30 best electronic music albums of 2021: Jim Noir, Joy Orbison, LNS & Murcof

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

Jim Noir – Deep Blue View (Dook Recordings) 

This was a massive surprise. Not in a horse's head in your shopping trolley kind of way. More like a unicorn in your wardrobe kind of way. Is that better? Not sure. Anyways, in Electronic Sound, I described Noir's ludicrously listenable music as "a full-on hug... a Jim Noir boudoir. Think Air covering the Beatles via John Barry." Honestly, this is possibly the most pleasant work on this best-of countdown. Ah, I've thought of a better simile. It's like ripping open your pillow then finding another pillow inside then ripping open that pillow and finding pillows carrying on until the end of the universe. Whilst sleeping with a unicorn. Delightful.

Joy Orbison – still slipping vol. 1 (XL Recordings)

You wait ages for a Joy Orbison debut album and suddenly one comes along at once. Look, it's not like you need to release an album to make a name for yourself. Orbison is electronic music royalty. However, it's astonishing to think that his game-changing debut track Hyph Mngo was released in the decade before last, and it's only now that he's chosen to pop out a long-player. It was a curiously low-key mix-tape-style debut, his floaty club cuts peppered with the voice of family members distanced from him during lockdown. Still, although there wasn't much to get your teeth into, it was extraordinarily listenable

LNS & DJ Sotofett – Sputters (Tresor Records)

What do you get if you cross a Canadian producer and a Norwegian DJ? Great big holes all over Australia! Wait. That's not right. This is the first time these collaborators have produced an album, and the fact it's on the hard-nosed Tresor Records gives a clue as to its content. Hammer-blow bass drums lead the energy, bringing with them twitchy 909 rhythms, abraded acid and lots of science fiction sounds. The best thing is the album's dubwise attitude, with the echo machine working overtime to plump the cold hardware with warm air. Dubby electro fun and no mistake.

Murcof – The Alias Sessions (The Leaf Label) 

Another album that probably should have been in my top ten. This abstract minimalism was originally written for a dance performance, and sees Murcof reuniting with the legendary Leaf label for the first time in 13 years. "Murcof creates cataclysmic ripples from the smallest waveform, like a moth’s wingbeat causing Saturn to explode," I wrote in Electronic Sound before waffling about "gaseous glitches" and "transient arcs" and an "ominous gong, rusted piano over supercharged static". For an act so obtuse to mainstream ears, it's incredible how listenable this is. Arguably Murcof's best work for a long time.

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

From catatonic breakdance to a need for speed: new electronic music for April 2021

Are your ears stupid idiots? Do you want to punish your ears? How about punishing your stupid idiot ears with some brand new electronic music?

Here's a smattering of bleepy albums due for release in April 2021.

Murcof's rejoins the Leaf Label for The Alias Sessions, an album written for a dance company in Geneva. I'm not much of a dancer, myself: my moves are limited to confused salsa, catatonic breakdance and eyebrow tango. Murcof's music often resides in little ripples of waveforms, but there are great big tidal washes of noise on this new album. One of my favourite Murcofs for a while.

Jimi Tenor's putting out Deep Sound Learning (1993 - 2000). This scoops up a load of unheard stuff from, you guessed it, 1993 to 2000. Apparently Jimi bombarded Warp Records with endless DAT tapes, presumably using some kind of cassette cannon, and much of it remained in storage until now. I really want a cassette cannon. A tape trebuchet. A reel-to-reel rocket launcher.

The album I'm most looking forward to in April is Eomac's Cracks. This is darkly desolate Dublin bass music that blends the atmosphere of Rival Consoles with the melodic motifs of Aphex Twin. Eomac (pictured above) is 'Cameo' backwards, but I don't know if that means he does backwards walk-on parts in movies, or whether every track is the 1986 party track Word Up! played backwards.

What else? Look out for Facta's Blush, a debut album of folky electronics released on the label Facta jointly owns with the equally pastoral K-Lone. K-Lone's Cape Cira made my best-of-2020 list and Blush certainly feels like a sister album to some extent.

By the way, I'd like to point out that I'm typing all this without the use of one of my index fingers. When cutting bread, I decided to use my hand as a chopping board. This wasn't a good idea, and I cut my finger. It's not a big cut, but it's in a really annoying place, so my middle finger is putting extra work in while my index finger has a long hard think about what it's done. I'm amazeb any og these words sre coming out okau.

And finally, look out for: Caterina Barbieri's Fantas Variations, an album of remixes of a single track from her excellent Ecstatic Computation album; Dawn Richard's Second Line which promises chart-friendly sassy bangers and a whole lot of fun; and Herrmann Kristoffersen's thoroughly listenable Gone Gold, an IDM-influenced imaginary soundtrack for the Need For Speed racing game. Vroom flipping vroom.

Take THAT, stupid idiot ears.

Further Fats: Just how DO you act at your first rave? (2019)

Further Fats: Best electronic albums of 2020 (2020)

The devil has all the best IDM: Murcof

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: Murcof
Track: Rostro
Album: Remeberanza
Year: 2005

Sometimes, the spookiest material is seemingly innocuous. In this video, a bloke wakes up to glorious sunshine, puts on his favourite jumper and spends a day with his rollerskating duck chicken girlfriend.

It has some lovely touches (the writhing duvet, the hands creeping around the torso, the blurry glass face) and, like a great horror movie, it doesn't end well.

But more importantly, Murcof's music is so delicate, so dark and so downbeat, no Hallowe'en would be complete without it.

Blog Of The Year

Fat Roland On Electronica was the big winner, alongside Love Levenshulme, in last night's Manchester Blog Awards.

I have been peppering the web with snotty flakes of false modesty in preparation for my campaign for blogputsch ending in failure. But believe me when I said I didn't expect to win anything; I meant it.

Banana skins

The awards event was held in the Deaf Institute and was graciously compered by Manchester Literature Festival's Jon Atkin. He introduced several short story readings by 330 Words contributors, all of which were brilliant and some of which included the phrase 'banana skins' in their text (by coincidence, but it proves I was right about 330 Words in my recent blog post).

My Shitty Twenties, the reigning Best Writing On A Blog winner, raised warm smiles with her blog post about gerbils and About A Boy and the spelling of Gandhi, while previous winner Chris Killen peformed a remarkable Choose Your Own Adventure story in which I volunteered to be the protagonist.

You can see us in Tom Mason's picture above, Chris reading the story and me making the crucial decisions. Except I've added a few speech balloons. That's me on the right, there. Chris Killen had me going on a date with crap hair then trying to escape through a toilet window. Or was it me that chose that? It was very chortlesome because he's a great writer.

And then came the awards. Best City And Neighbourhood Blog went to Love Levenshulme, more of which later. Best Arts and Culture Blog went to Ribbons and Leaves, which combines old and new by scanning typewritten blog posts (I must dig out my old typewriter some time).

The Best New Blog winner was the collaborative story-writing project 330 Words, while Best Personal Blog was awarded Might As Well, otherwise known as one of the brains behind Beards Of Manchester.

Each and every one of these blogs bagged a well-deserved win, and I urge you to frequent them constantly.

Slow motion

As for my wins, it played out in slow motion. As a couple of my competitors in the Best Writing On A Blog category won in other categories first, my chance of winning presumably increased. The preamble to my category mentioned the winner having a "slightly obscure subject matter", and that, along with a knowing tap from Do A Barrel Roll's foot, had me furiously trying to write an acceptance speech inside my head in the five seconds remaining before my name was read out.

On the stage, I took a slow sip of beer (got that tip off an actor a while ago!), hesitated because I nearly fainted from shock, and then apologised for everything I've said about James Blunt over the years.

To go on to win a second award, and this time the biggie (Blog of the Year) was surprising and humbling and delightful and scary and all the other things that bubble up from your stomach when everything happens at once. It gave me an excuse to be the first person ever to namecheck Venetian Snares at an awards ceremony.

Fat Roland the website has been chugging away for eight years, eight months and eighteen days, and as it became more bloggy (proper URL, some semblance of design) and more 'writerly' (six a.m. writing sessions, lots of editing), it still squatted in some obscure corner of the internet pooing out its electronic effluent on a modest gaggle of off-beat but lovely fans.

Something small

The extra sweetness from the yummy winnery was the fact I won Blog of the Year jointly with Love Levenshulme, another blog that is focussed on something small. but that something small is treated with passion and commitment and, it has to be said, sacrifice (turns out, one of them gave up their TV to concentrate more on writing, as did I earlier this year).

The judges split the prize because they couldn't work out which blog was the bestest, a conversation I would have given my right arm to eavesdrop on. "Aphex Twin or Levenshulme... Aphex Twin or Levenshulme... hmmmm... let me pipe Windowlicker in through Levenshulme library's windows, see what happens..."

I'm pretty sure ninety-twelvety per cent of Best Writing winners have gone on to be multi-millionaire novelists, so I'd better start writing my tome on Murcof b-sides straight away. I'll just copy out Dan Brown's books, twaddle a few words around and colour the edges of the book pages red because publishers think it's trendy.

Meanwhile, will this blog change? Will it fudge. There are bleeps to be fondled, squelchy basslines to be goosed, and I'll be flappered sideways if I'm going to give up this corner of the internet in my battle against r 'n' b clones, despotic pop loons and Michael chuffing Bublé.

Thank you for reading. NOT YOU, BUBLÉ.

Murcof's amorphous star clouds at Futuresonic 2009

Murcof's latest gig was so good, my eyes were crushed underfoot and smeared all over the wrecked remains of my eardrums.

The abstract minimalism of Mexico's premier glitch artist was accompanied by specially commissioned visuals from AntiVJ at the opening night of Manchester's Futuresonic festival.

And what visuals. A ball of shining dust throbbed and burst into an insectoid terror, at one point exploding with such ferocity, half the audience phoned their mummy. A grand vista of the universe, falling like fairy dust on the wide-eyed punters, swelled into an intense three dimensional world of amorphous galactic star clouds. Blue vertical lines harped and bowed, harsh squares graphed across the width of the stage, and dozens of hearts lurched as a black hole threatened to explode from a seething cloud of white light.

Murcof (photo by Conny Fornbäck) were no less impressive.Death Of A Forest's horror-film chords drew cold fingers up spines (copyright: every horror writer ever). Cosmos 1 or 2, whichever one it was, sounded organic and reedy then thundered to a grandious crescendo. The thin, snapping beats of Cielo and Mir sliced through the RNCM's pristine sound system, and each bass drum kicked harder and deeper than the last.

Support came from Johan Johnannsson, who I could take or leave with his basic string quartet / piano / loops set-up, and Denis Jones, who bristled with beardy beauty as he delivered a folktronica set that was simplistic in intention but full of complex twitches and layered samples.

Farting, belching, bleeping buckets of steaming sub-bass

Murcof (pictured) just seems to get deeper and deeper, into some unknown depths that would even prompt Satan to exclaim: "Hey, what's going on down there?"

The Versailles Sessions, Murcof's new collection of experimental noodlings on the legendary Leaf label, are no less deep. Although the album was meant to work for an arty-farty event on the other side of the channel (in a land called France), the sprawling, spooky compositions work in their own right.

The only downside is the record's loaded with harpsichords and flutes, and is therefore giving me flashbacks to my third year music lessons at Parrs Wood High School.

My favourite album this week is the seething bucket of steaming sub-bass that is Lord for £39, the latest offering from Edinburgh's Neil Landstrumm.

The rolling tech-bass tickles the feet of ragga and plays footsie with bleepy console noises to produce what ought to be a sombre bad-boy wonky techno effort. Except, the album has titles like Ross Kemp As Pixel and Easter Krunk Power, so it's hard not to smile.

Finally, keep your eyes open for a 12" from Dorian Concept called The Fucking Formula. It snaffles Landstrumm's fuzzy bass and wonkiness, but it has a Prefuse 73 accessibility about it. If you like your belches and squelches as low end as possible, whilst keeping your top end nodding in a hip hop stylee, track down this single - and duck when album When Planets Explode hits next month.

Reviving my shrivelling grandma and getting out of my depth with Mahler

Just because I've been adjusting to a new job for the first time in nine years, that's no excuse to leave my blog shrivelled on the edge of the pavement like an old forgotten grandma.

Still, there's nothing better to distract you from your blogless disappointment than some nice charts. Above is a bar chart interpretation of Jay Z's 99 Problems, and you can see plenty more here. If anyone can tell me the collective noun for charts, tell me using a graph.

Because blogging is the way I speak, I've kept silent about lots of music. Not least Sun Electric's Lost & Found (1998 - 2000). The tracks were rediscovered on an old CD-R, as the title suggests, and it's a welcome reminder of a band that have been dormant for donkey's.

Sun Electric always lacked the crunch of their techno peers Orbital, and perhaps the production talent of some-time Orb dabbler Thomas Fehlmann lent their music too much whimsy.

When it's not trying to be Brian Eno's Nerve Net on a little too much horse tranquilizer, Lost & Found works wonderfully, not least in the flapping rhythm of Echelon which sounds as though the whole thing was recorded inside a pipe.

A hop over to the Leaf Label now, and Murcof have thrown a curve-ball with their new album Cosmos.

Their glitchy precision has been buried in favour of ambience sweeping from Mahler-inspired moodiness to Wagner-inspired pomposity. (All the other reviews have mentioned György Ligeti, but I don't know who he is and I'm bloody useless at classical comparisons).

It's either quiet, or it's the ambient equivalent of a guitar solo. It's certainly not worth buying it on its own, which is good because apparently it'll be fully realised as an audio-visual project.

In fact, stuff all this lot. Screw it. If you're looking for something on which to spend your hardcore pimp wage, plump for Luke Vibert's Chicago, Detroit, Redruth. Playful acid rave has never been so listenable, and it's the first album I've owned dedicated to a Cornish town.

mpSunday: Pole's Stefan Betke remastered the newly found gems on Sun Electric's Lost & Found. Pole are seriously underrated, so here's a free track. Grab it while you can, because as soon as I post another mpSunday, this mp3 will be kicked to the kerb like gran. POW! This mpSunday is no longer available - click here for the latest mpSunday