeply satisfying it is to find Sun Electric's great 1996 album Present finally available online? (R&S, I kiss you.) Sun Electric never achieved the notoriety of Aphex Twin, Underworld or the Orb, but their best work, like Present, easily ranks alongside those artists' career-defining work. Begun as an uneasy balancing act between ambient and techno, the Berlin duo would continue to upset that balance to more and more fruitful effect. When I first heard Present, it seemed simultaneously lush and forbidding: all the rich tones and sumptuous textures folded around baffling rhythms and alien, atonal sequences. Thirteen years later, it hasn't lost one iota of its charge.

May is early -- pace Janet Maslin -- but never too early to be looking for the year's summer anthem. Jamie Jones' "Summertime" (Crosstown Rebels) seems to be the growing consensus pick on deep-house dancefloors, but allow me to offer a suggestion from two decades ago.

A few days back, I stumbled across a YouTube clip of Pal Joey's "Party Time." I'd never heard it before -- had never, in fact, heard much of anything by the legendary New York house producer, despite my best intentions -- but I found myself instantly transported to a rooftop party in midsummer, where colored lights and paper lanterns dapple an elegantly wasted crowd that bounces in slo-mo to a viscous, underwater groove. If that sounds suspiciously like a beer commercial, blame my own imagination's failure in the face of a song this perfect. You want a summer anthem so radiant it makes you a little woozy? This is it.

Joey's music of the late '80s and early '90s reflects a moment in the city when genres were particularly fluid, and "Party Time," released around 1990, is no exception. The eponymous vocal sample comes from the disco cut "Sixty Nine," by Began Cekic's Brooklyn Express; the swirling chords and brittle drum programming root a style that has since been adopted in turn by everyone from Mood II Swing to Lawrence, Pepe Bradock to DJ Koze. And Joey's hip-hop roots, making pause tapes before graduating to razor and reel-to-reel, are evident in the track's rough-hewn feel; the voice leaps out of the mix like a spark jumping off a power-pole that's got a street-corner sound system jacked into it.

"Party Time" comes off the second EP in Joey's Loop D' Loop series, and we've got the whole lot for your listening pleasure. Launched somewhere around 1990 -- Discogs doesn't say, and neither does the artist's own discography -- the label ranges from minimalist drum-machine workouts and disco edits to deep-hued garage, flush with organs and saxophone. Reflecting Joey's professional work in hip-hop and soul, producing and remixing artists like Boogie Down Productions and Sade, midperiod releases veer in a similar direction, with the occasional spoken phrase punctuating slowed-down boom-bap breaks and looped soul samples that recall DJ Premier or old Mo' Wax. For the final half-dozen releases, Joey returns to a kind of tribally deep house that will sound familiar to fans of contemporary house music: "Santeria Samba Groove," from #17, sounds not unlike recent Ricardo Villalobos slowed to -8, while the dreamy, uptempo skip of "Computer Love" sounds a whole lot like what labels like Buzzin' Fly are going after these days.

House is big on "DJ tools" these days, and in many ways, that's just what these laid-back, pared-back constructions are. But there's a wealth of ideas jumping out of these loops. If the voice of KRS-One takes you back, the immediacy of the whole thing zaps you forward; it's precisely the tracks' off-kilter futurism that makes them so classic. Check a selection of tracks below, and listen to the whole series in this massive playlist.

The Norwegian singer Annie's Don't Stop has had trouble living up to its title, moving only in fits and starts toward release since it was recorded as a follow-up to 2004's Anniemal. First the album leaked, and then Annie split with Island. Pitchfork recently reported that the icy disco princess is promising a summer release for the record, most likely in updated form. As a teaser, this week she released "Anthonio" as the inaugural release on Richard X's Pleasure Masters label. Co-written with X (Sugababes, Kelis, M.I.A.) and Hannah Robinson (Ladyhawke, Rachel Stevens), "Anthonio" is a slow dance in a Subzero, with Annie's breath steaming up on great, glassy panes of synthesizer. When the ice-cream headache clears, things get weirder as you realize the song's a scathing takedown of a Brazilian lover-turned-absent father. Complicating matters, reports Prefix, one alleged Anthonio has now appeared with a MySpace page featuring his own response, the song "Annie." Musically, it's a wounded peacock strutting around in '80s Euro-pop trappings; it's saccharine laced with Novocaine. Call me a doubter, but this smells like viral marketing; I suspect that the Annie camp had great fun putting together this gaudy soundtrack to the backstory. But the impishness is infectious. What's pop without a little manufactured scandal, anyway?

Almost tipping the producers' hand, the EP's "Berlin Breakdown Version" recasts the song in the mold of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away," a pinnacle of '80s electro-sentimentalism; more remixes come from Vaughn E and the Designer Drugs. But the best of the lot comes from French house mainstay Fred Falke, who gives the song the brooding feel of vintage New Order. He goes so far as to smuggle a few bars of "Your Silent Face" into the breakdown, but no matter how clever the move — doubly clever, considering that Richard X made his name mashing up Kylie with "Blue Monday" — the winks never detract from the song's full-on gush. Pleasure Masters, indeed.

The curveball of the week comes from the U.K. producer Joshua Harvey, better known as Hervé or the Count of Monte Cristal (the former half of the Count & Sinden). Under those aliases, Harvey has become a key name in "fidget house," a kinda-sorta-real subgenre where jacking Chicago house, rave-y techno and bits of indie-rock, dancehall and hip-hop are spun together into a sweaty, manic mess. But wring out that T-shirt and mop your brow, because Harvey's all cleaned up as the Young Lovers, his one-man lounge-jazz band. For the most part, the Young Lovers' self-titled debut album hews to the familiar, smoke-wreathed forms laid out by acts like Tosca and Kruder & Dorfmeister, but there's also a tangible echo of the Mo' Wax label's glory days in the mid- to late '90s, with crackly, hip-hop-inspired grooves and a sumptuous spread of instrumental samples. (There's also a touch of Burnt Friedman's winking approach to "hypermodern" jazz.) "Love You Madly," meanwhile, is a down-home stomper with billowing britches and a rousing sax lead, and the dubstep-inspired "Shake Off the Ghosts" sounds more than anything like an homage to Burial; it's not hard to imagine the track as a jumping-off point for a whole new project for the alias-happy Harvey.

While we're on the subject of dubstep, we mustn't forget Boxcutter's fantastic new album, Arecibo Message, on Planet Mu. Mike Paradinas' label has been on fire lately, and this, the third album from Northern Ireland's Barry Lynn in his best-known guise, is no exception. Classic 2-step garage serves as the foundation for grooves that are lumbering and elegant all at once, but he indulges all manner of tempos and styles, from practice-space drum 'n' bass to vintage acid; "Otherside Remix" is laser-baiting dubstep, "Lamp Post Funk" a bizarre, seam-bursting tribute to Miles Davis via Prince. The standout track is "A Familiar Sound," featuring Kinnego Flux, which sketches the fluid, funk-infused outlines of broken beat in bulbous, cartoonish shapes daubed with juicy Clavinets. Rarely does soul music come across as quite so giddy.

It's a full-time job staying on top of new releases these days. (I should know; I punch the clock to do more or less just that.) And since even diehard fans can be disoriented by the maze of subgenres, scenes and side projects that characterize electronic music culture -- to say nothing of more casual listeners who might just be looking for some good drive-time (or bedtime) listening -- I'm reviving the Concentric Pleasures column, an occasional roundup of notable new releases and timely trips through the back catalog. With no further ado, here's a rundown of crucial recent releases across electronic music.

The big news this week is the arrival of a new album from Viennese downtempo mainstays Tosca, perhaps better known as Richard Dorfmeister's other band. Fans of the duo's effortlessly chilled mood music will be relieved to hear that little has changed in the four years since Tosca's last studio album, J.A.C.. (Cut 'em some slack; Kruder & Dorfmeister haven't released an album since 1998, though they did tease us with an EP last year.) No Hassle stays true to its title across a dozen shamelessly soporific numbers (plus a bonus disc of live interpretations). What they may lack in vim, they make up for in their single-minded pursuit of maximum bliss-out. (Plus, hey: fewer side effects than Paxil.)

Also returning after a long absence are Roni Size and Reprazent. New Forms2 revisits the iconic junglists' Mercury-winning 1997 album, with a rejiggered track listing and new edits of the group's jazz-inflected drum 'n' bass classics. While less well known, Burnt Friedman's Con Ritmo is another reissue well worth your time; originally released in 2000, the album is a masterpiece of hypermodern jazz -- an off-kilter amalgam of dub, lounge jazz and African rhythms that throws the whole played-vs.-programmed debate to the winds. (Guests include improvising guitarist Josef Suchy, electronic trickster Atom Heart -- aka Señor Coconut -- and fiery vibraphones credited only to "the Disposable Rhythm Section.") Finally, on a much older tip, Cabaret Voltaire's Remixed has been given a digital reissue. Originally released in 2001, the album documents the Sheffield industrialists' flirtations with acid house in the late '80s and early '90s. Shot through with bleeps and breakbeats, it's definitely dated -- but remixes from the likes of François Kevorkian and even Paul Oakenfold (!) sound strangely current in the wake of DFA's current fascination with vintage house. Dub maestro Adrian Sherwood offers two worthy mixes, and Robert Gordon's "Easy Life (Very Strange Mix)" is a fascinating slab of proto-minimal techno.

Finally, returning to our accidental theme of jazz-inflected sounds, there's Bronnt Industries Kapital, a new act on Booka Shade's Get Physical label. Their name may be unwieldy, but the music's anything but. Touching variously on Four Tet, Boards of Canada, Quiet Village and Tortoise, their debut album, Hard for Justice, is a mixture of disco, downtempo, Krautrock and electro-pop that feels fresh almost in spite of itself. Sumptuous horns, electric bass and live drums help contribute to the richness of a sound already awash in buzzy analog synthesizers, while cuts like "Streets of Fury" prove that these guys know their way around a compelling arrangement as well as the knobs on their gear.

For more new releases worth checking out, here's a quick list of singles I highly recommend: Ben Watt's Guinea Pig Remixes (with a jawdropping DJ Koze remix); Sensorika, epic techno from nature boy Dominik Eulberg; and indie wavers Delphic's Counterpoint EP for the recently revived, long-legendary R&S label, produced by Ewan Pearson and featuring remixes from Paul Woolford and the Chain. Tell us what you think of them and send your own recommendations by following us on Twitter at RhapsodyDance.

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Their jeans are skinnier, their pouts poutier, their hair more tousled than yours. They are, of course, Paris' Kistune label, purveyors of haute fashion and hot dancefloor action. And now Scion AV, the club-culture arm of the automaker, has invited them to sit behind the tinted windshield for a spin. Scion Sampler Volume 23: Kitsuné Pioneer features acts like Ted&Francis, Heartsrevolution and Guns N' Bombs, plus bigger-britches names like Alex Gopher and Para One. In honor of the occasion, we put together a playlist digging deeper into the label's history, highlighting tracks and remixes from Simian Mobile Disco, M.I.A., Digitalism, Hot Chip, Black Strobe, Joakim, Klaxons, Crystal Castles, and just about anyone who's anyone in the world of punky, irreverent electro. Forty tracks deep, it's like a virtual visit to Paris' painfully hip Colette boutique—but way cheaper. Check the preview below, and click on over to get the full playlist.

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Ever since U.K. garage began splintering in the late '90s, its followers have spun off subgenre after subgenre. Dubstep and grime were the first to peel off from UKG, along with short-lived variants like nu dark swing, sub-low and Eski-beat. In the past year and a half, more names have blossomed and spread like Morning Glory vines: bassline house, niche, even the confusingly named "funky." Short for "funky house," it's a post-garage brand of 4/4 dance music that, nevertheless, has little to do with the American dance-music strain widely known as funky house. (In U.K. house music, meanwhile, you also get fidget house and "donk," another head-scratcher of a name that, likewise, refers neither to Soulja Boy's "Donk" nor to minimal house duo Donk Boys.)

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Despite my many obsessive-compulsive tendencies, my fandom has never been particularly fanatical. If I were going to become unhealthily fixated on a single band, though, New Order probably would have been the one, which makes the arrival of double-disc collectors' editions of their five classic '80s albums—Movement, Power, Corruption & Lies, Low-Life, Brotherhood and Technique—particularly welcome. (More obsessive fans than I have complained about audio fidelity problems with the set, but I haven't noticed anything amiss, even playing through what, on my budget, is a rather obscenely expensive pair of Genelec monitors.) Each album is presented in its entirety, subtly remastered, along with rare sides and alternate versions. Some of these, granted, aren't as rare as you might wish; 1987's double-disc Substance did a good job of collecting singles and B-sides like "Shellshock" and "Everything's Gone Green." Still, there's plenty to sink your teeth into, even for semi-completists like myself. And listeners who didn't spend the latter half of the '80s converting their allowance to black wax may find even more surprises. Here's a look at some of the best bits.

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

For many electronic music fans, the Obama win has raised a giddy possibility that, until recently, was all but unthinkable: the return of Ricardo Villalobos to American shores. The Chilean-German producer and DJ has long declared his refusal to visit the United States under the Bush administration, or indeed any subsequent administration continuing Bush's policies. As justification, Villalobos cites his alleged harassment at the hands of immigration officials when passing through U.S. airports shortly after 9/11; the musician, whose family fled Chile after Pinochet's 1973 coup d'etat, claims that the officials interviewing him knew of his family's history and pressed him to explain why they had fled the dictatorship, which in its early years had received CIA support and State Department blessings.

Given Villalobos' round-the-clock, round-the-world schedule, it's well possible he's not even available for inauguration-night raving. But what was once a don't-hold-your-breath scenario has become a bated-breath affair. Here are a few of the releases soundtracking minimal fans' campaign of hope. All serve as reminders that electronic music is only as apolitical as you want it to be.

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

I've been in the mood for a certain strain of '90s electronic music lately. The records I'm thinking of were often considered "home-listening electronica," though they were firmly grounded in the club culture of their day: deep and sensuous, they privileged harmony and melody as much as rhythm, and no matter the techniques they employed—sampling, breakbeats, drum machine sequences, analog synthesizers, digital sound design—they always let the sound itself dictate the final form. If we're going to have a revival of this stuff—and I hope we do—we could do worse by way of preparing than to dig out some of the classics of Peacefrog's catalog. The U.K. label has roamed far and wide since its founding in 1991, moving from acid house to hard techno and on through a range of Detroit and Chicago styles; these days, it's putting out José González and Nouvelle Vague. But there was a moment in the mid-'90s where Peacefrog, along with R&S Apollo, essentially set the standard for deep, emotive techno—to borrow a Black Dog title I cited last week, you could call it "ambiance with teeth."

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Also known as Black Dog Productions, the Black Dog came up amidst the crazily productive musical chaos of Sheffield in the early days of rave. Beginning in 1989, they crafted a handful of ambitious, wide-ranging EPs (mostly for GPR and their own eponymous imprint) that incorporated breakbeats and electro-funk into gorgeous, streamlined house and techno in clear debt to Chicago and Detroit. Working with a tidy toolbox, they forged analog synths, drum machines and samplers into a powerful, emotive sound by turns tender and tenacious. (Their track title "Ambience With Teeth" just about sums it up.) By 1993's The Cost EP for GPR and the Bytes album for Warp, their increasingly variable tempos and time signatures would move away from straight techno toward a more fractured, abstract sound. Their approach would eventually come to be known as IDM, or "intelligent dance music"; it's fair to say that along with Autechre and Aphex Twin, the Black Dog round out IDM's Holy Trinity. But they're also the genre's most direct link to another, earlier pantheon: Detroit's first generation of techno producers, whose augmented chords and steely sequences directly informed the Black Dog's melodic sensibilities.

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

There often seems to be an aesthetic divide between electronic-music scenes in the U.K. and Germany, but that's not the case with London's Freerange label, co-run by Jamie Odell (aka Jimpster and Audiomontage). The record's early releases drew inspiration from a range of places—Paris, Chicago, Detroit, New York and of course London itself—and carved out a loose, lush sound that ranged from pumping deep house to the off-kilter funk of West London broken beat. Their more recent records, from producers Stimming, pursue the same sense of sumptuousness, but show traces of German minimal techno's precision sonics. (Stimming, appropriately, is from Hamburg; Freerange has also reached out to Finland, Sweden and even Allston, MA in recent A&R efforts.) Despite the fact that the label has been around since 1996, Freerange don't seem to enjoy the profile you might expect, which is odd: after all, you can hear their influence all over the new German deep house being championed by artists like Âme and Dixon. Here, a few choice cuts from the label: for more Freerange, see Square One, Shur-I-Kan and Palm Skin Productions, for starters; for more recent releases, check out Pezzner, Roberto Rodriguez and Manuel Tur, whose Vebanque EP is especially strong.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Classic is back! The label, run by Chicago house mainstay Derrick Carter and U.K. house maverick Luke Solomon (of the duo Freaks), shut down in 2005, but not for the usual reasons. Instead, having begun with catalog number 100 and run, via reverse numerical order, down to 000, they pulled the plug on the series, and Classic became what its name had proclaimed all along. Now, finally, the label has made much of its back catalog available digitally. There's a wealth of material to revisit, from the crossover hits (Isolee's "Beau Mot Plage," Blaze's "Lovelee Dae," Markus Nikolai's "Bushes") to powerful, unconventional house tracks from Red Nail, Rob Mello, Gemini, DJ Sneak and many more. Here are a few of my favorites from over the years.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Alex Ridha's Boysnoize label has just announced its first compilation, the unobtrusively titled BNR Vol. 1. This is welcome news, and not just because it's always fun to see where Paul Snowden (of "Wasted German Youth" and "Minimal My Ass" fame) will take his Futura Bold theme and variations next. (In terms of graphic design, Boysnoize is sort of like the maximal-techno equivalent of Perlon.)

Ridha (who records as Boys Noize) and his label often get lumped in with Ed Banger and their ilk, largely for his fondness for overdriven synthesizers, and the way he makes his tracks seem to heave like a bellows, sucking all the air out of the room with every yawning chord. But Ridha, who hails from Hamburg and lives in Berlin, has a more purist dance-floor instinct than many of his peers: Chicago house and grinding German techno play significant roles in his music, which is as minimalist in its structure as it is maximalist in its attitude. The compilation is due out September 29; read on for some Boys Noize-related highlights to listen to now.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Labor Day, schmabor day: heading back to work or school doesn't have to entail a return to real life. For Stateside readers, two September festivals, New York's Minitek and Seattle's Decibel, are about to bookend the country with advanced beats and high spirits. And while Ibiza's summer season is drawing to a close, there's no shortage of high octane tracks to carry us kicking and screaming into the fall, wherever we may be.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Despite my undying love for techno, there are some mornings I just can't bring myself to stare another 4/4 beat in the face. Especially on days like this one, in Barcelona, when a sticky, Mediterranean pall hangs over everything like a soggy lead blanket. Fortunately, the new Stereolab album, Chemical Chords, has woven a magical pillow around my head, protecting me from oonce-oonce shockwaves. Full of short pop gems far more condensed than the band's Krautrock-trance jams of yore, the record makes for the perfect escape. (It feels a little like returning to a place that, as a child, struck you as enormous and baffling and spangled with sequins. Now, as an adult, it's still just as glittery, but the proportions have shrunk.) There's still plenty of strangeness on the album: in "One Finger Symphony," side-winding horn blasts echo the Ethiopian jazz of the Ethiopiques series. In that spirit, then, here are three suggestions for gooey electronic-pop goodness.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

(Photo by Kim Hiorthoy)

Autumn's approach means the arrival of some of the year's most anticipated albums. For fans of contemporary disco, next week is the week as Lindstrom's new album, Where You Go I Go Too, finally arrives. Released on Smalltown Supersound -- the Norwegian label that's home to acts like Bjørn Torske, 120 Days, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Tussle, Jazzkammer, Jaga Jazzist et al -- Where You Go is by far the most "avant" of Lindstrom's recordings so far. The opening track is almost a half-hour long, and another runs to almost 16 minutes. (In fact, there are only three songs on the whole album.) Beyond that, the record is far less stereotypically "disco" than most of Lindstrom's work until now: gone are the oonce-oonce beats and the randy handclaps, and in their place are chugging arpeggios that construct great, arcing forms that feel almost architectural in nature. Influenced by synth addicts like Manuel Gottsching and Jan Hammer, it's sprawling, ambitious and, not to put too fine a point on it, breathtaking. To tide you over 'til next week, then, here are three of Lindstrom's best jams to date.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

You know what's been strange about this season? There hasn't been a monster hit from Alter Ego, nor from its more visible member Roman Flügel. (His partner, Jörn Elling Wuttke, keeps a much lower solo profile.) For a while there, the Frankfurt musicians set the tone for the summer: in 2004, with Alter Ego's bruising "Rocker," and then again in 2005 with Flügel's "Geht's Noch?" After kitting out "Rocker" with remixes from the likes of dub-stepper Plasticman, Eric Prydz and more, Alter Ego returned at the end of 2007 with Why Not?!, a cheeky slab of aggro electro-techno, but none of that album's singles managed to take off in quite the same way. This spring, Alter Ego released What's Next?!, a collection of remixes from the last LP. The title seems to suggest a certain degree of top-of-their-game anxiety, which might be warranted: even reworks from such hot properties as Supermayer, Joakim, Modeselektor and Carl Craig haven't generated much interest in the record. What's next might just be a return to the underground values that have always dominated Flügel's labels Klang, Ongaku and Playhouse. The truth is, Flügel's and Alter Ego's hits have always felt like flukes. Instead of waiting for another chart-topper, here's some back catalog to check out.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Last month, New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones lamented that there's not yet a notable "song of the summer" (or as NY Mag explained it, a new "Umbrella"). Back in May, I had suggested a few tracks to him that I suspected would be big on dance floors this summer. The sad truth of the matter is that I've barely been clubbing in the past few months. But the positions of these tracks on DJ charts and in sales rankings suggest that all of these tunes are getting big play—as though you couldn't figure that out from their sonics alone.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

In just six years, Berlin's Get Physical label has built itself into a powerhouse operation, thanks largely to the crowd-pleasing anthems by its flagship acts Booka Shade (who in May released their third album, The Sun & the Neon Light) and M.A.N.D.Y. Fewer people know about Kindisch, the Get Physical sub-label reserved for slightly more eccentric fare. Like Get Physical, no single sound identifies Kindisch; but just as the former leans towards bold, brassy melodies, the latter generally favors the leaner frame of minimal techno and off-kilter house.

Matchbox, U Can Get Sonar (Kindisch)
Gavin Herlihy, Opium Haze (Kindisch)

Of Kindisch's recent releases, Matchbox's "U Can Get Sonar" comes the closest in spirit to Get Physical's output. The track's well-tempered structure and mood both follow from the sultry, slightly sinister music of M.A.N.D.Y. and Booka Shade (and the same goes for the B-side's velvety "Persuasion"). Not so Gavin Herlihy's "Opium Haze," one of the label's bigger hits so far: scaly and not particularly smooth, it's one lumbering beast of a tune, and while it may be possessed of a nicely economical bassline, whatever it saves there it spends on ragged percussion, drunken flutes and animal howls. It's gloriously excessive in its range, and yet it still sounds somehow tidy.

by Philip Sherburne

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

In underground house and techno, 2008's defining trope is the one-chord chug: a bouncing, syncopated pattern that recasts rave stabs as cotton swabs. That it's being done to death is evident from the current beef between Aril Brikha and Shlomi Aber. (The former accuses the latter of copying his own "Groove La Chord" for Aber's "Efrat," and while there are troubling similarities, in a larger sense, it's hard to say what separates either of them significantly from the dozens of pumping, neo-Detroit house tracks of the season.) Fortunately, as in all of dance music's enduring tropes, canny artists have found ways to use the constraint in a way that doesn't limit possibility. Three recent singles take the one-chord form in radically different directions.

Ane Brun, "Headphone Silence" Remixes (Objektivity)

Dennis Ferrer's New York-based Objektivity label regularly keeps the sound fresh, though, passing the post-disco pump of Ron Trent and Chez Damier through Basic Channel's dubbed-out filters before anchoring the gauzy swirl with Afro-Latin percussion and crisp, stomping drum machines. The Martinez Brothers' trance-inducing "My Repetition" might be Objektivity's definitive statement on the style—or at least it was until May, when Objektivity released these two remixes of the Norwegian singer Ane Brun's "Headphone Silence." Part of what makes both mixes—by Ferrer himself and Berliners Henrik Schwartz and Dixon—stand out is the interplay between ground and figure: in each version, bubbling chords pitter-patter like rain on a lake while Brun, sounding a bit like Lamb's Louise Rhodes, sings long, improvisatory phrases that bob and weave around the (virtually unchanging) changes. It's hard to say which is more hypnotic: the background's ceaseless churn or Brun's spellbinding delivery, which filters a snake charmer's wiles through English folk song.