90 best electronic music albums of 2021: Mouse On Mars, Nala Sinephro, Nightmares On Wax, Perila & Rat Heart

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)

Subterranean spookiness. Aaargh! Corroded hip hop beats. Woooo! Machine-gun electronic glitches. Lawks! Manchester / Wigan DJ Tom Boogizm’s superbly lo-fi album of crushed beats sits somewhere between RP Boo snoozing under his duvet and Actress having an especially grumpy session with a steel plate folding machine. Certainly one of this year's more pleasant surprises, and the winner of the Best Sudden Scream On An Album award 2021. AAAAAAAAARGH. Love it.

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