Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents five more brilliant albums:
Mouse On Mars – AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) (Thrill Jockey)
I had a fascinating chat with Mouse On Mars earlier this year about their science fiction-ish project with scholar Louis Chude-Sokei. As I wrote in a review of the album, it's "an inspired work that, thanks to the very human inspiration of Chude-Sokei’s cyborgian studies, has more interesting things to say than 'bleep bloop'." A very entertaining listen. A special mention too for Jan St. Werner's other album Imperium Droop, which was a great collaboration with improvisational drummer Kid Millions.
Nala Sinephro – Space 1.8 (Warp)
Raised in Belgium and now based in London, Sinephro is a classically-trained musician who just happens to have produced one of the nicest sounding, folksy ambient albums of the year. This is technically a jazz work, a genre for which I have very little love. However, armed with sultry piano and mad skills with a pedal harp, Sinephro strays expertly into electronics and effects to produce a woozy meditation more akin to a field recording album.
Nightmares On Wax – Shout Out! To Freedom... (Warp)
George Evelyn's energy is incredible: a one-man consciousness guru. It's no surprise one of the track titles here is Imagineering, this album having arisen from "life-affirming realisations". Actually, it doesn't necessarily stray from the car-boot soul he's known for, but the truly smokin' delight is the input from his many collaborators: Greentea Peng's flouride warning on Wikid Satellites is superb. Head-nodding beats, smooth soul vocals, Nightmares On Wax doing Nightmares On Wax. Nice one, George.
Perila – How Much Time is it Between You and Me? (Smalltown Supersound)
I once dropped a can of WD-40 lubricant. The can burst and the resulting high-powered instant fog of oil created an all-consuming fluid miasma that coated the room I was in and the two rooms adjacent. This glassy, glacial ambient album is that miasma. Tectonic plates of delicate instrumentation float endlessly in what Perila calls a "silence prism". I'm calling it a quietness can. An all-flooding, all-fogging quietness can.
Rat Heart – Rat Heart (Shotta Tapes)
This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021. Read it all here.
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