60 best electronic music albums of 2021: Foodman, Nils Frahm, Howie Lee, Illuvia & Jacques Greene

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

Foodman – Yasuragi Land (Hyperdub)

Takahide 'Foodman' Higuchi comes from Japan's footwork scene, so there are rhythmic trills peppered throughout this curious genre-bending album for London's Hyperdub label. The album is as abstract as heck, mixing Japanese environmental music with an improvisational multi-track set-up. The tracks feel episodic. There's no bass. The loops come laden with memorable hooks, but they're bitten through with hesitations and land as lightly as a feather. You'll not hear anything else like this. Extraordinary.

F.S. Blumm & Nils Frahm – 2X1 = 4 (LEITER) 

An underground German producer teams up with a classical maestro for an experiment in dub? Yes please. Over to my review of this album for Electronic Sound: "We’re talking bull-by-the-horns electronic dub. Blumm brings his experience from his duo Quasi Dub Development, where a tuba did the bass work... All along, Frahm’s melodies ooze with sadness. Like the confused maths of its title, it shouldn’t work but it does." The dub bits really, really work. With echo and everything. 

Howie Lee – Birdy Island (Mais Um Discos)

Beijing-based visual artist Howie Lee based the concept of this album around an imaginary floating theme park in which birds and ghostly spirits (I presume) go on the log flume together. It's suitably mystical and magical, with lilting accordions and jazzy drums lazily seeing the afternoon through. Imagine sparrows running a candy floss stall, or blue tits operating a Wurlitzer. Apparently, he's usually clubbier than this: we're certainly in pastoral territory. Not a rollercoaster in sight.

Illuvia – Iridescence Of Clouds (A Strangely Isolated Place)

Having written music journalism as long as I have, I'm pretty sure I've heard everything. And then someone like Ludvig 'Illuvia' Cimbrelius comes along. On the face of it, this is a sweeping ambient album typical of the excellent fayre produced by the A Strangely Isolated Place label (check their 9128 streams). But then... the drum and bass. The distant drum and bass, as if farted out by passing angels. An extraordinary sonic technique that already has me regretting not placing this further up my list.

Jacques Greene – ANTH01 (LuckyMe)

I had to break my rule about not including reissues in my best-of list because, oh my giddy trousers, this is so damn good. This is a collection of out-of-print records from earlier in Greene's career. The sparky house of Faded and the Brandy-sampling garage of The Look sound so in tune with recent dance trends, this might as well be brand new material. As jolly Jacques puts it himself, "time became quite slippery in the past year and a half." Too right.

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