Best electronic albums of 2017: four

4 – Shinichi Atobe – From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art (DDS)

Give me eggs, flower and fairy dust, and I'll bake you a cake. You may want to spit it into the bin, but it will contain all the right ingredients. Even if the end result was lacking, it is a cake.

Cakes contain fairy dust, right?

Give me the ingredients to produce house music, and I might produce something okay given the right YouTube instructional videos and Ableton training sessions. Those that have heard my 2012 recorded output may argue that....

However, some people can take basic ingredients and make something amazing.

I present to you the simple dubby house rhythms of From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art. Atobe is a Japanese producer clouded in mystery, but I would love to know why he, say, plonked the snarling air-gun percussion over the terribly sad Republic - it's a stroke of genius.

From the glimmering work-out of Regret to the echoing shimmy of closer First Plate 3, this collection of rediscovered old tracks is full of sparkling, driving techno in the vein of Jon Hopkins and Four Tet. It works more slowly - no builds or swoops here - but the result is no less rewarding.

I bet Shinichi Atobe uses fairy dust in his cakes. No easy streams to embed, so here's a YouTube rip of Republic. Give it time...



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