Top 50 electronic music albums of 2022: Deepchord, Frantzvaag, Galcher Lustwerk

     

We continue with my album countdown. I'm eking out the top 50, which will eventually get us to a top 20, then a top 10, then electronic music nirvana. No, not that Nirvana. Here are my latest top 50 treats.

See the full countdown here.

Deepchord: Functional Designs (Soma Records)

“Pneumatic bass drums that crumble warehouse walls… The tectonic transcendence of 2017’s ‘Auratones’ is taken deeper. Ambience swarms until it coagulates, turning bass thuds into distant fuzz. Amid miniscule droplets of sound design, muffled drums top 140bpm without seeming to break a stride... And breathe. Feel that warehouse wall. It's not crumbling; it’s floating.”

Frantzvaag: Solo Super (Fuck Reality)

"Frantzvaag bursts from the Oslo house scene with this straight-shooting debut album for Smallville’s sweary sublabel. Belatedly unearthed from the label owner’s neglected email inbox, this neat set has cymbal-drenched party pumpers, crowd-pleasing filtered vocals, and elegantly euphoric dubs. Nothing fancy: just cobweb-blasting deep house fun.”

Galcher Lustwerk: 100% GALCHER (Ghostly International)

Ole Lusty may think this is 100% GALCHER, but actually it’s 62% smooth synth lines, 79% delicious deep house, 43% sexy jams, 22% warm ambient chord drama and 176% attitude. Pretty sure that adds up to 100%. It’s also one million per cent breaking my no-rerelease rule for this countdown, but this Ghostly vinyl reissue is too darn Galcher to miss out on.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2022. Read it all here.

Best electronic albums of 2018: getting into the top 20 is a fragile path

Hold on to your monocle: this is going to be a longer-than-usual summary of albums that didn't quite make the final best-of-2018 list. They're all house music, or influenced by house music, or have once been in a house with some house music.

A choir from Hackney added a whole new direction for Simian Mobile Disco on Murmurations (Wichita) which led me to produce an alarmingly introspective review for Electronic Sound magazine ("Life is a fragile path that sometimes leads us to thin places we’d rather avoid"). There was solid house action on Specter’s Built To Last (Sound Signature): extra points for the insistent piano riff on Not New To This. I enjoyed the clean house stylings of Invisibility (Sushitech) from Romanian duo SIT – minimalism with sheen.

Essaie Pas's ominous New Path (DFA Records) was "enough to make you gleefully afraid of your own shadow" (Electronic Sound again). There was a masterclass in shrink-wrapped drum programming on Konduku’s Kıran (Nous'klaer Audio). Russian artist Evgenii Fadeev sounded restless on Litie (Gost Zvuk), turning up those bpms for his AEM Rhythm Cascade persona. And on my notes for Beta Librae's Sanguine Bond (Incienso), I've just got the word "hypnotic". So it must have been hypnotic. Ahem.

I liked rapper’s Galcher Lustwerk’s inconsequential chatter amid the smooth house of 200% Galcher (Lustwerk Music). RAMZi’s Phobiza Vol. 3: Amor Fati (FATi Records) was a heady mix of hazy house music. There was a dark urgency to Neville Watson's house breaks album The Midnight Orchard (Don't Be Afraid). Phew. Is this section over yet? It's going on a bit.

Shinichi Atobe sounded perkier than usual on Heat (DDS), not least in part because of his perfectly ratcheted snares. Underground favourite DJ Bone spilled a load of bright Detroit bangers this year on A Piece Of Beyond (Subject Detroit) – expect the trilogy to complete in 2019. And finally I utterly overlooked SCNTST's Scenes And Sketches From The Lab (Boysnoize Records) despite a previous album of his being in my 2013 top ten. I only just spotted it now. Blast. Maybe I should have been listening to that instead of writing this. Scandal. *drops monocle*





Scroll all of the best 2018 electronic albums by clicking here.