Best electronic albums of 2016: ten

10 – patten – Ψ (Warp Records)

Welcome to my top 10 electronic albums of 2016. Yay, we made it!

My Autechre radar first went off around patten two years ago when their last album ESTOILE NAIANT turned heads. On Ψ (psi), they’ve tightened up everything. Now it sounds like early Autechre made for the dang dancefloor. Well. Maybe the basement below the dancefloor.

Hark: the stark percussion of Sonne; the footwork claustrophobia of Blade or Epsilon; the ambient chords washing underneath Used to b, the broken melancholia of Cache, with its Nintendo bleeps trying to break through the track.

This is a refreshed patten, boosted no end by the monotone mutterings of new member A. Yep, they comprise two lettered people: he's called D, she's called A. With her vocals never far away and yet as distant as Alpha Centauri, this cold techno sounds strangely warm. Their live visuals are reportedly breaking new ground: there's evidence here that their audio is too.

Watch the video for the brilliant Sonne by clicking here.

Scroll all of the best 2016 electronic albums by clicking here.

Listen to patten's Sonne while I hold this trifle

You know when you walk into another room but you leave a bit of information at the threshold? As if it tumbled from your brain without you noticing?

It happened to me the other day. "Why did I come into this room?" "Oh yeah I need get the trifle to feed the buffalo."

We've all done it. It seems I've done the same with patten's Sonne video. It came out months ago and I could have sworn I'd posted it.

But no, I probably got distracted. Maybe I'd started writing about it but then walked away from my computer to stop the buffalo eating all the trifle because some idiot, can't remember who, decided to give the buffalo all my trifle.

Anyway, it's finally posted. Watch this video for Sonne taken from patten's second album on Warp Records, Ψ. That's the Greek letter psi by the way. Not to be confused with the Psy that did Gangnam Style.

The harsh percussion matches the video's dramatic lighting, and brings to mind Autechre's Gantz Graf. Mesmerising use of colour too.

Must go. I've got an animal to feed, and this dessert's not going to eat itself.

Further Fats: Three things I've been listening to (including patten's ESTOILE NAIANT) (2014)

Further Fats: God sent Jesus Christ but the techno gods sent a single solitary extra black dot (about Autechre) (2008)

Three things I've been listening to, and they all begin with P like pea, pineal gland and, er, Papa Roach

This is what I've been pouring into my ear tubes recently.

PLASTIKMAN: EX (MUTE)



Slow-ass acid techno, performed live in New York, that's as sharp as a million pins piercing your brain. There's so much space in Pastikman's first album for a decade, a simple cymbal shudders plaster from the walls. The growling bassline of EXtrude will knock you off your feet. Every moment is played for a live experience, and although progress is, on the surface, glacial, the themes submerge and rise with a beautiful and hypnotic dynamism. And Richie Hawtin certainly offers us the best production I've heard in 2014. Run for the hills, Jon Hopkins!

PLAID: REACHY PRINTS (WARP)



IDM's most listenable, most melodic moment of the year, and certainly Plaid's "easiest" album. Nafovanny's moody loping is nothing less than a five minute pop song with a stadium-techno refrain, albeit with that ethereal chiming to make things sounds like a steel drum band on Venus. Like their older tracks Eyen and Get What You Gave, most of this feels simple and familiar. Throughout, there's Kraftwerkian melodies, home-listening melancholia and, on Matin Lunaire, a close approximation of Wonky-era Orbital. The most Plaidian Plaid to date.

PATTEN - ESTOILE NAIANT (WARP)



And here's an album I started listening to a lot then gave up on. patten's complex and messy electronica sounds like Boards of Canada with broken legs. It has all the sounds of classic IDM, but it seems somehow distracted and entirely of the head rather than the heart. There's so much bustling on Key Embedded, while their most intriguing moment Drift kills itself with its own percussion. Still, I love the abstraction and the Autechre bit of me has an utter tentpole at the sound of it all.

Further Fats: Bleep Years day two: Plaid's Get What You Gave (2012)