Top 50 electronic music albums of 2022: Whatever The Weather, Biosphere, Maxime Denuc

      

This is the [mumble]th of ten blog posts laying out numbers 50 to 21 in my end-of-year countdown of the best electronic music albums of 2022. I dunno. I've lost count. I'm typing furiously to stay ahead of my blog schedule, smashed on peanuts, Smarties, Diet Pepsi and Windowlene. Anyway, let's continue. Here are three more albums to pad out this never-ending Top 50.

See the full countdown here.

Whatever The Weather: Whatever The Weather (Ghostly International) + 

This was the outing of the new ambient alias from the critically acclaimed London producer Loraine James. The track titles are temperatures, ranging from the scorching 36°C to an exactly freezing 0°C. Which suits the album, because even when she’s dropping beats into the foggy atmosphere, it’s either snowflake crystalline or devilishly scorching. Phew. Also worth checking out is her other 2022 album, the Julius Eastman interpretation Building Something Beautiful For Me (Phantom Limb) – this is also hot / chill stuff.

Biosphere: Shortwave Memories (Biophon)

Let’s stay with ambience. Apparently Geir Jenssen took inspiration from post-punk for this latest album. You can’t hear much of that in the rich chords, the long structures and that ever-so-90s bass. Instead, thanks to the reintroduction into his sound of vintage analogue synthersisers, we have an evocation of classic Biosphere. Moody and moving ambience.

Maxime Denuc: Nachthorn (Vlek)

I’ll fess up. I used to help organise a rave in a church. It was called TAS:TE, although I can’t for the life of me remember what that stood for. As if treading in my footsteps (ahem), Denuc plays rave music on a church organ. Indeed, it’s all there: the thudding rhythms, the choppy chords, the banging melodies. Except it’s all on a pipe organ. This Album Soars: Totally Ecstatic.

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

90 best electronic music albums of 2021: John Tejada, Loraine James, Lotic, Madlib & Meemo Comma

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

John Tejada – Year Of The Living Dead (Kompakt) 

I've enjoyed Tejada's work with Reggie Watts: a real zippy approach to house music production. On this solo album, things are more simple. All bright and shiny. Sprightly bass drum pads skip hand-in-hand with spacey synthwork, while elsewhere the beats are slower and a little more broken, perhaps reflecting the introspective, lockdown theme of its title. In any case, it's a proper bag of loveliness, with a dubbier feel than usual. And I like it when the synths go pyow-pyow.

Loraine James – Reflection (Hyperdub)

For You and I was a cracker. I likened it to "being parachuted into a leftfield techno metropolis without a map" in my favourite albums of 2019. James's second album progresses her urban soundtrack of drill pop urbanistic futurism, or whatever it is. It's at once utterly r&b while slicing through that genre with a bass-busting chainsaw. It's complex and abstract, a gravity constantly pulling things down: Maxinquay on Xanax. Yet it's less bewildering than her previous work, now we're more attuned to its lackadaisical London vibes.

Lotic – Water (Houndstooth)

There are several things that come to mind with this second album of dreamy deconstructed electronica from this one-time Bjork producer. One: a choppy sea, sirens singing from beneath the waves. Two: ghosts singing your name from the clouds above you. Three: Kate Bush as supernova. Accompanying her gasping choral iterations are, as the title hints at, splashes of liquid synths and deep pools of electronic ambience. A deeply personal album that feels at once gentle and immensely powerful.

Madlib – Sound Ancestors (Madlib Invazion)

You know Madlib. Old Madders. L'il Lib. He's the hip hop guy turned jazzer who's been spitting soundpieces for over two decades. Sound Ancestors has all the feel of an old mixtape: the beats are smokin' and the whole thing has the warmth of well-needled vinyl records. Sorry for mixing my format metaphors there. The added element? This album was arranged by Four Tet, adding a sharpness to the blunted beats. As one review said, it's "jazzy, dirty, clean, and mean."

Meemo Comma – Neon Genesis: Soul Into Matter² (Planet Mu) 

Here's a bit of my review from Electronic Sound magazine. "A mystical mash-up of ancient Judaism and imaginary anime is the mood board for Lara Rix-Martin’s latest: Mononoke with a menorah... Grumbling incantations, hesitant slivers of rhythm and downright spooky calls to prayer. Even the fluid beats of Tif-eret is subsumed into haunting choral blessings: it’s audacious stuff. Not so much field recordings as demonic transmissions from an abandoned quarry." A deeply curious album. The Kabbalah's gonna get yah.

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

Best electronic albums of 2019: three

3 – Loraine James – For You And I (Hyperdub)

For You And I is the sound of London bustle, of coming out of basement clubs, of tube stations shuttering their doors, of a queer life in a contemporary capital. Apparently. I don't live in London. In Manchester, we don't go on tubes, we just swagger with our maracas.

This freewheeling collage of broken bass music gets more compelling with every listen. The drum sounds are as loose as a bag of nuts: cheese-grated cymbals and strangled toms collide with precarious snares that rattle the walls of the album.

It's like being parachuted into a leftfield techno metropolis without a map, but that's not to say there aren't familiar touchpoints as we hear Loraine's story. Scraping My Feet has some serious Aphexian melancholy. There's something Autechresque about the scrunched rhythms of So Scared. And London Ting is pure grime bravado – "look at my skin!" – told through a tough techno lens.

All this on a debut album. Remarkable. As broad as London itself, it's one moment brutal, the next moment tender, all of it uneasy, all of it compelling. A boundary-breaking statement that's queer by nature and queer by noise. *shakes maracas*



Scroll the full best-of-2019 list here.