30 best electronic music albums of 2021: Pye Corner Audio, Ruth Mascelli, Ryan James Ford & Skee Mask

Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents four more brilliant albums:

Pye Corner Audio – Entangled Routes (Ghost Box)

Martin Jenkins, yes he sounds like a solicitor, completes his trilogy of albums. His last work Hollow Earth was one of my 2019 highlights, with me proclaiming that it deserved "its own police hat". I must have been drunk. This is dramatic analogue techno encased in marshmallows. Imagine a spaceship gliding through space, but it has no edges. It just seems to absorb everything that's around it. And this is the genius of Jenkins: he makes something ethereal and gossamer floaty sound so dang weighty. Please don't go back and read that old blog post: I bang on about arresting aliens or something. Honestly. As drunk as a pig in absinthe.

Ruth Mascelli – A Night At The Baths (Disciples)

Normally a synth wielder for New Orleans punkers Special Interest, Mascelli steps out into the hot night for an assortment of buzzing club techno custom made for that 4am pill-fuelled dance slog. Ruth says they got their inspiration from "bathhouses, dark rooms and gay clubs", and you can certainly feel the sweat pouring off the subterranean basslines and deep, deep drums. Ruth also talks about "cavernous sex clubs". Indeed, a Bandcamp reviewer writes "My bf has f*cked me to this album at least 5 times this weekend". Goodness me, you'll spill your Babycham, mate. Techno for punks. Sexy punks.

Ryan James Ford – Exshaw (DUB Recordings) 

Ryan James's debut named after his Canadian childhood home, or more specifically the forests that surrounded his home. I don't know what you get in Canadian woodland. Badgers? Elk? Polar bears on scooters? Probably all three. He has a tasty way of juggling breakbeats against a background of gloriously pitched ambience: imagine Aphex Twin's On remixed for a rave, with added club thuddery that grows growlier and more dominant throughout the album. Very good indeed. I was right about the woodland animals, by the way. The ominous Avant Guaze has a sound akin to a polar bear trying to nuzzle into a backpacker's soup flask. You'll never get it home on that scooter, mate.

Skee Mask – Pool (Ilian Tape)

2018's Compro was a corker, likened on this blog to that "little glint in a hippo’s eye when it wears its first tutu". What? This is not so much a dancing hippo as a step aerobics class by a bunch of miniature warthogs, each one dressed like its favourite soap opera star. There's not much to tie it all together, but you like the variety and weirdness of it all, and you don't doubt the energy everyone's putting in. Five, six, seven, oink! Pool takes in everything from pounding club bangers to squirrelly experimentalism, barely resting along the way. Squirrels? Where did they come from?

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021. Read it all here.