Best electronic music of January 2014

I know what's going to happen. I'm publishing this on the last Monday morning of the month, and in about two hours, Thom Yorke will suddenly release a track with Venetian Snares (or something) and it'll be number one by Sunday,

Daaaamn you, Yorkie.

Let's give this a go anyway. It's not quite the end of January 2014, and I'm resigned to missing great stuff out in error, but here is the pick of the best electronic dance music this month.

Also, I'm aware by numbering these in preference, I'm comparing single tracks with albums. Which is a bit like comparing a Dairylea slice with a juggernaut full of chalk, but, er, um, shut up.

The best electronic music of January 2014:

1 - MODERAT - LAST TIME (JON HOPKINS REMIX) (MONKEYTOWN)

Hopkins, who is no stranger to the number one spot on this website, goes slo-mo acid with devastating effect as this track morphs into an epic designed to hypnotise. Tip of the fedora too to Moderat, that Modeselektor and Apparat collaboration that bowled me over with last year's Bad Kingdom (video still pictured above)  Listen.

2 - MOUSE ON MARS - BAKERMAN IS BREAKING BAD (MONKEYTOWN)

Monkeytown acid again! A silly acid bath of a track, by which I mean 'acid bath' in a good way, not in a murderous way. It's dirty and trippy and it's good to have the mice back. Listen.

3 - ACTRESS - GHETTOVILLE (NINJA TUNE) (album)

If this really is Actress' last album, it's a bit of a party pooper. Shuffling and claustrophobic loop variations. He saves the more comfortable upbeat motifs for later. Glorious in its miserablism. Listen.

4 - KAUMWALD - HANTASIVE (OPAL TAPES)

Dark field recordings filtered through the anus of hell, droned into your veins like a syringe of diseased noise. An essential 12" if you like obscure techno. Listen.

5 - SHACKLETON - FREEZING OPENING THAWING (WOE TO THE SCEPTIC HEART)

Detailed, almost mathematical, percussion on this EP from dubstep label pioneer Shackleton. He allows the simple repetition plenty of space to tap little holes into your brain. Listen.

6 - LEE BANNON - ALTERNATE / ENDINGS (NINJA TUNE) (album)

Dense drum 'n' bass album scattered with a warehouse rave sensibility. I suspect this one will grow on me throughout the year. Listen.

7 - BIBIO - THE GREEN (WARP RECORDS)

Bibio's pastoral leanings faded on me a bit over the past few years, but this EP is loaded with beautiful melody. Listen.

8 - FALTYDL - DANGER (NINJA TUNE)

Check that LTJ Bukem sample on the A-side. On the flip side, King Brute is rough and gravelly: it sounds like a purring cat's inside your speakers and it has KNIVES. Listen.

9 - D/R/U/G/S - ECHORAVE

You can't go wrong with a bit of melodic dancefloor techno, and D/R/U/G/S does it better than most on this EP of collected muzoid scraps. Listen.

10 - VARIOUS - BANGFACE: NEO-RACE ARMAGEDDON (BANGFACE) (album)

Bangface scares me. It makes me long for Coldplay and cardigans and Watercolour Challenge. Actually, that's a lie. This is a December release but I've included it here because it is day-glo and stoopid and ace. Nice one, chop one, snorted. Listen.

Justin Timbercomment's "jheeeze wavy" bow tie versus FaltyDL

Some of the user comments on Justin Timberlake's boring new single Suit & Tie, some directed at the video, some directed at other users. All comments posted in the last few hours.

i ruined your mom's bed last night 

Kill youself!  

you're retarded 

haha u retarded? 

f--k yourself with a burning end of a stick. 

LOL, you suck and are gay. 

he looks so gay he should have married lance bass 

If you see he dose a Micheal jackson thing 

A lot of Bruno Mars moves 

he sounds like Justin Bieber 

WHY IS HE WEARING A SUIT AND BOW WHEN THE SONG IS CALLED 'SUIT AND TIE' !??!?!? 

Justin's Bow tie keeps disappearing and reappearing! 

A BOW IS NOT A TIE.  

his bow tie jumps on and off jheeeze wavy. This is my new s--t 

its called a bowTIE 

Why does the mike keep changing. 

The mic that JT is using changes like its magic every camera angle change... COME ON! So unprofessional. 

WHY IN GOD'S NAME DOES HE KEEP CHANGING MICS?!?! Dear GOD! 

now I make $35h - $80h...how? I’m working online! 

Hey EveryBody Go Check My Channel Out I'm a really Good Dancer 

Check out our Harlem Shake! 

all the dislike in this video is the size (inches) of my dick 

He genuinely belongs to music industry 

Why is no text written under the clip? 

Why is he suddenly look so 30++?!

And now some of the user comments on FaltyDL's great recent single She Sleeps, some directed at the video, some directed at other users. All comments posted in the last two months.

Awesome song & video.

awesomeness!

I can´t stop moving my feet right now! 

Epic! 

Such a great track! This album is gonna be big when it drops

This track put a smile on my face this evening :) Such a lush video...

Great video FaltyDL's album is shaping up to be pretty terrific. 

This...is....a....TUNE 

FaltyDL being the f--king man brought me here. 

Foster the people, that is why i am here. 

Shut the f--k up about Foster the people, seriously.

I know which corner of YouTube I prefer.

Further Fats: FaltyDL's been building something in his garage (2011)

Best electronica albums of 2011: numbers 10 to 8

Welcome to my annual review of the best electronica albums.

I must start dear reader, with an apology. I got it wrong last year: Luke Abbott's Holkham Drones (Border Community) languished at number three on 2010’s list, but repeated plays makes me think it should have taken the top spot. Oh well. Mount Kimbie ain’t giving their crown back.

So no pressure then. This year’s best electronica list is, if I may say so, utter brillsocks. Every album featured I love to bits, have slept with several times and have moved into a bungalow with. Before we lap up the goodness, let’s see some of the tracks I spat out. After that, we’ll crack on with the top ten.

[This is part one. Click here for part two. Click here for part three. Click here for part four.]

Some also-rans

Walls were darlings of the ambient community in 2010, so they went and ditched the driftiness and took up dance beats instead. Their album Coracle (Kompakt) was closer to techno and therefore closer to my heart, but it wasn’t enough to make the list.

Bibio scored highly in my best electronica review two years ago but 2011’s Mind Bokeh (Warp) seemed confused: their sub-Orson rock song Take Off Your Shirt was, well, like Orson. Meanwhile, Tycho's Dive (Ghostly International) was lovely, Zomby’s Dedication (4AD) didn’t quite do it for me, while I got Dave Monolith’s Welcome (Rephlex) for Christmas and haven’t had time to absorb it yet.

10 - Falty DL - You Stand Uncertain

You Stand Uncertain (Planet Mu) is such a complete world and yet, by all rights, it ought to be a disconnected mess of rave, house, r’n’b and techno samples.

Take Lucky Luciano. It starts with some slow-motion rave riffery, hypes it up with some breakbeat samba and “oooh yeah” vocal samples, throws in some frenetic funky drummer-ness and suddenly we’re in a watery world of 808 State techno followed by some drill’n’bass-lite. The fact that this one track holds together is a miracle, never mind the album as a whole.

I’m less keen when it gets too far down the garage path and I could do without the female vocal tracks: they feel too much like a bid for radio play. You Stand Uncertain works better in the abstract as repeated melodies work their way into your brain and hang around for the rest of the record, or when a new opposing theme drifts into the music as if uninvited and the whole records hangs beautifully in the delicate, titular uncertainty.

9 - Machinedrum - Room(s)

If Travis Stewart was an actual machine, he’d be a bit rusty around the wingnuts because he’s been in service now for ten years as Machinedrum, Sepalcure, Tstewart and Syndrone.

A brief flirtation with Glasgow’s Lucky Me record label oiled his creativity as he left behind his glitchy past in favour of more upfront electro. Room(s) (Planet Mu) is the full-flexing realisation of that change: swirling vocals and complex breakbeats abound.

In fact, that’s pretty much the motif of Room(s). Busy rave rhythms agitate echoing soul vocals, such as the “for real” refrain of Now U Know Tha Deal 4 Real, the auto tuned U Don’t Survive or the people wailing at the choppy synths in The Statue. A highlight is the additively repetitive She Died There. And with a lot of the tracks coming in at the four or five minute mark, Mr Drum knows how to structure things so that nothing outstays its welcome. Pitchfork wrote off this album as “devoid of its creators voice” – they couldn’t be more wrong.

8 - Kuedo - Severant

Three Planet Mu albums in a row: crikes.

I never thought a Carly Simon sample would end up in my annual album reviews, but it’s happened thanks to the fifth track on Kuedo’s debut album which sees the famous “la de dah de dah” refrain from the ‘80s songstress go to battle with a helicopter or at the very least, a synthesiser that dearly wants to be a helicopter. Next up, Burial doing Coming Around Again on a hovercraft?

Kuedo is a new name around these parts, but most will recognise him as remixer and producer Jamie Vex’d out of, um Vex’d. There is not much comparison, however. While Vex’d The Duo snarled and growled like some crazed darkstep killing monster, and Jamie Vex’d The Soloist sounded like Ninja Tune down a k-hole, the new Kuedo project has a different flavour.  Severant (Planet Mu) sounds like a Vangelis remix album. It is a landscape of yearning 1980s chord sequences (Truth Flood), cinematic analogue ambience (Salt Lake Cuts) and delicate melancholia (Visioning Shared Tomorrows). This album will pluck your heart strings until they shimmer.

[This is part one. Click here for part two. Click here for part three. Click here for part four.]

Falty DL's been building something in his garage

I've been juggling three records with my many eared-tentacles of music appreciation. But I only want to talk about one, which is Falty DL's You Stand Uncertain.

Much has been made of DL's genre-slurping production skills, taking in two decades of dance music. It does genre-hop, but mainly in one one spot: UK garage. Let's get this clear: the new Falty DL album is a garage record. Garage. Not techno. Not bass music. It's garage.

You can bang on all you want about dubstep, post-dubstep and chilldubwavestep, but just take its lead track Brazil featuring Lily MacKenzie: it's proper UK garage. That's garage. It's a word you won't have seen on a blog for about 46 years.

You Stand Uncertain is Planet Mu's most notable release this year so far (although Boxcutter's got some interesting stuff on the way), and it is Mr Falty's follow-up album to his debut platter Love Is A Liability. The big female vocal choons on the album, such as Gospel Of Opal, seem to be a statement. It's Falty pinning up a six-foot banner emblazoned with the phrase I'M BACK.

Onto the outside of his garage.

There are many tools in his garage, though. Open Space is a good example of the variance on offer here: it lurches from tingling fairy techno to dark, low-hung rave (a tendency even more obviously splashed over the playful Lucky Luciano).

And I'm deeply in love with the early-Grid snare clickiness on The Pacifist. He's got that retro feel yet again.

You Stand Uncertain is an impressive achievement and, for my money, sets the standard more so than another one of the three records I'm hammering at the moment, namely James Blake's eponymous and ubiquitous debut album.

The third one? It's not an electronica record, so I can't mention it. All I can tell you is she has the same name as an invisible rabbit and she sings about England.

More pow than Batman: some singles from Ikonika, Falty DL and James Blake

Because I went a bit flappy on maintaining this blog for a while, I'm a bit behind on my single reviews. Here are three quick ones to keep you going while I sort out the other 3,927 I have in my to-do pile.

On an unrelated note, while the MPs aren't looking, can someone install Aaron Funk of Venetian Snares as prime minister, please?

Ikonika

I'm not sure if I've waffled about Ikonika's new album yet. I will do, but in the meantime, Idiot is worth grabbing. Its punchy Nintendo lead is rooted in a rolling bass, a contrast that is amplified by the Altered Natives remix - a track with more pow than Batman thanks to a repeating descending fill that sounds like someone's spilling LFOs.

Falty DL

Falty DL's All In The Place is not dubstep. Repeat. Falty DL's All In The Place is not dubstep. Let's stop calling everything dubstep, shall we? It is probably acid techno and it's all a bit ho hum - choppy synths, bouncy bassline, loadsa reverb - until he allows a muggy rave line pull the tune into fantastic, foggy Aphex territory.

James Blake 

James Blake, who has made his name touring with Mount Kimbie, sounds like he was in 1995 listening to an ethereal moment on Goldie's Timeless before jumping through a time tunnel to provide us with his sad, liquid r'n'b-tinged grime-tech. See if you can spot the Aaliyah and Kelis samples on his essential Cmyk EP.

House music and really big eskimo hoods: some recent singles

Pantha Du Prince's dreamlike house haze on his spanking new album Black Noise has got me in the mood for some four-to-the-floor action. Never mind all that cut-and-paste broken beat crap. This week, I want my beats fixed up and looking sharp. Here are some recent house singles.

Raffertie

Raffertie (pictured) is Planet Mu's top drawer dance guru, beloved of grungy club types as well as the glossy hacks of Mixmag magazine. Recently, he's been getting some big-time snogs from Huw Stephens, Rob Da Bank and Dame Mary Anne Hobbs. Which is nice.

7th Dimension is Raffertie's newest single, and while the title is not as classic as last year's Wobble Horror!, there is ample to restrain your thumbs from twiddling. It's a whooping high-energy flare of rave house, convulsing from snare stab attacks and swirling, persistent vocals.

The b-side, String Theory, sounds like a melancholic Way Out West experimenting with a wobble-board for a bassline. 7th Dimension is the better cut, and reminds me a little of Hospital Records' more zealous moments - without the junglism.

Floating Points

His bubbly 2-stepper J+W Beat enjoyed more than a play or three on my phone last year, so unfurl the bunting because electronic polymath* Floating Points has dropped a brand new track called People's Potential.

He's not just torn a leaf from Luke Vibert's book: he's photocopied way beyond the legal limit to produce a thumping, nagging acid work-out with wailing synths and both hush puppies planted solidly on the dance floor.

Track it down if you can, but I warn you, it's a limited edition one-sided white label. And they're harder to find than Lil Wayne's self-respect.

The XX

I've saved the best for last: a superb cacophony of remixes of one of the best indie bands of the past 12 months. There are several remixes of The XX track, Islands. And they're all fab.

Untold culled the coldness of The XX, secreted it in an igloo somewhere north of Alaska, hurled it into Heston Blumenthal's deep freezer, and fashioned a dubstep remix so startlingly chilly, your ears will ice over at the mere notion of listening to it. Pardon? Exactly. It's tribal, like Zulu, but in eskimo hoods, really big eskimo hoods.

The Blue Nile's version of Islands shimmers and ripples, simple piano and electric guitar adding a nagging theme to the sparse vocals, while Nosaj Thing interprets the track as astral ambience. Delorean flings us back to the warm world of 90s intelligent techno, and, finally, Falty DL makes it sound like Tricky's record player's broken.

Okay, I veered away from house music at the end, there, but I don't like my beats too neat: if it ain't unfixed, I'm gonna broke it. You can quote me on that. (Please don't.)

* I only call him this because he can play the piano too.

Fat Roland's 2010 electronica preview, part two: The Official BBC Electronica DJs In Need Medley

This is part two of my 2010 preview. Here is the link for part one.

Writing a preview for 2010 is easy for earlier in the year. Once you get into spring onwards, it all gets a little fuzzy. So here's my attempt at a preview of electronic music in the rest of 2010, but it may look a little like a blind man punching at the wind.

April - December: "boom bang a bang"

In yesterday's preview, I missed the somewhat tribal Nice Nice and their See Waves single in February. But what I can say is, in April they will give us Extra Wow, an album advertised by their label as a "sprawling psychedelic monolith." I also missed Soma 2010, the Glaswegian techno label's slightly delayed annual compilation bonanza.

Flying Lotus's DJ Kicks CD, mentioned yesterday, should get an mid-April release. Meanwhile, in May, Venetian Snares will win the Eurovision song contest with his version of Boom Bang A Bang. Okay, I lied about that bit.

As summer bears its sweaty heat down upon us, you should go and see Orbital: they'll be touring again, in particular at the Isle Of Wight festival in the middle of June.

LFO collaborator Bjork will appear on the soundtrack to summer 2010’s guaranteed blockbuster movie Moomins And The Comet Chase. Yep. That’s right. The Moomins. Imagine Moon, but replace all the Sam Rockwells with talking marshmallows. This is going to be a classic.

And I can bring your more information about Battles. The band called a ceasefire while Tyondai Braxton worked through some solo stuff, but it’s back to war again in 2010 – well, at least, in the second half of 2010 when their new album is due.

And finally, for scheduled releases in 2010, it's time to get Parisian on yo ass. Daft Punk have been leaking Tron Legacy images on their Twitter feed. The duo have recorded the soundtrack to the film, although it’s not due for release until Christmas 2010. I reckon this will at least ten per cent better than the Moomins film.

Other electronica releases in 2010: "glitchy wonkiness"

Like an unwashed Top Gear fan, I am severely lacking in dates. But this much I know is true:

Eclectic 2-stepper FaltyDL, who delivered Love Is a Liability for Planet Mu this year, is working on a disco album. In less exciting news, "crazy” beat jugglers The Avalanches are in the process of clearing samples for an album supposedly due out in '10 – but don’t hold your breath.

I read somewhere that Boards of Canada have been working on material for three years and it should hit in 2010, but I that’s all I know. And while I'm speculating, Bibio released about 42,000 albums in 2009, so don’t be too surprised to see more material in 2010.

Ikonika will be hopping from Planet Mu to the excellent Hyperdub label to produce a soulful dubstep album without all the wobbly basslines. Hyperdub is not only due to release material from London rookie DVA and long-time grime producer Terror Danjah - they're also promising a debut single from a new artist they're refusing to name.

The glitchy wonkiness foisted on us by Glasgow's LuckyMe crew should continue to be a highlight for 2010. The most anticipated album of 2010, for my money, is the one by Rustie. Assuming he gets round to recording one. And Hudson Mohawke is working on material with Olivier Daysoul – whether it means another album, we’ll have to wait and see.

Expect an album from De Tropix, whose Adeyhey joint has been smearing dancefloors this year. De Tropix is aa London duo that bridges the gap between Prince Buster and Neneh Cherry,

You can also expect something from Gold Panda, with his lovely mix of techno wandering and folktronic meandering. Broadcast will produce an album in 2010, following up their amazingly entitled 2009 production Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age.

Oh and there's Manchester band's Everything Everything's debut album too. And the Klaxons maybe. And lots of stuff from the Outkast boys. And Floating Points. And Tiefschwarz. And Beak, a.k.a. that bloke from Portishead.

Let me leave you with a final thought from the greatest dance band of all time.

The Vengaboys recently started touring again and are working on a new single to be released soon. Their producers Danski and Delmundo have released a statement that possibly summarises 2010's potential musical legacy. The Vengaboys say:

"2010 is the year! Look out for the new hit! It's the most gay song we've ever made."

Actual quote. Brilliant. That's enough blogging for a couple of days. I'm off for a lie down and a pint of whisky.

This is part two of my 2010 preview. Here is the link for part one.