Welcome to Producers Corner, our new video series in which we grill our favorite producers about their mysterious craft while following them around their natural habitat: the studio, of course. So far we've talked to folks like Pacific Northwest icon Phil Ek, fearless M.I.A. cohort Zakee and SF rock guru John Vanderslice. Today we make a home visit to Jimmy Tamborello, the electro-pop innovator who records as Dntel, has worked with the likes of Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes, and is also one-half of celebrated indie-pop duo The Postal Service. He tells us why he prefers working from home (who doesn’t?), how to deal with writer’s block (buy something!), and why it’s better to work alone (you feel free to do dumb stuff). It’s all brought to you by ASUS and Intel. Enjoy.
The Cleveland trio 
Dubstep really isn't made for albums. That's not to say that dubstep artists haven't made some fine long-players. But the music's cold-sweat intensity is best experienced in a long, rolling rush, from bass riff to bass riff. To facilitate that visceral immersion in the deep end, we've created a brand-new radio station, The Lowdown: Dubstep and Bass. Here you'll find every variation of low-end pressure, from 
Synthesizer freaks will be stoked this month, whether it's for the cosmic frequencies that Emeralds' Steve Hauschildt harnesses on his new album for Kranky, or the Day-Glo arpeggios and cartoon trance of Rustie's audacious debut album for Warp. Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin actually moves away from the supersaturated synths of his previous work, but his new record's cryptic vignettes are still a treat for fans of well-tempered analog sound. And the dark drones of Sandwell District's glowering Feed Forward, finally given a digital release, insert coldwave keyboards into techno at its most austere.
With Rhapsody turning 10 years old next month, let's flash back exactly a decade to salute the class of 2001 — the generation that brought us, for better or for worse, the hipster.
A week ago, Amsterdam's rain-slicked streets filled up with DJs, industry types and hangers-on for the Amsterdam Dance Event, one of the club world's biggest confabs. There were panels and photo ops, champagne toasts and all-night ragers. It would have been the perfect opportunity for the city's Delsin imprint to crow in celebration of its 15th anniversary.
Rhapsody named 
An annual celebration of the legacy of synthesizer inventor and engineer Robert Moog, Moogfest might seem like an odd place for a classic rock fan to search for the rawk. But I have my reasons. 
Deep house never really goes out of fashion; somewhere, there'll always be someone playing jazzy chords over a disco beat. For whatever reason, though, the style is particularly hot right now, with artists from Los Angeles to the Ukraine sinking their teeth into the slower tempos and moody melodies of dance music at its most romantic.
Only in its second year, Moogfest has quickly become one of the United States' more diverse and cutting-edge music festivals. It's also one of the country's most scenic. Taking place in Asheville, N.C., on Halloween weekend (October 28-30), the three-day event will be awash in the fiery reds and incandescent yellows that dot the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains in late autumn.
Electronic dance music has been enjoying an unusual amount of exposure lately, reflecting the music's rising stateside popularity. The bulk of the spotlight, though, tends to fall on the crossover sensations — your 
I'm off to Poland in a couple of weeks for 
Paris' Ed Banger label has a certain reputation for, if not actual bad-boy behavior, then a certain louche, wanton excess -- from their overdriven club bangers to the frenzied response they elicit from their fans. From 
Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin might seem like an odd pairing. Ford's group 
Since releasing its first strange transmissions in 2004 and '05, Los Angeles-based Not Not Fun Records has become one of the underground's most exciting, prolific and influential labels. Their aesthetic is commonly described as "hypnagogic pop," a tag that does a nice job of capturing the gooey and decayed fusion of synthesizer music, psychedelia, dub, lo-fi rock, exotica and '80s dance pop favored by much of the label's roster. We're talking freaky heavies with names like Sun Araw, Peaking Lights, Robedoor, Maria Minerva, LA Vampires, High Wolf, Sex Worker, Dylan Ettinger and Psychic Reality.
It's not official, but Labor Day pretty much sealed the deal: summer is over. And so we turn from the fading season's gregarious hits and focus our attention on slightly more esoteric fare. There are plenty of sunny grooves to be found in records from the Swiss house producer Agnes, Germany's Permanent Vacation label and the rising London talent Maya Jane Coles. But this is music for the back rooms rather than the festival tents — especially when introverts like Lukid and Legowelt get involved. 
In case you were wondering, yes, I was one of those people who would spend months perfecting a mixtape, design a collage of artwork for it, and then shyly hand over the cassette tape to some crush I mooned over in hopes that she would get my special "message." Don't front like you didn't do that, too.
Months after its release, I still have trouble entirely wrapping my head around 
Simon Reynolds would probably have a field day with this month's roundup of new releases in electronic music. His new book, Retromania, examines the grip that the past has on the contemporary imagination, and most of my picks this month have a firm purchase on one bygone style or another. Portland's Soft Metals give New Wave its umpteenth iteration; Morning Factory and Two Armadillos both turn their hands to deeply classicist deep house. And Brooklyn's Laurel Halo makes lush, psychedelic electronica reminiscent of the '90s output of the Rephlex and R&S labels.
"Brostep" isn't a real genre -- it's a tongue-in-cheek term for dubstep's most aggressive wing, which has a propensity for serrated bass riffs and, sometimes, a reform-school sense of humor. Like chillwave, witch house and crabcore, it's a tag with which few artists wish to be identified. But that doesn't keep it from being a useful shorthand for dubstep at its gnarliest and tooth-gnashingest. (It just as well could have been called chainsaw 'n' bass, or perhaps testoster-tone.)
There's nothing like a major move to make you appreciate cloud-based music. As I wrote last week, my mom is selling her house, so I've been tasked with going through the approximately 3,000 records I have stored in her basement, and figuring out which to sell and which to ship back to Berlin, where they'll join another couple thousand pieces of vinyl already eating up all the available floor space. (My girlfriend has told me, in no uncertain terms, that we have space for exactly 1,600 more—that's the number of records that fits in Ikea's 4x4 "Expedit" model, the shelving of choice for DJs and hoarders the world over. So the culling is rather grueling.)
Even for a 40-year-old gawker like myself, it was easy to feel welcome at last month's Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-night bacchanal where as many as 75,000 ravers wearing beads, body paint and, often, very little else came together at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway to hear some of the biggest names in electronic dance music. That's not just because virtually everyone there was unusually friendly and unfailingly polite. (Even police officers at the scene reported kids giving them high-fives throughout the course of the dusk-til-dawn extravaganza — a marked contrast from an earlier E.D.C. event in Dallas marred by multiple hospitalizations and one death.) No, it's because no matter where you went, you were bound to hear 
Welcome back to 
Welcome to another edition of 
This week brings us one of the year's most anticipated albums: London's masked producer SBTRKT has finally arrived with his debut full-length. Featuring a diverse and wildly talented bunch of singers (including Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano), it's a stunning realignment of pop along bass music's principles — or perhaps vice versa. Recent Ghostly signing Com Truise and the Oneohtrix Point Never-related Ford & Lopatin, meanwhile, prove that there's still plenty of future left in '80s electro pop, while Sarcastic Disco hero DJ Harvey brings us bleary-eyed Balearica with his Locussolus project, and Berlin's Trickski puts a slow-motion spin on house music.
One aspect of summer that never fails to surprise is that the year is now nearly half over: we are closer to 2011's year-end critics-poll season than we are to 2010's. You've started drafting your own Top 10 list already, right? No? You haven't? Don't panic: here, Rhapsody's genre editors each pick their five favorite records of the year so far. How many will survive until November? Which ones will be replaced by Lil Wayne, by Beyoncé, by the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark? Time will tell, but for now, here are our picks for the year's best, half a year early. 
Electronic pop is the most vocal that it's been in years. Between acts like Planningtorock, Austra and Glasser, we're riding a wave of strong new voices wrapped artfully in idiosyncratic sonics and synth-pop productions. Artists like James Blake and Gang Gang Dance, meanwhile, are using vocals as waveforms to be manipulated, tracing the human/machine interface with wires wrapped around vocal cords.
Last month, we highlighted tracks in our roundup of the top 10 electronic releases of the month (or thereabouts); this time, we're mixing it up between LPs, EPs and double-A-side singles. Why not?
Sprockets aside, comedy and electronic music don't initially seem like they have much in common. But there's actually a whole spectrum of the electronic genre that's shot through with humor, whether it's the goofball antics of 
We must admit that Tuesday is our favorite day of the week here at Rhapsody: that's when new releases come out. Thankfully, the next three months of Tuesdays look absolutely glorious, full of fresh music from ukulele-brandishing rockers, electronic pioneers, strident country hit makers, unabashed pop divas, unrepentant metalheads, CCM luminaries, contenders for Best Rapper Alive honors, soul superstars and, of course, Lady Gaga. Here's the best of what's to come.
Here on Rhapsody's The Mix, we have the habit of emphasizing albums over singles. But when it comes to electronic music, that strategy kind of misses the boat, given that dance music, in particular, is a singles genre. 
Chicago's Kranky label has had a handle on its aesthetic from the very beginning, when albums from 
This week, we're running down some of the best and brightest new electronic releases from the past few weeks. Our roundup is heavy on left-field pop, whether it's the lyrical minimalism of James Blake and Nicolas Jaar, the dubby punk of Paris Suit Yourself, or the lush textures of Toro Y Moi, but there's also pipe-organ ambiance from Tim Hecker, thumping analog techno from Rude 66, and even garage-rock covers of Detroit techno classics, courtesy of the Dirtbombs. Fans of Radiohead at their most abstract should pay special attention to the winsome sounds of Stateless, a promising new act signed to Ninja Tune.
Dubstep has been crossing over into pop music for a while now, but in all the potential ways the genre could have developed, perhaps the most unexpected line of flight is traced by 
It's fairly apparent that the contemporary dance-pop that currently has its robo-hand (like 
France's 
Along with resolutions and returned gifts, January brings hope. Some yearn for world peace, others want a viable alternative to fossil fuels that breaks our dependency on Middle East oil. And then there are those who pray for jobs for the unemployed or adequate health care for the elderly and poor. Us, we'd take new albums by Justin Timberlake, OutKast or Pavement — or maybe better (or worse) storylines from Glee. Below, you'll find all of our wishes for music in 2011.
Last year was an astonishingly good one for electronic music, and 2011 is looking like it's no slouch either. House music and dubstep are set to be the principal poles around which everything revolves this year, but don't expect that to mean that things will stay the same. The blogosphere is already agog over James Blake, a young U.K. producer who started off making experimental beats, amplified his buzz via an unexpected Feist cover, and will soon drop a lush, vocal-centric album with huge crossover potential. Find out what's in store for Blake plus new material from Isolee, Boys Noize, Siriusmo, Wolf + Lamb, Soul Clap, and Kode 9 with the Space Ape — plus an unexpected reissue on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label.
With every new year comes the promise of great new music. Those hopes are nearly always well founded, though inevitably there are also some disappointments. Here we've assembled what we think are the most promising prospective releases for 2011, broken out by genre. In the comments field, let us know your expectations for them, and whether there are some albums that you're looking forward to that aren't on this list.
In putting together our list of the year's best electronic music, the criteria were, as always, rather fuzzy. These days, it's harder to find an indie band that doesn't use synthesizers than one with at least a token keyboard; hell, even some metal bands use laptops on stage these days. And when it comes to chart pop and hip-hop, those genres are every bit as CPU-intensive as the most avowedly digital dance music.
Aside from some characteristically superlative-drenched praise from NME ("If Tron: Legacy is among the most anticipated sequels in all of history, this score blasts away all previous frontiers of excitement for what a movie soundtrack can be"), early reviews of 
It was as if nobody wanted to admit it was 2010. MGMT released a paean to '60s psyche, Ariel Pink looked back at the '70s and '80s through rose-colored, lo-fi glasses and Broken Bells and Cee-Lo dipped their buckets in the ever-deepening well of '70s soul. LCD Soundsystem plundered '80s avant disco, while Robyn revisited the halcyon days of Swedish pop. On the other end, Janelle Monae peered into the future and saw messianic robots, while Flying Lotus crafted an album that mined the sublime amidst fractured electro future shock. The albums that strained for the zeitgeist -- Kanye West's angry, self-obsessed Fantasy and Arcade Fire's meditation on the mundane crunch of suburban life -- were the most emotionally desperate and revealing. There was more great music, as always, and we've compiled our top 50 albums right here.
Maybe it says something about 2010 that the year's most ubiquitous and demographic-defying song was a chirpy '70s soul retread entitled "F*ck You," or that Kanye West's "Power," the most ambitious pop single of the year, paraphrased a quote from Malcom X in an effort to deify hip-hop's reigning enfant terrible. It was that type of year, people, and the songs that we selected as our top 50 tracks are strange, funky, heartfelt and confrontational slices of magnificent pop music. Whether you agree or not, leave us a comment, and don't forget that you can listen to a playlist of all these tracks right 
November and December often seem to be bountiful months for electronic music, much to the consternation of music writers who find themselves scrambling to re-sort their year-end lists. Teebs' Ardour, released on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label, had that effect on me: fusing the left-field beats of his Los Angeles scene with Gamelan-like bell tones, it offers the kind of hybrid between hip-hop and ambient music that I've always wanted to hear, but never thought possible.
Whatever its actual popularity, dubstep is one of the most actively watched scenes right now, with everyone from 
Now that chillwave is ebbing, there's a new fly-by-night micro-genre upon us. It's been called "witch house," for its occult iconography and its pilferings from electronic dance music; its artists are sometimes called "triangle bands" for their obsession with the shape, often including triangles, crosses and other charged (and Google-proofed) symbols in their very names: consider Lake R∆dio, Gr†LLGR†LL, or the inscrutable ///▲▲▲\\\. (The three-sided meme is hardly limited to witch house, however, as you'll see from this 
One of 
One of the funny things about editing Rhapsody's electronica/dance genre is that I tend to take in a lot of strays that wander in from the cold — artists who don't necessarily make strictly electronic dance music, but whose use of dance tropes or digital techniques earn them an at least partially "electronic" tag. The fall season, when labels ramp up their release schedules, has seen a bounty of releases that straddle worlds this way, from Robyn's sparkling Scando-pop to El Guincho's fourth-world psychedelia. Including Junip's new album in this bunch might be a stretch — the presence of Jose Gonzales virtually ensures that you'll file this one alongside similarly folksy singer-songwriters — but the Swedish musician's work has, after all, been remixed for the Balearic disco crowd. In any case, this one's got a Moog on it. That's gotta count for something.
L.A.'s sprawling community of musicians and producers — at least the ones who tend to fuse electronic and hip-hop into a new sound often classified as "beat" or "bass" (as well as less-respected and kitschy terms like "lazer bass" and "wonky") — have flooded the market this year. Few national scenes have garnered as much attention, whether it's 
In a sign that the industry is banking on electronic beats, 
August is always a slow news cycle, so it's somehow fitting that this month's big viral sensation was about a really slow song.
I was probably 12 or 13 when I first discovered 
Do we do an injustice to a work of art when we use it for purely instrumental purposes? The conventional wisdom might say yes: surely there's something unseemly about a dude who throws on 
Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the end of this post, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you're not a member, 
Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the end of this post, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you're not a member, 
If 
Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the bottom of this page, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you’re not a member, 
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.
Amsterdam is famous for a bunch of stuff -- beautiful architecture, stunning canals, fried food vending machines, and something else that's escaping us... -- but it's also got some great music. We hooked up with Dutch producer 
Listen to all your favorite artists whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. If you don't have one, 
There's recently been a spate of classic '90s electronica acts returning with new albums after considerable absences.
He's a tricky one, James Murphy. We knew that, of course—his whole career as