90 best electronic music albums of 2021: Flying Lotus, Helm, Herbert, Humanoid & Jana Rush

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

Flying Lotus – Yasuke (Warp)

It's really nice to see Mr F. Lotus get his teeth into something as chunky as soundtracking a samurai series on Netflix. The telly programme evokes 16th-century feudal Japan, but this album feels much more modern. Trop hop beats, nostalgic analogue synths and fat computerised beats nestle up against its anime inspiration with the greatest of ease: lounge bar music by way of Tokyo. There's even a track (War Lords) which is Very Pink Floyd Indeed. A very different Flying Lotus experience, and we're all the better for it.

Helm – Axis (Dais Records)

"Fractured clanging, hissing steam, granular haze," says the blurb. Wait, don't go. Luke Younger's returns to his low-fi noise roots for this debut on Dias Records. Its scratched industrialisms and pained clanking rhythms are certainly matched by its track names: Moskito, Repellent. But actually, it's surprisingly tuneful if you're okay with the whole apocalyptic building site thing: there's beautiful ambience to be found in this end-times EBM. And hey, if I'm going to have a haze, I want it to be a granular one.

Herbert – Musca (Accidental)

Here's a bit of my review for Electronic Sound magazine of this latest instalment in Herbert's ‘domestic house’ series. "Each track is ever-so-neosoul, new jazzy standards made for a Gilles Peterson playlist... This is Herbert exploring his commercial rather than experimental side, the purported – and very Herbert – grunting pig and chatty fox cub samples kept largely under the radar." Forgot about the pig bits. Anyhoo, it's all very smooth and Radio 2, but Herbert always delivers everything with a wink and I love him for that.

Humanoid – 7 Songs (De:tuned)

I admit, this was a very last-minute addition to my list. This is the act that brought us Stakker Humanoid from back in the day. I'd just assumed it was some old rerelease. How wrong I was. The chap from Future Sound of London slaps us across the chops with chunky acid madness: listen to it squeal and bleep and yelp. Absolutely gorgeous. Nothing complicated: just an old drum machine and some significantly squelchy sonics. Just listen to Pyramid 17 go. 7 very good songs.

Jana Rush – Painful Enlightenment (Planet Mu) 

This album is everywhere. It's the most hyped thing since Pogs or Betamax or that time I told Charlie Norridge I could balance a bunsen burner on my willy. For her second album, this Chicago producer moves from footwork into abstract experimentalism: chopped loops get caught in powerful cycles of shuddering bass, ecstatic vocal samples and ever-present urgent drums. Like looking at a jazz club through a kaleidoscope through insect eyes. Genuinely unique. Oh and always make sure the burner's switched off first.

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

Brass band players, coming over here, taking over our dancefloors

The Daily Mail is an august institution that, in 2008, has had an important and positive effect on modern culture.

I'm not talking about its constant chiding of anyone it considers as non-British, or indeed its fawning over old fashioned values where we could hang misfits and still leave the door open.

No, I'm talking about one of my favourite gigs of the year where the Matthew Herbert Big Band (Matthew pictured) sampled themselves tearing the Daily Mail into strips, before bursting the racist rags into the air in a delightful, synchronised confetti show.

Their album There's Me And There's You is a political mix of brassish oomp-ery and jittery sampling, although Eska's sassy jazz vocals are worth hearing live than through your headphones.

Also out recently was Last Step's 1961, the second album under this signature for Venetian Snares' Aaron Funk. It's a massive, brightly coloured bag of broken Roland 303s, 606s, 808s and any other shiny palindromic music box you care to mention.

If you rate Luke Vibert and Squarepusher (who dazzled at last week's Warehouse Project, but that's for another post), or if you pine for old Aphex Twin, you should have this album in your collection. Just be prepared for sporadic ruptions of cheesy pop and TV adverts.

More straight down the line is Harmonic 313's Dirtbox single, which is a darker bad-boy slice of his usual gasping slow-motion Detroit techno

When his album hits in a couple of months, it will sit proudly alongside his classic album of nearly 15 years ago, the ambient beast that is 76:14.

Ah, yes, 15 years ago. When you could leave your door open, shoot whomever walked onto your property, and Princess Diana wouldn't get suicide-bombed by social workers. Those were the days.

In Southport and not quivering under the duvet hiding from Franco frolickers

Luke Williams usually quivers under the duvet pretending he's Quinoline Yellow, a melodic electronic artist attached to the seminal Skam label and now to his own Uchelfa. (Dol-Goy Assist album pictured.)

But now he's under the bed with the bogeyman pretending he is someone else. Now, he answers to Tatamax, and he's just blurted out a superb album of cut-up sounds and dream noises.

It's called Wells Sentry and it's his debut album as Tatamax. Some will label it 'musique concrete'. This is where lost souls frolick through the long grass with a mini-disc recorder, a microphone and several large Francophile pretenses.

It is indeed a disc full of detailed found-sounds; there's a great snooker ball clack which bounces around the inexplicably-christened 54434D iadem.

But with the exception of the Venetian Snares-lite Kill Switches Demo, this is a haunted house of wafting dynamics and cheap plastic sonics that will keep you entertained long after the ambience has tip-toed back to spook your nightmares.

While you're in HMV confusing them with your request for this particular piece of digital tomfoolery, why not ask for Emissions: From The Archive?

This is a compilation of early Two Lone Swordsmen tracks. When I say early, I mean it's way before they started sounding like PiL. The 'Emissions' bit refers to the label they ran before they were scooped up by Warp Records.

It could be very standard upbeat mid-90s lounge dance, if it wasn't infused with late-night-smoky-clubness. Expect your clothes to smell in the morning.

And remember - this is from the same production brain that brought you Sabres Of Paradise extra-orgasmically-gorgeous Smokebelch.

Finally, I would type about Matthew Herbert's new offering Score, which is a big pile of music he's written for films, musicals, ballets, jazz clubs and scouting jamborees. I lied about the last two.

But I don't like it much. Instead let me spend the last few lines of this internetular missive telling you I am writing this from an internet cafe in Southport (time used 46min, balance £2) inbetwixt running a bookshop for a chorus of Salvation Army people.

I bet Aphex Twin's never done such a thing. Run a bookshop for the Salvation Army, that is. I'm sure he's been in an internet cafe. I don't know. You'd better ask him. Don't ask me--

--damn, that's £2.50.