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.

From catatonic breakdance to a need for speed: new electronic music for April 2021

Are your ears stupid idiots? Do you want to punish your ears? How about punishing your stupid idiot ears with some brand new electronic music?

Here's a smattering of bleepy albums due for release in April 2021.

Murcof's rejoins the Leaf Label for The Alias Sessions, an album written for a dance company in Geneva. I'm not much of a dancer, myself: my moves are limited to confused salsa, catatonic breakdance and eyebrow tango. Murcof's music often resides in little ripples of waveforms, but there are great big tidal washes of noise on this new album. One of my favourite Murcofs for a while.

Jimi Tenor's putting out Deep Sound Learning (1993 - 2000). This scoops up a load of unheard stuff from, you guessed it, 1993 to 2000. Apparently Jimi bombarded Warp Records with endless DAT tapes, presumably using some kind of cassette cannon, and much of it remained in storage until now. I really want a cassette cannon. A tape trebuchet. A reel-to-reel rocket launcher.

The album I'm most looking forward to in April is Eomac's Cracks. This is darkly desolate Dublin bass music that blends the atmosphere of Rival Consoles with the melodic motifs of Aphex Twin. Eomac (pictured above) is 'Cameo' backwards, but I don't know if that means he does backwards walk-on parts in movies, or whether every track is the 1986 party track Word Up! played backwards.

What else? Look out for Facta's Blush, a debut album of folky electronics released on the label Facta jointly owns with the equally pastoral K-Lone. K-Lone's Cape Cira made my best-of-2020 list and Blush certainly feels like a sister album to some extent.

By the way, I'd like to point out that I'm typing all this without the use of one of my index fingers. When cutting bread, I decided to use my hand as a chopping board. This wasn't a good idea, and I cut my finger. It's not a big cut, but it's in a really annoying place, so my middle finger is putting extra work in while my index finger has a long hard think about what it's done. I'm amazeb any og these words sre coming out okau.

And finally, look out for: Caterina Barbieri's Fantas Variations, an album of remixes of a single track from her excellent Ecstatic Computation album; Dawn Richard's Second Line which promises chart-friendly sassy bangers and a whole lot of fun; and Herrmann Kristoffersen's thoroughly listenable Gone Gold, an IDM-influenced imaginary soundtrack for the Need For Speed racing game. Vroom flipping vroom.

Take THAT, stupid idiot ears.

Further Fats: Just how DO you act at your first rave? (2019)

Further Fats: Best electronic albums of 2020 (2020)