Best electronic albums of 2018: off-grey paste

Here is yet another collection of brand-spanking new audio presents whose batteries ran out before reaching the much-coveted top 20 best electronic albums of 2018. I hope you kept your receipt.

JK Flesh took great delight in pneumatically drilling our brain to an off-grey paste on New Horizon (Electric Deluxe). “This is my extravagant entrance for my show” boldly announced the scuzzed club anthems of Peder Mannerfelt’s Daily Routine (Peder Mannerfelt), a claustrophobic journey into a self-styled temporary psychosis. Demdike Stare’s Passion (Modern Love) was a pulsating patchwork of noise and jungle and nasty breaks.

FORMA’s Semblance (Kranky) gave us some beautifully building arpeggios with a cosmic classical bent, while I held a candle or three for the slow-burning debut album from Bruce, Sonder Somatic (Hessle Audio). Rather less forgiving were the gorgeously grit-teethed beats of Chevel's Always Yours (Different Circles).

Lorn discovered sobriety to produce a wonderfully dark new album Remnant (Wednesday Sound). Objekt moved away from techno for Cocoon Crush (PAN) into a world that seemed equally organic and robotic – it has been compared to Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms, and I can see why. And the post-club fuzz of Anthony Naples’s Take Me With You (Good Morning Tapes) included a beautiful dubby smoker’s version of John Barrys Midnight Cowboy.





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

Psycho bunny, qu'est-ce que c'est?

Now to the small matter of a truly international Manchester record label: one leg in this city and the other leg in Dubai.

Borland and From The Kites Of San Quentin have released a split 12" full of giddy ambience and beats that are snappier than crocodiles playing card games. More about the music in a moment: allow me for a second to literally judge a record by its cover...

Gulf Records is a collaboration between local boy Rob Gregg out of prog bleepers Borland and Daniel Fogg, who was single-handedly responsible for getting me into Lorn.

Although an equal collaboration between the two, Fogg is currently living it large on the Arabian Peninsula, so Gregg is hot-footing it around record shops with trouser pockets full of vinyl.

Yes, vinyl. Their debut release comes on a beautiful slab of vinyl, its cover adorned with the psycho Donnie Darko rabbit (my mutilated version can be seen above). I went to the launch at Centro recently, and it was truly a pleasure to get something heavy and touchable slapped into my hand (stop it) rather than a piddling little CD or a URL to a streaming site.

Each cover is hand-daubed with red paint, with copies available at the Japanchester charity gig boasting Japanese-style red circles on the back. It's good to see Gulf Records 'getting' vinyl.

As for the music, what we have is Chet Beaverbrooke by From The Kites Of San Quentin, which is a 'ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space' ambient psych-out with Billie-Holiday-on-heroin vocals.

It settles itself somewhere near chill-out (splutter, wash my mouth out), but being of an older school, the trippy spoken word drops remind me of The Orb. The disgustingly dirty bass that lands at around the three and a half minute mark suggests this is a beast of a much darker pelt.

Clockmen by Borland spits a growling melodic progression onto the floor of witch house then slurps it up with a hefty dose of melancholy. That track is ripped into seven shards of bad boy on the b-side as each artist remixes the other. Borland's take on the Kites track is the closest the 12" gets to a head-nodder, with its flip-book snare adding crunch to a delicious overdose of shimmering effects.

Chet Beaverbrooke / Clockmen is a bold debut, is difficult to categorise despite other reviewers' unconvincing comparisons to Four Tet, and is lovely to slap in your hand. I suggest you buy yourself one now: what better treat for Easter weekend than a psycho bunny?

 

Top ten best electronica albums of 2010: part one of four

This is part one. Please do read the other parts of this blog post: part two, part three and part four
To read last year's top ten best electronica albums, click here.

10 - Lorn – Nothing Else

Marcus 'Lorn' Ortega teased us with the track Until There Is No End on Fat City Records some time ago, a deeply moving slice of apocalypto-funk. Clark, the recipient of my Best Album Of 2010, then went on to master his debut album Nothing Else. You know it because every city in the UK has been plastered top to bottom with stickers promoting the record. In the process, the Brainfeeder sound (crunchy cut-paste J Dilla beats) was quickly knocked several days left of Tuesday with the label's first signing outside of Los Angeles.

It was also Brainfeeder's second album proper, and with Lorn quoting Milton all about the place, you knew it would be something special. Before now, I have praised his testosterone retro and made comparisons to Animal Farm and Bladerunner. The album sounds like Knight Rider having a breakdown: maybe it takes itself too seriously, but Nothing Else soaks you like tears and rain with a sound defined by no-one else but Lorn.

Embrace the synth melancholy. Buy Lorn's Nothing else from Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

9 - Venetian Snares - My So-Called Life

Like a naughty boy, Aaron Funk ventured away from his natural home at Planet Mu and set up Timesig Records for the (arguably) 22nd studio album from his interior decor / percussion-inspired moniker. Because it was recorded quickly - Snares sees this more of a diary entry than a year's work - My So-Called Life shifted the game somewhat. Well. Slightly. Its still a (detri)mentalist cavalcade of dirty junglism.

The quick recording process lightened the music by precisely nought-point-seven degrees: for example, pastoral string-picking gives way to a beautifully melodic 8bit 'n' bass on title track My So Called Life. But it's the vocal samples that are leaned on more heavily than usual here - and what horrible vocals. Grossly non-PC Welfare Wednesday contains a hilarious jibe at Planet Mu label boss Mike Paradinas, while Who Wants Cake? and Posers And Camera Phones say things that would make Jerry Sadowitz blush.

The most accessible and disgusting Venetian Snares album for a while. Buy it from Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

8 - Caribou – Swim

Caribou doesn't need any more praise heaped on his handsome locks. Resident Advisor has already pronounced Swim as the album of the year (please don't look at that list too much: mine is horribly and coincidentally similar). And Sun's dizzying refrain ("sun, sun, sun, sun...") loomed heavily over 2010.

I have an entirely personal reason for including Swim here. Opening track Odessa was playing in the bar in which I was getting drunk after my blog awards win, and it kind of became my soundtrack. That's not to downplay the rest of the LP though: crisp, driving house music, chiming hypnotica on Bowls and a nod towards indie pop on Kaili. But really, it's all about Odessa and it's all about the Sun. Sun. Sun. Sun. Dammit, there I go again.

Hunt yourself a Caribou: buy Swim from Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

Not quite in the top ten (part one)

I will not pretend my list - or indeed any element of my blog - is comprehensive. I also don't think this has been a classic year for electronica, nor that all of these artists are electronica. Crikes. This is like a minefield. Anyhoo, here are some of the albums that didn't pass muster.

I'm astonished at how commercial some of my top ten is this year, although Magnetic Man's eponymous debut album pushed the pop too far to be included, despite MAD and despite it being one of the most important electronic music collaborations of recent times. The same goes for Plastic Beach by the Gorillaz, although that was still a glorious album.

Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack came very close; maybe it would have helped if I'd bothered seeing the film. I found Darkstar's slow mosh-hopping North difficult to love, while Salem's King Knight didn't tug the earstrings enough for a top placing. Meanwhile, UNKLE bored me to sleep with Where Did The Night Fall.

I was gutted not to include two albums at the opposite end of the electronic sonic spectrum: Ikonika's gamer-baiting Contact Want Love Hate and Brian Eno / Jon Hopkins' Small Craft On A Milk Sea (which is not a great ambient album: it is a great techno album). Any top ten without them would be a crime. It's a fair cop, guv.

This is part one. Please do read the other parts of this blog post: part two, part three and part four
To read last year's top ten best electronica albums, click here.

The devil has all the best IDM: Lorn

Here I am, on Hallowe'en night, choosing my favourite IDM / electronica to accompany your fright-filled evening of pumpkin soup, bad clothes and legal doorstep extortion. See the other posts in this series here. See the introduction to the whole thing here.

Artist: Lorn
Track: Tomorrow
Album: Nothing Else
Year: 2010

The previous posts were video-focussed. Now we're back to the music.

I could have chosen several Lorn tracks, but his testosterone retro is balanced neatly on Tomorrow with a scraping iciness. It's a short track, but it quickly flies in from an eerie distance until it's slobbering right in your face.

It's choc full of slow, loping chords from the very (non-)mind of a zombie itself. It's flesh turned robotic, a beast sparked alive with an electric energy.

And it helps that the video, which I suspect is a fan video, is exactly what's happening in Chez Fats tonight. But really, it's the music that makes this a Hallowe'en special.

Keep your scanners peeled for Lorn's Nothing Else

Emerging like a dense ash cloud from the volcanic Brainfeeder label (almost topical!) , Lorn has finally landed his album Nothing Else. The title is a reference to a question raised by John Milton in Paradise Lost, although if this long-player was literature, it would be something much more dystopian - Animal Farm or The Road, maybe.

As soon as the fat, fuzzy synth lines drop in Grandfather, the scene is pretty much set: cloggy beats and loping hip-hop instrumentals that, perhaps, sometimes take themselves a little too seriously such as when the ghostliness edging into pomposity on Army Of Darkness.

Oh but what ghostliness. Eerie, melancholic chords give way to thuddering beat patterns, giving us a soundtrack to a film in which Decker thought 'sod this' and went off to steam his head instead of tracking down replicants.

The sounds are solid, eighties pixels of pleasure too - the masculine, rolled-up suit sleeves of the biting stutter synth in Cherry Moon, for example. If you don't get the odd frisson of Knight Rider excitement, then you should go away and listen to Busta Rhymes' Fire It Up and then work your way up to Lorn.

But it's a modern album on a modern label. The best comparison I can give for this album is Clark's Totems Flare, and not just because it was mastered by the Clarence Park body riddler himself. It has the same boldness and playful fussiness - as well as vocals, which are more unusual than you'd realise on electronic albums like this.

For those that have followed Lorn for the past few months, there is one depressing realisation. There seems to be no Until There Is No End on this album. His epically evil take on r 'n' b was such a ground-shifter last year, I'm puzzled to find it missing. Of course, it's up to Lorn where he sticks his music, but that track's spectre looms over this album.

You see... there wasn't Nothing Else after all.

The Brainfeeder / Paul Weller connection

It's easy for me to parp on about Warp Records all the stupid time, but there's another record label that is becoming a keystone of modern electronica.

Brainfeeder is the, er, brainchild of Flying Lotus, a Los Angeles producer about whose great aunt Paul Weller once wrote a song.*

Mr Lotus, or FlyLo to his chums, started Brainfeeder as radio show back in 2008 on Dublab, a not-for-profit internet radio station set up by students. The 'feeder mission, "we are here to feed brains," was reassuringly simple, and like a lot of good radio programmes, it was an excuse for FlyLo and his mates to play their own music and the music they loved.

Already with a toe in the door at Warp Records thanks to the Reset EP (used by the Adult Swim cable TV network, which means bugger all in the UK but is a big thing in the States), Flying Lotus was about to step into much bigger things.

His 2008 album on Warp Records, called Los Angeles for blisteringly obvious reasons, had other music producers salivating over his complex, urban instrumentals. I even got drooled on by HMV staff when I bought it on CD (their dribble is like acid: it stings).

As FlyLo increased his knob-twiddling respect levels to 11**, Brainfeeder morphed into a record label. Bolstered by a distribution deal with the legendary imprint Ninja Tune, the 'feeder now boasts Ras G, Lorn, Matthewdavid, Daedelus and the Gaslamp Killer among its roster.

In fact, Daedelus's forthcoming Righteous Fists Of Harmony EP is the label's first put-out-the-bunting and stick-the-kettle-on release: it should propel them into the bleep-o-sphere.

Brainfeeder is exciting because the music is so fresh and so clean. Ain't nobody dope as them. And it's a great complement to the Glaswegian DIY electronica scene championed by Hudson Mohawke and the LuckyMe collective.

To wrap your ears around Brainfeeder goodness, this Red Bull Music Academy show is a good place to start. Or FlyLo and the Gaslamp Killer's Christmas present to everyone is also worth sticking on your iPod. Meanwhile, it's not at all long until Flying Lotus' droolworthy third album Cosmogramma is released on Warp Records.

But then, I'm not parping about Warp, am I? I thought we'd established that.

* Song For Alice (Dedicated to the Beautiful Legacy of Mrs. Coltrane) from Weller's 2008 album 22 Dreams (Mrs Coltrane being FlyLo's great aunt and wife of John Coltrane).

** This is not, as you would expect, a nod to the classic rock spoofudrama Spinal Tap, but instead it is an endearing tribute to the maximum volume level on the BBC iPlayer.