60 best electronic music albums of 2021: Foodman, Nils Frahm, Howie Lee, Illuvia & Jacques Greene

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

Foodman – Yasuragi Land (Hyperdub)

Takahide 'Foodman' Higuchi comes from Japan's footwork scene, so there are rhythmic trills peppered throughout this curious genre-bending album for London's Hyperdub label. The album is as abstract as heck, mixing Japanese environmental music with an improvisational multi-track set-up. The tracks feel episodic. There's no bass. The loops come laden with memorable hooks, but they're bitten through with hesitations and land as lightly as a feather. You'll not hear anything else like this. Extraordinary.

F.S. Blumm & Nils Frahm – 2X1 = 4 (LEITER) 

An underground German producer teams up with a classical maestro for an experiment in dub? Yes please. Over to my review of this album for Electronic Sound: "We’re talking bull-by-the-horns electronic dub. Blumm brings his experience from his duo Quasi Dub Development, where a tuba did the bass work... All along, Frahm’s melodies ooze with sadness. Like the confused maths of its title, it shouldn’t work but it does." The dub bits really, really work. With echo and everything. 

Howie Lee – Birdy Island (Mais Um Discos)

Beijing-based visual artist Howie Lee based the concept of this album around an imaginary floating theme park in which birds and ghostly spirits (I presume) go on the log flume together. It's suitably mystical and magical, with lilting accordions and jazzy drums lazily seeing the afternoon through. Imagine sparrows running a candy floss stall, or blue tits operating a Wurlitzer. Apparently, he's usually clubbier than this: we're certainly in pastoral territory. Not a rollercoaster in sight.

Illuvia – Iridescence Of Clouds (A Strangely Isolated Place)

Having written music journalism as long as I have, I'm pretty sure I've heard everything. And then someone like Ludvig 'Illuvia' Cimbrelius comes along. On the face of it, this is a sweeping ambient album typical of the excellent fayre produced by the A Strangely Isolated Place label (check their 9128 streams). But then... the drum and bass. The distant drum and bass, as if farted out by passing angels. An extraordinary sonic technique that already has me regretting not placing this further up my list.

Jacques Greene – ANTH01 (LuckyMe)

I had to break my rule about not including reissues in my best-of list because, oh my giddy trousers, this is so damn good. This is a collection of out-of-print records from earlier in Greene's career. The sparky house of Faded and the Brandy-sampling garage of The Look sound so in tune with recent dance trends, this might as well be brand new material. As jolly Jacques puts it himself, "time became quite slippery in the past year and a half." Too right.

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

Best electronic albums of 2019: mine's a 99! Mooo!

As my top ten favourite 2109 electronic music albums thunder across the internet like a pack of cows chasing an ice cream van, let's take a look at some ambient, classical-ish and pastoral albums that didn't quite make my final list.

Leading this longlist is A Winged Victory for the Sullen: the elegiac ambience of The Undivided Five (Ninja Tune) constantly reached for a perfect fifth chord: extra points for a track-title dig at Jacob Rees-Mogg. I liked what previous Fat Roland champion Clark was doing on his television theme album Kiri Variations (Throttle Records) – all a bit fancy. This year saw the joyous return of Telefon Tel Aviv with Dreams Are Not Enough (Ghostly International). Its track titles were to be read as a poem, but the true meaning came from the ever-expansive production design.

Also in my best-of-the-rest is Nils Frahm's All Melody (Erased Tapes), whose seventh studio album was classic Frahm with added trumpet. Parp! Tim Hecker gave us the rather coy Anoyo (Kranky), a brief ambient sojourn in which he was inspired, not for the first time, by Japanese gagaku music. And Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Allesandro Cortini picked up a guitar for the first time in his solo career and drowned it with spine-tingling analogue fuzziness on Volume Massimo (Mute).

The ever-reliable Bibio went back to bucolic on Ribbons (Warp), with strings so lovely I'd wear them as a vest. The fact that Panda Bear guests on Teebs' lush Anicca (Brainfeeder) tells you exactly what that album sounds like: dreamy and exquisite. And the delicate glitches of Leif's Loom Dream (Whities) made me feel like I was getting razzed on fazoomy on a glacier's edge. Whatever the heck that means.

Best electronic albums of 2018: if I'm into it, I'm not into it enough for the top 20

In compiling my top 20, there are lots of albums I have to screw up and throw into the bin. That doesn't mean I don't value them. It's a nice bin, with little frills around the edge.

This count-down will be peppered with little summaries of the dozens of albums that didn't make the final list. That includes compilations and rereleases, which I have excluded for simplicity.

So before we kick off the top 20 proper, here are some also-rans.

There's no space for hardcore getting dirty on the reissued broken breakcore of Christoph De Babalon’s overlooked 1997 album If You're Into It, I'm Out Of It (Cross Fade Enter Tainment) or the experimental South American drumism of Suba’s early-90s work Wayang (Offen Music). Nor did I include Time To Tell (Conspiracy International), a reissue from Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti which was a more interesting album than suggested its inspiration suggests – namely, a lecture at Leeds Polytechnic.

I also didn't include Takecha’s ear-tickling skeletal house retrospective Deep Soundscapes (Love Potion) was a real ear-tickler, the wonderfully familiar IDMisms on the unearthed Challenge Me Foolish (Planet Mu) by µ-Ziq, the messy joy of the superb compilation Don't Mess With Cupid, 'Cause Cupid Ain't Stupid (трип) or the expanded box-set reissue of Move D’s 1995 techno album Kunststoff –  if the name rings a bell, he was on Volume Four of the Trance Europe Express series.

I also tried to keep my list as techno / IDM as possible, because that's what rings my electronic bell. So not much room for hip hop or jazz, with a couple of notable exceptions. And, to my shame, I excluded two classical behemoths. Firstly, Nils Frahm’s All Melody (Warp Records), which was delicate, like a unicorn made of snowflakes, if it was armed with a piano in each hoof. And Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Englabörn & Variations (Deutsche Grammophon), which was overflowing with melancholic elegance like bins wot ain't getting collected until some time after the new year.





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