Best electronic albums of 2017: assorted strangeness

We're off! This year's top 20 is well underway. Let's divert for a moment into an assorted selection of oddballs that didn't quite make the final list.

I enjoyed the nervy ambience and reverberating rhythms of Stargate (Rinse) by Rinse FM's new kid on the block Celestial Trax. The third album from Perc called Bitter Music (Perc Trax) was wonderfully miserable, despite the hilarious "why don’t you just stick them on" sample on I Just Can't Win (available on the CD version). And warm the cockles of your wotsits with Hannah Peel's amazing electro-brass adventure Mary Casio: Journey To Cassiopeia (My Own Pleasure).

Want something dark and strange? Listen to the shuddering drones of Ben Frost's The Centre Cannot Hold (Mute Records), or the techno lost in dark fog on F Ingers's Awkwardly Blissing Out (Blackest Ever Black), or the Maori instruments getting reduced to shards in Fis and Rob Thorne's Clear Stones (Subtext).

And finally for this tiny section of also-rans, Duran Duran Duran's Duran (Power Vacuum) gave us an endless rave, Bambooman's Whispers (Accidental Jnr) mixed hip hop, house and lounge but in a good way, I liked the vocal-smothered chaos of Chino Amobi's PARADISO (NON) and although I try not to include reissues in this round-up, if you plump for Randomize's ¿Como Se Divertirán Los Insectos? (A Harmless Deed) then you'll end up with Eno-esque experimentalism from 1980s Spain. How can you refuse?





Scroll all of the best 2017 electronic albums by clicking here.