The Cleveland trio Emeralds may play at stoner affect, but slackers they ain't. These three ambient ambassadors from the noise underground are not only responsible for dozens of tapes, CDRs and "official" albums, they also pursue multiple side projects. Steve Hauschildt recently released one of 2011's finest electronic albums, Tragedy & Geometry, on the Kranky label. Mark McGuire has put out three albums on Editions Mego in the past 13 months, in addition to a steady stream of cassettes, CDRs and vinyl-only LPs. And John Elliott might be the most prolific of all: in addition to his array of solo projects and side groups (among them Mist, Imaginary Softwoods and the vividly named Colored Mushroom and the Medicine Rocks), he's also responsible for Spectrum Spools, a label offering an even broader view of Emeralds' brand of psychedelic synthesizer music.Rippling drones are at the core of the Spectrum Spools aesthetic, which remains heavily indebted to the blissed-out electronic fantasias of Klaus Schulze, Edgar Froese, Harald Grosskopf and other analog cosmonauts. (You wouldn't expect anything else from a guy who also records as Outer Space.) But the Spectrum Spools catalog — numbering an incredible nine albums so far, after just one year in operation — ventures far beyond the traditional limits of "cosmic" synth music. Container's LP is mutant techno in the vein of Rephlex's early-'90s records, pummeling and unhinged, while Temporal Marauder's Temporal Marauder Makes You Feel — allegedly a lost recording from the '70s by a Belgian musician with connections to Conny Plank — runs the gamut from
My playlist
Spectrum Spools: A Sampler features representative tracks from all Spectrum Spools' releases to date, so dig in and space out. Check out the whole catalog via the links below. 
Let's get this out of the way up front: I am no great fan of the Christmas season, although that manifests itself less in grinchitude than in mild indifference. (No, Fox News, I am not waging a war on Christmas; I just want to enjoy the ability to indulge or ignore it at my leisure, without being reminded that 'TIS THE SEASON every commercial break and/or city block.) Anyway, the same goes for Christmas music.
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.
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.
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 
Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin might seem like an odd pairing. Ford's group 
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. 
Erstwhile 
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 
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.
The 1995 film 
Nothing says "summer" quite like the murmur of the tide and the shrieks of seagulls wheeling in the setting sun.
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.
While there probably weren't too many high school seniors that made it past the velvet ropes, in 1978, Studio 54 shone like a beacon to kids dreaming of bright lights in the big city. Just a few years before, disco had been a resolutely underground thing, but by 1978 and 
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 
Chicago house never really goes out of fashion. Invented in the mid-'80s, it was a catalyst for both British rave culture and 
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. 
Talk about "Hands on a Hard Body": for a certain species of auto-shop student, back in 1995, tricked-out rides were raised to the level of an art form. And while all kinds of hip-hop fueled their subwoofers, surely the most potent strain was G-funk, with its slinky leads and suggestive bounce, rolling and purring like an El Dorado.
Chicago's Kranky label has had a handle on its aesthetic from the very beginning, when albums from 
Despite San Diego's reputation as a breeding ground for svelte, blond surfer types, it's also been home to plenty of musical misfits over the years — among them 
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.
Back in high school in the mid-'80s, I did drama: not in the sense of throwing hissy fits (though I probably threw my fair share) — I acted in school plays. The Man Who Came to Dinner, Brighton Beach Memoirs, that kind of thing. Backstage, in the dressing room, the cast would listen to music in the hours before the performance began. When my turn came to commandeer the boombox, I put in a tape of 
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 
France's 
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.
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 
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.
In a sign that the industry is banking on electronic beats, 
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, 
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.
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.
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 
Their album's not out for another three weeks, and all ears are on 
The music of many Trouble & Bass artists is yours to enjoy whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody
subscription. Click 
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. 
Lest there be any doubt about it, Lady Gaga wants us to know that her song "Poker Face" is about fantasizing about women when she's hooking up with men. (It's a double entendre, capiche?) Sure, you could write that off as merely an attempt to stir up a little controversy -- although, if it's a ploy, it pales in comparison with her teasing suggestion that she may or may not have hermaphroditic features. But Gaga has backed up her sexuality in interviews, insisting that "people are born the way they are," and she's vocal in her support for gay and lesbian communities. Whatever you may think of her music, it's a refreshingly different approach from Katy Perry, who flirts with Sapphos on "I Kissed a Girl" -- mostly for the benefit of her ego and her boyfriend -- and then gets regressive on "Ur So Gay," her ode to an insufficiently butch boyfriend. ("I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf" -- classy!)
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