Best electronic albums of 2020: eleven

11 – Lorenzo Senni – Scacco Matto (Warp)

There's a wonderful moment in The Queen's Gambit where Beth Harmon is chatting to Jolene in the orphanage, and suddenly Beth sees something on the ceiling. In the space above them, an apparition appears of a moustachioed Italian grinding the gears of a battered synthesiser while shouting "I'M DECONSTRUCTING RAVE!"

I may be getting my 2020 chess entertainments mixed up because, yes, this is an album themed on chess. Scacco Matto is 'checkmate' in Italian. Lorenzo Senni launched the album with a virtual chess meet-up. And it's as loud and as brilliantly garish as the wallpaper designs in The Queen's Gambit.

Senni eschews percussion, often reducing his tools to one single instrument. He's a man that loves a JP-8000, the synth I'm named after. However, that doesn't stop everything feeling maxed out. The cleaved EDM of Discipline of Enthusiasm punches hard. The single-finger melody of THINK BIG is as power pop as it gets.

As with chess, it's an acquired taste. But if you like your music "full of melodramatic bombast filtered through the smallest Gameboy in the world" (as I wrote in 2017), then make a move on Scacco Matto. As long as that move is two forwards and one across.

 

Browse the rest of the Best Electronic Albums of 2020

Happy 30th anniversary, Warp Records

Warp Records has been celebrating its 30th birthday - it's the same age as Taylor Swift, Daniel Radcliffe and the twins who played Carl Gallagher in Shameless.

The first Warp track I heard was LFO's LFO, quickly followed by Tricky Disco's Tricky Disco. Both were UK top 40 hits - I know that because I taped the charts religiously every week: both songs would have degraded gloriously as I tape-to-tape copied them onto successive home compilations. Aside from loving the electronic simplicity of the records, having eponymous songs seemed weirdly rebellious.

Then came the Artificial Intelligence compilations, my musical fulcrum from which everything spewed, which featured Polygon Window, The Black Dog, Beaumont Hannant and B12. Warp also gave us some incredibly beautiful artist albums, most notably from - of course - Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, Autechre and Richard H Kirk. You already know this.

I remember Warp's tectonic plates shifting when they moved to London. A bit like when Boddingtons shut down their Manchester brewery. They widened their electronic remit (Warp, that is, not Boddies), bringing in acts like Anti Pop Consortium who sounded wonky and wild. And now they rule the world with artists like Flying Lotus, Plaid, Bibio, Kelela and Oneohtrix Point Never. You can catch a stack of the label's 30th anniversary broadcasts here.

Happy birthday, Warp. I'm glad you're still going strong, and I'm glad you're still putting out music by the likes of Lorenzo Senni, which has all the vital energy as your early stuff. I'll be forever grateful to the label being a beacon of quality techno, and the basis for a lot of further record browsing across a zillion other labels.

If I had one criticism, it would be that there doesn't seem to be much eponymous song titling these days. Just saying. If you want to release Fat Roland's Fat Roland, you know who to call.

Keeping an eye on Roland-twiddler Lorenzo Senni

I'm named after a Roland JP-800. Twiddly knobby keyboard, all lovely and blue. And I've just found out one of my favourite miminalist techno tracks, Windows Of Vulnerability by Lorenzo Senni, was composed entirely on the JP-8000.

What's he up to these days? Milan-based rave-mangler Lorenzo recently dropped his debut EP on Warp Records. It's called Persona uses all sorts of other sounds. I suppose I'm going to have to name myself after all his other keyboards now? Fat Korg. Fat Yamaha. Fat Casio?

Win In The Flat World, below, is on the EP. It's full of melodramatic bombast filtered through the smallest Gameboy in the world. Amazing what you can do without a drum track too.



Further Fats: Confusion in our eyes that says it all - we've lost Control (well, almost) (2008)

Further Fats: Chosen Words: E is for Ecstacy (2010)