60 best electronic music albums of 2021: Alessandro Cortini, Andy Stott, Arca, Caro C & Cid Rim

The Top 90 becomes a Top 60. Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents five more brilliant albums:

Alessandro Cortini – SCURO CHIARO (Mute)

The Nine Inch Nails keyboardist custom built his own synthesiser for this solo album. Quite frankly, that's just showing off. It's a droning, peaceful work in which synth lines follow simple paths before building into something more intense: the micro-rhythmic climax of Corri, the buzzing swarm of Sempre. A pleasing listen, and no doubt benefitting from his recent work with the analogue master Daniel Avery. Custom built? Pffrt. Couldn't just get a Casio from Argos like a normal person, could he?

Andy Stott – Never The Right Time (Modern Love)

Is Andy Stott is rhyming slang for (a) beats so hot, (b) techno hotshot, or (c) Westlife he's not. Answers on a postcard to the usual address. Always innovative, this Manchester-based producer strikes a perfect balance between the ethereal and the electronic. Cocteau Twins wooziness against metronomic percussion. Dusted Autechre-isms against heavenly chords. Ghostly vocals courtesy of Alison Skidmore. And every album cover in black and white to match the industrial brutalism of his music. I like this a lot.

Arca – KICK ii (XL Recordings) 

Bjork’s favourite experimentalist released, like, a billion KICK albums at once. KICK i was last year's lockdown album. And now we have four more (slightly less than a billion, sorry). KICK ii does a kind of sun-bleached reggaeton. KICK iii is full of Spanish vibes. KICK iiii is all ghosts and witchcraft. And KICK iiiii does the hushed ASMR thing that sets my teeth on edge. I'm letting number ii get a place in my list because it's surprisingly accessible considering the contorted audio of her previous work. Also it's got a pretty impressive collaboration with Sia.

Caro C – Electric Mountain (self-released, I think)

Caro's fourth album was inspired by rock climbing – keen-eyed audience members will spot the use of a rock xylophone and carabinas in her live performances. In Electronic Sound, I called this a "cosmic space boogie", and it really is as uplifting as that sounds. "Motivational vocals add a maverick attitude, declaring 'we are magnificent!' and 'you are mighty like mountain'. This is no stock Insta-inspiration: Caro delivers the vocals like melted cheese over a toasted bed of ever-loosening percussion." Definitely worth a peak-- er, I mean, peek.

Cid Rim – Songs of Vienna (LuckyMe)

Previous album Material was lauded for its day-glo instrumentals, so it's a brave move for Cid Rim to switch to a more mainstream direction. Well. Kind of. This mix of gently psychedelic pop and club-friendly floor fillers are funk-lite, full of joyfully weaving synth lines and Animal Collective-happy songsmithery. Cid Rim is still having fun in the studio: tracks like Purgatory have LuckyMe style rhythmic drops, and there's pumping bass a-plenty. As radio friendly as ever: no bad thing.

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

Best electronic albums of 2019: mine's a 99! Mooo!

As my top ten favourite 2109 electronic music albums thunder across the internet like a pack of cows chasing an ice cream van, let's take a look at some ambient, classical-ish and pastoral albums that didn't quite make my final list.

Leading this longlist is A Winged Victory for the Sullen: the elegiac ambience of The Undivided Five (Ninja Tune) constantly reached for a perfect fifth chord: extra points for a track-title dig at Jacob Rees-Mogg. I liked what previous Fat Roland champion Clark was doing on his television theme album Kiri Variations (Throttle Records) – all a bit fancy. This year saw the joyous return of Telefon Tel Aviv with Dreams Are Not Enough (Ghostly International). Its track titles were to be read as a poem, but the true meaning came from the ever-expansive production design.

Also in my best-of-the-rest is Nils Frahm's All Melody (Erased Tapes), whose seventh studio album was classic Frahm with added trumpet. Parp! Tim Hecker gave us the rather coy Anoyo (Kranky), a brief ambient sojourn in which he was inspired, not for the first time, by Japanese gagaku music. And Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Allesandro Cortini picked up a guitar for the first time in his solo career and drowned it with spine-tingling analogue fuzziness on Volume Massimo (Mute).

The ever-reliable Bibio went back to bucolic on Ribbons (Warp), with strings so lovely I'd wear them as a vest. The fact that Panda Bear guests on Teebs' lush Anicca (Brainfeeder) tells you exactly what that album sounds like: dreamy and exquisite. And the delicate glitches of Leif's Loom Dream (Whities) made me feel like I was getting razzed on fazoomy on a glacier's edge. Whatever the heck that means.