30 best electronic music albums of 2021: Blanck Mass, Facta, Hannah Peel & Herrmann Kristoffersen

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

Blanck Mass – In Ferneaux (Sacred Bones Records)

When the Guardian reviewed this, they called it "the very definition of niche". I think that's code for "we don't quite get it". This is certainly Benjamin John Power doing something different, as he swaps his flesh-wobbling red-LED maximalism for something more serene. In two long phases, he leads us through sparkling streams of polished pads, through tinkling found sounds, through droning funereal organs, Scanner-style vocal wires. There are relatively few moments – although they are still there – where it feels like he is battering mechanical moles into your brain. Sounds niche. And I approve.

Facta – Blush (Wisdom Teeth) 

How did this drop out of my top ten? For flip's sake. Can someone get admin on the line? Here's a snippet from my review of this folky debut for Electronic Sound magazine. "Facta’s insanely good-natured debut is a woodland meander through placid pads and feet-tickling FM synths... On Deck’s cheery vibraphone recalls 808 State’s rosier moments, or last year’s triumphantly tropical Cape Cira from label partner K-Lone [see 2020's countdown]." Speaking of K-Lone, it does work as a sister album: this Balearic delight is another gleaming triumph for the Wisdom Teeth label. Well done, teeth fairies!

Hannah Peel – Fir Wave (My Own Pleasure)

Hannah Peel is well jammy. For this fourth album, she was given access to the Delia Derbyshire archives. She rebuilt that historic audio into a haunting Mercury Prize-shortlisted tribute to library music and nocturnal chill-out. Cycles of fuzzy synths pay homage to the likes of Global Communication, and the thrilling build on Ecovocative is pure Ulrich Schnauss. All the while, this is uniquely Peel, and you can easily draw a line of heritage to her ace spacy album Mary Casio. I presume she got permission for the Delia samples, and didn't break into the archive like the Pink Panther, the Oceans Eleven fellas or an especially naughty badger.

Herrmann Kristoffersen – Gone Gold (Bytes)

Over to my Electronic Sound writing again for this tribute to the classic Electronic Arts video game Need For Speed. (Yes, really. Apparently the Kristoffersen half of the partnership used to compose music for Nintendo.) "Unsurprisingly for something released on Bytes, named after the legendary Black Dog album, there’s more than a hint of Artificial Intelligence here. The nostalgia works: cue a montage of Playstations, Gameboys and blocky Designers Republic geometrics... There is widescreen emotion on Gone Gold, its wistful IDM washes as filmic as any modern cutscene." Vroom, vroom.

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

Best electronic albums of 2019: dub be good to you

Stop right now, thank you very much, I need some longlisted albums with a slightly gloomy touch. Here are more best-of-the-rest albums that didn't make the top 20 best albums of 2019 — and this time, we're going underground: pounding techno and dubby grime.

Dolenz's brutal and brilliant Lingua Franca (Exit Records) conjured up an imaginary sci-fi movie soundtrack expressed through nasty beats and buzzing bass. East Man switched to his Basic Rhythm moniker with some grime-gloamed frowning rhythms (try saying that six times fast) with On The Threshold (Planet Mu). On Ossia's debut album Devil's Dance (Blackest Ever Black), the dubby ambience was as much about the bass as the space around the bass.

MC Yallah's all-dominating delivery was easily matched by the tough beats of Debmaster on Kubali (Hakuna Kulala). Meanwhile, DJ Nigga Fox got positively techno tribal on Cartas Na Manga (Príncipe) and Ilian Tape stalwart Stenny included some killer club cuts on Upsurge (Ilian Tape) – listen to this if you like Skee Mask.

Beats not pounding enough for you? There were some big stompers on Ellen Allien's no-nonsense Alientronic (BPitch Control), while Nkisi's 7 Directions (UIQ) was all about the percussive Detroitian techno, and I'm still wonderfully haunted by the detached robotic vocals on PTU's Am I Who I Am (Trip).

Finally for this little section, there's Blanck Mass's Animated Violence Mild (Sacred Bones Records), an artist who won my number one prize back in 2015. Although a bit more on-the-nose than previous iterations, this album was perfect for blowing some cobwebs from your brain. And from your chest. And from the inner regions of your spleen. Yeesh.





Scroll the full best-of-2019 list here.

Angry ambience: Blanck Mass has a new writhing earworm

Blanck Mass's sound is so fatty, it's like sonic lard. You can feel it slithering down your ears, gloop after gloop, until it solidifies inside you. Look at it fester. It's beginning to writhe. Are those maggots or earworms?

All these are good things, by the way.

Benjamin John Power's Blanck Mass is about to cook up a new album called World Eater, and if the calories are as high as their last work Dumb Flesh (album of the year 2015), then give me a napkin and a spoon - I'm going in.

Have a taste of their first video from World Eater, seven minutes of angry ambience called Please. Did I do the eating metaphor right? Did I do well? Dammit, this has made me hungry.



Further Fats: Fake plastic CDs and eating too much cheese before writing a blog post (2008)

Further Fats: Best electronic albums of 2015 - Dumb Flesh (2015)

Best electronic albums of 2015: one

The road up until this point is a painful one. A story of my own failure. In 2010, I failed to give Luke Abbott the album of the year despite it clearly being the album that most moved me and made me trill with excitement for the future of music. In 2014, I yet again let my head rule my heart and I relegated Clark and Kiasmos despite either one deserving the number one position. The road up until this point is, frankly, a shambles.

In 2015, right here, right now, I will atone for my mistakes by making an utterly heart-felt decision. This year’s number one album is the one that thrilled me, that sent my belly a-quiver, that made me do a little poop in my head with terror: this year’s number one album is Dumb Flesh by Blanck Mass.

1 – Blanck Mass – Dumb Flesh (Sacred Bones Records)

Blanck Mass is Benjamin John Power from F*ck Buttons (excuse the blog filter asterisk) and this does indeed sound like a development of their Slow Focus album. Dumb Flesh starts with the loping reversed vocal of Loam before exploding into the throbbing electro workout of Dead Format, complete with hand-clap snares. We're talking full-on overblown. No Lite is more careful to begin with, stacking things up over a ten minute period as it peaks in bleeping triumph as the beat refuses to relent.

The first twenty minutes done, with the listener exhausted, the album tones things down. The toe-tapping Atrophies follows a simple theme: slow and considered. The moody Cruel Sport can't hold it in though, and it allows in the epic chords that greeted us earlier in the album: a central theme that makes Dumb Flesh greater than the sum of its fatty parts.

Double Cross is almost electro-pop, and even allows for a cheery fourth-bar snare fill. As with Atrophies, Lung allows for some breathing space (sorry) and a little creepy groaning for good measure. And then the final ten minutes: their masterpiece Detritus. We start amid scraping white noise that seems to last forever, and then... and then, swooping from the darkest recesses, the anthemnic organ-crashing ending promised by so much by that which came before.

The industrial Front 242-isms referenced throughout are a little before my time: I can see why fellow journos a bit older than me are frothing at their mouths at this. But it has split opinion too, proving a little too one-note for many. The Observer said these "bombastic modular synth symphonies owes more to Queen’s One Vision than it does to Kraftwerk’s Man Machine.” The Observer are idiots.

What I hear in Dumb Flesh is a glorious energy, a broad-strokes sound that takes some getting used to, and the one album I have returned to most in 2015. I said this would be a heart-over-head decision, but maybe more than anything else, this is a head-trip: a body-physical album that leaves your emotions tearing along a few desperate steps behind.

Thanks for reading my blog in 2015. Eleven years and counting. See the whole of this year's top ten, as ever, by clicking this magic link - and below that, Dead Format:

-----> Best electronic albums of 2015 <-----