One small BlueDot with Bjork, Anna Meredith, Jane Weaver and tonnes more

I went to BlueDot Festival and had a brilliant time, thanks for asking. The camping was a little tough because I am now as old as a mountain, but with the help of a hastily-bought camping chair and a steady supply of Tango, I got through it just fine. Festivals are back! Woo!

BlueDot is a science and music festival based at Jodrell Bank, which is a clever science centre with a telescope that looks like a satellite dish. You know the scaffolding that Tom Baker Doctor Who fell to his death from? It’s based on that telescope. It’s a small, chilled festival full of nice people. You should go.

I’m going to reel through everything I saw and did, so brace yourself. This is a quick and dirty blog post, so it’s all first draft. No photos – you can find them on Twitter by searching for fatroland and the blue dot emoji. Right. Let’s do some words. Let’s go!

Sunday’s main headliner was the Halle Orchestra featuring Bjork. So good, I cried twice. She was as otherworldly as ever – you can google the costume she was wearing. But she was also earthy and emotional, and she did old tracks like ‘Come To Me’ which made me a very happy boy indeed. The orchestra was phenomenal, and reminded me that there are certain melodic arrangements that sound very Bjork indeed. It’s not all about the voice, as it happens.

I ought to take this chance to tell you that I have also sung with the Halle Orchestra. I was a founding member of Manchester Boys Choir, and we sung in proper concerts and everything. We even did Songs of Praise. I’m not saying that makes me as good as Bjork and/or Jesus. I’m not saying that. That is for you to decide. Ahem.

Mandy, Indiana knocked the tent pegs out of the place with their claustrophobic drums and apocalyptic Frenchness. The lead singer took a bad tumble on stage and ended the gig laughing like a maniac. Breathtaking start to finish.

This seems like stating the obvious, but Yard Act were cheeky, hilarious and very Yorkshire. I loved the bit where he railed against middle-class kids and their confectionary, then tried to list as many middle-class kid sweets as he could. Frubes. He mentioned Frubes. Also worth including in this very-Yorkshire section is the Eccentronic Research Council, whose brilliant festival-closing set involved some amazing gruffness and Maxine Peake reading out people’s dreams. Adrian really does have a very impressive hat.

It was so great to see Kelly Lee Owens, who trod a perfect line between Canderel-sweet vocal harmonies and grubby warehouse techno devastation. She clashed with Groove Armada, but this was an easy choice. Kelly Lee flipping Owens.

Anna Meredith took to main stage and converted everyone to her tuba techno and her bold, brassy, brainy beats. And her digital Tom Cruise. So much fun. Last gig of the year as she turns her focus to album production.

I got to see Koreless, my album of the year for last year. Intricate, powerful, all the good things – but cut short because I had to pop off to Squarepusher. Mr Pusher was in a furious mood, barraging us with audio fractals for a solid hour before allowing even a slight notion of melody to show its face. ‘Detroit People Pusher’ was a fractured highlight. Cracking stuff.

Jane Weaver revived the spirit of melodic 1990s indie and put in a remarkable and mesmerising set. Head and shoulders above most of her peers. I’ve seen LoneLady several times since I did my interview with her for Electronic Sound magazine, and it was good to see her on a proper big stage. Front rail, boogied a lot, sorted.

Hannah Peel and her Paraorchestra was a fine appetiser on a quiet Thursday. Norrisette brought some quirky and masked Stockport realness to the festival. Dirty Freud reminded us of 1990s trip hop. Caro C did a delightfully engaging performance of her Electric Mountain album, complete with found sounds. All rather smashing.

What else? Henge once again beamed in from space to deliver their mix of Spinal Tap and Galaxy Quest fun. Always good value. Sad Night Dynamite were fun too but probably more aimed at kids. I saw some Sea Fever, the projected by Johnny Marr’s bass player Iwan Gronow. Sounds From The Other City did a colossal DJ takeover – another great festival you should check out. Tim Burgess knocked out some Charlatans numbers on main stage, which was endearing, like watching your poodle dance on its back legs. There was Mogwai too. But I didn't watch them. Soz.

Among the non-music things I saw were Matthew Cobb talking about brains and entertaining us with AI-generated Love Hearts slogans, comedian Bec Hill and maths funny man Matt Parker doing a live podcast and Brainiac Live doing science experiments probably – I missed almost all of it because I was chatting and facing the wrong way. I caught A Certain Ratio talking about the olden days with affection and humility. Anna Meredith ran an album listening session which was engaging and funny. The spoken word artist ROY did a hugely enjoyable and expletive-ridden reading and Q&A.

Oh and astronaut Tim Peake talked about being astronaut Tim Peake. This was amazing because he’s a chuffing astronaut and I am most definitely not a chuffing astronaut. Or perhaps I am an astronaut. Perhaps I am. That is for you to decide.

A few personal things. Shout out to my camping buddies Deb and Tom and Michelle, and to the many friends I hung out with. BlueDot is a bit like everyone in Manchester dumped into a field. Hat doff to Ben, to Adrian, to Helen, to Electronic Sound, to my Blackwell’s buddies, and to Dave and Hannah whose BlueDot experience was robbed by Covid.

Would I go again? Of course. I’m addicted to this festival. It perhaps needs more stalls and traders, and more places to buy a bacon butty, and less sponsorship from Dyson which was a bit odd. But the food was immense (masala dosa!), the stewarding was great, and I got to be in a room with a flipping astronaut. Well. Not quite in a room. Outside the tent. Sat against a fence. Just enjoying the BlueDot space vibes. Brill. 

Best electronic albums of 2020: twelve

12 – Squarepusher – Be Up A Hello (Warp)

At this stage of the countdown, the variation in quality is so small, you can pretty much consider the top 12 as one long Album Of The Year. Maybe it comes as one humongous CD that you have to roll into your living room, or a single cassette tape the size of a washing machine. That's how box sets work, right?

Be Up A Hello is one of Squarepusher's best albums. It's melodic yet acerbic, warming yet acerbic, thrilling yet acerbic. Detroit People Mover is a sweet moment of stillness in a storm of clattering dynamics, breathless melancholy, and really flipping good noises. I love it.

The album also came from a tough place: an accident nearly saw the end of Squarepusher's career, and he had to rebuild his process from the ground up. Read about this in my interview with Squarepusher in Electronic Sound issue 62. An interview conducted, by the way, after I'd suffered a similar accident. We were both smarting.

I enjoyed the 'Pusher's collaboration with Japanese speed robots, and the LED-bright prog funk as Shobaleader, but his move towards older synth kit really paid off here. Ole Squiggleplops has done good.

 

Browse the rest of the Best Electronic Albums of 2020

Talking about sad things with Squarepusher

In the new issue of Electronic Sound magazine, I chat to Squarepusher about keeping puppies, and how puppies are so cute, and ha ha ha look at their little floppy ears and—

Okay, I lied about the puppies. I'm trying to keep things light-hearted because actually my chat with Squarepusher in issue 62 of the magazine was as melancholic as flip. This is not angry Squarepusher. This is a vulnerable bloke who has recently faced loss in more ways than one. Our conversation was quite extraordinary, and it was a side of the Square one I really liked.

I would explain more, but you're going to have to get yourself a copy by visiting the Electronic Sound website, or popping into WH Smith, or summoning a magazine-creating wizard by setting twelve magpies on fire.

Six whole pages of me and Squarepusher. Exciting, right? No? Oh suit yerself.

The @SQUAREPUSHER interview in @ElectronicMagUK this month is really special.

— Colin Bond (@colinb_nd) February 13, 2020

Elsewhere in the magazine, I write a full page column all about insurance. Yes, really. For the first time ever, I accompany my words with a custom-scrawled illustration. There's a little bit of the illustration in the image above. Find all the words alongside my cartoon on the inside back page of the mag.

Oh and I've done some reviews too. All of which is massively overshadowed by this month's Electronic Sound cover story, not written by me, about the astonishing life and death of music producer Joe Meek. It's well worth a read. Oh my.

Ten slices of shallow-fried Twitter whimsy

Twitter is a platform in which everyone can communicate with everyone else all of the time without any downsides whatsoever.

What follows are ten slices of shallow-fried whimsy lovingly copied-and-pasted from my Twitter account. Some if it reads as a useful self-help guide along the lines of The Power Of Now, How To Win Friends And Influence People or the Roland SH-101 Owner's Manual. Some of it reads like poetry along the lines of, er, poems and stuff.

I have given each tweet a header so you can perhaps make an index from it, like they do with proper books.

1. The food puns
Butter Living Through Chemistry. Meusli Has The Right To Children. Thymeless. Dubnobasswithmyheadman (where bass is a fish). Adventures Beyond The Ultrawurst. Endtrojuicing. Not sure where I'm going with this.

2. A question about 1996
Did the boy ever see his mom that weekend to tell her Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan?

3. Thoughts post-Brexit
Don't worry, everyone, we don't need Europe. Just stay in your towns, don't go anywhere, don't meet new people and don't buy anything. We didn't have the EU around the time of the Great Plague and everything was just fine.

4. Morning reflection 1
A grey morning in Manchester. Cold raindrops fall on puddled streets like polar bears in spandex, if polar bears were tiny and made of water, also forget the spandex, that's just a distraction tbh

5. A motivation
How to have a positive day:
- smile more
- do one kind thing
- pay a compliment
- open up the portal of d'ath krondor
- eat healthy
- live in the moment
- the tentacles, the tentacles, they burn
- be a good listener
- the void shall become all, ye wastrels of earth

6. A concern
I'm slightly worried that Antifa is short for Anti Fat Roland.

7. A dream for the future
It's splitting hairs, but I'd like to hear New Order's Mr Disco covered by Electronic.

8. Morning reflection 2
It is morning. The sun comes alive in the eastern sky and says its happy greetings. Hello trees. Hello fields. Hello squirrels. Hello sun! they call and wave. In the western sky, the moon dies a horrible death. Everyone laughs.

9. A simple wish
I wish Squarepusher was called Squidpusher and all of his promo shots were of him in back alleys selling squid.

10. The bird incident
Twitter, I forgot to tell you. A low-flying goose honked at me pretty aggressively the other day, so that's pretty much 2020 written off. How's YOUR week been?

Further Fats: Squarepusher's psychedelic number - could it send him (robert) miles off course? (2009)

Further Fats: Top ten ways to write a top ten music list (2012)

My eyes, my eyes – Squarepusher goes to Tokyo for Terminal Slam

Squarepusher's popped out a new video for his banging track Terminal Slam, taken from his new album Be Up A Hello. It centres around the famous Shibuya road crossing in Tokyo. You know the one. It's made from steamrollered zebras.

In the video, fancy glasses make display adverts go all glitchy and strange. A bit like that Roddy Piper film with the sunglasses and the aliens, except without any sunglasses and without any aliens.

The track is an absolute belter, and the whole visual experience feels widescreen and ultra-technological. Neon signs everywhere, sunburst bright. And best of all, Squarepusher's face, name and logo keep appearing.

I tried recreating the video in my sleepy suburb. I didn't have sunglasses, so I just gaffer-taped my eyes and ran out into the street. It's very hard to write your name and logo on everything when you can't see a thing. Long story short, the 'Twenty's Plenty' sign opposite my gaff now has "FAD ROLANT" scrawled across it.

Here's the video. Read more about Squarepusher's new album by reading this blog post that tells you to read Electronic Sound magazine.

(Sine)wave hello to my full page Squarepusher review in Electronic Sound magazine

Issue 61 of Electronic Sound magazine, released last week, pokes a stick at independent record labels and sees if they squeak. Even more importantly, I'm pretty chuffed to have written this month's lead album review.

There's always one big chunking piece at the start of every month's review section: a full page blather about the big release of the month. In issue 61's big fat review, I give my thoughts on Squarepusher's new album Be Up A Hello.

If you take a peek above, you'll see I've taken a photograph of the review, so you don't have to buy the magazine. Oh. Dammit. Silly old Censorship Cedric got in the way. Gaaaah! Cedric!

One thing I will tell you about the review is that I mention Mr Blobby within the first few words. This is a serious album review. Honest.

I've also written about new album releases by Steve Roach, Phase Fatale and Pod Blotz. And if you finger your way to the back of the magazine, you'll find my monthly column. I've banged on about the brand spanking new year we affectionately call 2020. The first paragraph contains the word "groin", which is pretty much all you need to know.

I realise I throw lots of free words at you on this website, but it's definitely worth a subscription to Electronic Sound because my words there tend to be better. For example, I have never used – and will never use – the word "groin" on this blog. But I have definitely used the word "groin" in issue 61.

By the way, they never squeak: they're too robust.

Further Fats: Harder Better Faster Fats: how I want to make 2014 better than 2013 (2014) (contains the word "groin")

New music: Squarepusher, Dan Deacon & Phase Fatale

The rotted wasteland of January surrounds us, and not even our finest waterproof knickers can insulate us from the cold sludge of a British winter.

What you need is some new music to bring some soft candlelight to your endless darkness. Here are three January 2020 releases worth your attention.

Squarepusher – Be Up A Hello (Warp Records)

In recent years, Squarepusher has,in the parlance of modern slang, "gone off on one". His Shobaleader One project turned him into a kind of bezerker Cylon. He jammed with Japanese robots and produced an ambient soundtrack with Olivia Colman, which sounds like the kind of nonsense I'd make up, but it's true.

This was all brilliant, but now ole Squiggleplops is back to more familiar territory with a studio album that follows up 2015's Damogen Furies. He's moved away from the extreme digitalism of his recent work, and has instead opted to use a bunch of old gear. I wonder how old. Maybe we're talking lutes and harpsichords and the jangle of jester bells.

Actually, I've had Be Up A Hello on repeat for a few weeks now. I would give you my opinion, but my lips are contractually sealed. For now.

Dan Deacon – Mystic Familiar (Domino Records) 

Speaking of following up 2015 albums, it's nice to see the return of Dan Deacon, eccentric knob-twiddler and Sigur Ros collaborator. A long time ago, I boldly - and prematurely - declared that Dan Deacon had the best album of the year. In that blog post, I bang on about his similarity to Animal Collective, and that's a comparison that I suspect will hold up on Mystic Familiar.

With this album, he seems to be obsessed with "familiars" which are magical creatures that follow you around. That could include rats or cats or badgers or five-legged elephants or hedgehogs made of toenails or a panda reading a Thomas Pynchon novel.

If Dan Deacon was a season, he'd be summer, or maybe a late spring that feels like a summer. Which leads me on to...

Phase Fatale – Scanning Backwards (Ostgut Ton)

Never mind all that summer nonsense. Scanning Backwards is beyond the four seasons: this is post-nuclear fallout when the skies shimmer with unearthly light. This second album of pumping Berghain techno from Berlin's Phase Fatale will please those of you that want aerobic techno shuddering with mantle-deep bass rhythms.

He's promised "brain-penetrating instrumentation", which means when you tear the cellophane off the vinyl, a bassoon leaps onto your face and jabs your forehead with a whisk.

Here are bits of two of the above albums. Happy listening.





Further Fats: Ultra-funkulent new band from Squarepusher (2010)

It is my duty to inform you of this Selected Ambient Works anagram

It is my duty to inform you that Selected Ambient Works is an anagram of "Welcome Break dentists".

Less impressively, Squarepusher's 1998 album Music Is Rotted One Note is an anagram of "emits erotic note sound" while his debut from a couple of years earlier Feed Me Weird Things can be rearranged to say "eight friends mewed".

Boards Of Canada's seminal album Music Has The Right To Children is an anagram of "hi, third nuclear ghost chemist", while their later work The Campfire Headphase works out with an Iranian twist: "imperfect shah had a pee".

Venetian Snares is more of a challenge. The best I could get out of Rossz Csillag Alatt Született was "let tzars lust at laziest clogs", which they should be allowed to do. Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole becomes the horsey scandal "fool whinnies at neigh prizes". I'm not even going to attempt Cavalcade of Glee and Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms.

μ-Ziq's archive release Challenge Me Foolish can be rearranged to make "nice flesh homage, lol" which is all very creepy but none of this as good as the Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works anagram. Welcome Break dentists. Yeesh. Service stations are usually quite uncomfortable experiences, and this just opens up a whole new world of roadside pain.

Further Fats: Ardently foul, wet flies: do my angry anagrams, you fart-hole (2010)

Further Fats: Fat Roland's February pop anagrams - number 4 is a doozy (2019)

Feed me Rephlex things

This blog post was prompted by a tweet from Bandcamp, which is a bit like a more modern version of writing a LiveJournal entry prompted by a forum post from Napster.

Rephlex Records was a massive part of my musical world. It was truly the ABC of alternative techno, if that ABC stood for Aphex Twin, Bogdan Raczynski and Ceephax Acid Crew.

The label wound up a couple of years ago, but Bandcamp are here to remind us of their legacy in this old article tweeted at the end of October.

I think I'd include Squarepusher's Feed Me Weird Things, something by The Gentle People, some Voafose and that cracking Monolith album from a while back that was well good.

Professional music writer, me.

Read the Bandcamp piece here.

Further Fats: Reviews: The Flashbulb & Hecker/Voafose (2006)

Further Fats: Some abandoned musics: Body Down by Hounds Of Hulme (2015)

Listenable new video gunk from Warp Records

No explanation needed, really. These are all from the past couple of months, and each chosen because they'll ooze melody right down your lug-tunnels.

Best electronic albums of 2015: ten

10 – Squarepusher – Damogen Furies (Warp) 

The Square One’s fourteenth album lives in a very different world to his Hard Normal early days. Stadium EDM is everywhere now: huge crowds, plenty of lasers and more bangers than a balloon animal practice academy.

And so Four-Sides, as I like to call him, has given Damogen Furies a live feel: I read somewhere these tracks were produced in single takes. This frees him from his slap bass noodling and instead gives us an on-the-button collection of digital mayhem.

There are crowd-pleasing tunes – the Hudmo-style bombast of Baltang Arg, the sad earworm of Stor Eiglass, the compressed-to-heck melody of Rayc Fire 2 – but most of Damogen Furies treads an angry line between repressed brutality and armchair listening.

I guess, because of his recording process, there’s less befuddling eccentricity (compare this work to, say, 2008’s A Real Woman), which is a shame, but it’s still one of his most likeable albums of recent years.

-----> Best electronic albums of 2015 <-----

 

Best electronica albums of 2012: numbers 7 to 5

This is my count-down of the best electronic albums of 2012. Dozens of discs were whittled into a select ten that your reel-to-reel mp3 player should not be without.

Before we get stuck into the middle bit of the top ten, here are some albums that didn't make it through.

[Read other parts of the top ten here: numbers 10-8; numbers 4-2; number 1. Click here for the whole lot.]

Some also-rans

It pained me to exclude two amazing albums from this top ten. The first was Leila's between-the-eyes electro on U&I (Warp), much of it worth checking out by Orbital fans, while Lukid's Lonely At The Top (Werkdiscs) is my number 11 in a list of 10.

I reviewed several albums for Electronic's debut magazine, and the one that sticks in my head is Sterac's smooth remaster of Secret Life of Machines (100% Pure) and Last Step's deliberately dream-driven Sleep (Planet Mu) in which Venetian Snares does accessible.

Thomas Datt's punchy trance album Picking Up The Pieces (Discover) was likeable,
The Gaslamp Killer's Breakthrough (Brainfeeder) wasn't quite the breakthrough I was hoping for but still had a smoky charm.

I need to mention Dave Monolith's Welcome (Rephlex) which I listened to too late for last year's countdown (it was first mentioned here and yes, it's a masterpiece), while finally I've never quite tuned into the critically-lauded Shackleton's wavelength (Music For the Quiet Hour (Woe To The Sceptic Heart)).

7 - Squarepusher – Ufabulum (Warp)

A welcome return to form from the brother of Ceephax Acid Crew. Ufabulum (Warp) may not forge new territory, but it brims with trademark chords, clipped snares and bonkers digitalism reminiscent of Go Plastic. The d’Demonstrator funk is reigned in as is the live bass, and this, uh, albulum is stronger for it. (That's now a word.)

Opening track 4001 is a hymn to hands-in-the-air IDM, a sound more evident in the first half of the long-player with much of the deformed compression saved for later in the record. In fact, his light touch is faintly comical, such as the computer game bleeps of Unreal Square, the Plone-style tunefulness of Stadium Ice and the punchy power chord theme-tune of Energy Wizard.

By the time we get to closer Ecstatic Shock, the melody is suffocated by farting bass and stop-start beats: it reminds us the machines are truly in control and we are a long way from the Squarepusher as the saviour of live electronics. Maybe he could have pushed more boundaries, but this is his best album since Ultravisitor and, whisper it, a bit of a relief.

6 - Vessel - Order of Noise (Tri Angle)

Vessel seems to have come from nowhere – well, actually, Bristol – to produce one of the surprise highlights of 2012. Not really techno, not really house, not really anything, he signed to the influential Tri Angle label to become labelmates of Balam Acab and oOoOO for his debut album.

The strength of Order of Noise (Tri Angle) is its understatement. Lache, for example, shuffles along nicely, while the slow breaths of Silten are quite lovely. But then Vessel will grab some Global Communication-style tones or Leftfield warmth from somewhere, or perhaps a simple drum fill, a suspended chord or a sub-bassline, and suddenly the simple motifs become something quite affecting.

Villane sounds like Thom Yorke in his death-throes, while I love the whooping halfstep dub of Images of Bodies. The chugging Court Of Lions is a highlight, all tick-tock disco and wafer thin ambience topped off with a late-in-the-day four-line refrain. Vessel commented on this site in 2008 that he was "trying his ass off". Taken as a whole, Order of Noise is such a complete vision and a triumph of ideas, it can be considered as one of the most effective debuts of recent times.

5 - Flying Lotus - Until The Quiet Comes (Warp)

Describing the new Flying Lotus album is a bit like trying to describe the weather: we all seem to know what it looks like, what it feels like, and there are plenty of places on the internet where you can get much more information than from anything I can jab into my worn Logitech keyboard. Although I'm not sure Elijah Wood appeared in a weird amputee fantasy video to warn us about an approaching cold front (Tiny Tortures).

There was a danger with Until The Quiet Comes (Warp) that FlyLo would begin to believe his astral zodiac cosmogrammic shizzle and become as nakedly overrated as the proverbial emperor’s clothes. Think how UNKLE went. Instead, he has taken a small step away from the free jazz claustrophobia of his last work and produced a beautiful odyssey that is easier on the ears but no less fascinating.

The jazz is back as are the guest vocalists (See Thru To U), but the album really shines in the stranger corners: the playground insanity of Putty Boy Strutt, that beguiling “oh no” refrain of All The Secrets, and the African influences throughout, especially on the steel drums of Yesterday//Corded. Strange, thoughtful and delicate, and great for all weathers.

[Read other parts of the top ten here: numbers 10-8; numbers 4-2; number 1. Click here for the whole lot.]

Further Fats: Best electronica albums of 2010.

Bleep Years day nine: Squarepusher's Love Will Tear Us Apart (2002)

 Here's the latest of my Bleep Years in which I try and compartmentalise my life using tracks that represent specific years. My little grid is filling up nicely.

2002: Squarepusher's Love Will Tear Us Apart

The thing about being Mancunian is you get to live on a smug cloud of weed smoke and Hacienda dry ice whilst looking down on all the inferior people with their inferior musical heritages. Are you from Dagenham? Loser. South Woodford? Bah. Hammersmith? Nottingham? North Weald? What have they got that Manchester lacks, apart from being the birthplaces of the various people in Depeche Mode?

Squarepusher is roundly the greatest exponent of jazz drill 'n' bass that has ever lived, unless there's an especially impressive performing troupe of B&Q staff members I don't know about. My Sound was the first track I fell in love with, and his Shobaleader One project had its highlights too.

Love Will Tear Us Apart is the only cover version in my Bleep Years list, and its a contentious one because any true Mancunian would have throttled him with a hooded top for attempting this. However, the icy claustrophobia Oh Square One lends this track is quite beautiful.

And I can see myself in a Revolution bar, DJing in an alternative electronic room at a night called Backslider with some very lovely people, letting this track infect the airwaves of commercially-minded soul and pop fans. Happy days, good friends, and total DJing freedom. A year when Manchester was vibrant and alive and so much more than its history.

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

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

7 - Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

There's something about the great nephew of John and Alice Coltrane that enables him to kidnap heavyweight vocalists with Guru-like ease (Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, Outkast, Laura Darlington) and yet still beguile the casual listener with the strangest cacophony of polymathic twiddling whilst provoking bemused reviewers into penning juxtapositional metaphors of space travel and smokey 1970s jazz clubs. That and his beats are well phat.

So, among the laidback hip hop of Zodiac Shit, the shuffling funk of Dance Of The Pseudo and the swirling headnodding of MmmHmm, we have a multitude of influences: jazz, garage, hip hop, techno, classical, folktronica and Enrique Iglesias. Despite all of this, I can't help feeling Cosmogramma is an album none of us can quite understand yet and perhaps it should be enjoyed more some time in the distant future, maybe in a smokey jazz club in space.

FlyLo isn't just a comedy airline created by Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Buy Cosmogramma at Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

6 - Autechre – Oversteps

The Wills and Kate of Manchester electronic music produced three records in 2010. 3 Telepathics Meh In-Sect Connection was a banana-themed collaboration by Sean from Autechre, Move Of Ten was technically an EP (although it's longer than the Flying Lotus album, above), while the release featured in my top ten, Oversteps, gave notoriety to Altered:Carbon who dressed their own LP as Autechre.

Listening to Oversteps is a bit like cuddling up to your favourite hedgehog: it's sharp and awkward, yet you're allured by the familiar scent. I don't get the detractors who write this off as difficult. known(1) has harpsichord, qplay is as delicate as my tummy after a night on the rohypnol, whilst see on see and Treale (oh NOW they use capital letters) are bonafide Autechre hits. Kind of. Warmer than Quaristice, this is music that spikes the bloodstream.

Buy Autechre's Oversteps at Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

5 - Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise

Arriving on Rough Trade Records like a supercharged Sosumu Yokota, Pantha Du Prince produced eleven minimal techno masterpieces that were so fluid, so organic, they could only have been harvested as they were literally dripping from the trees. Minimal techno often bores me, so why on earth is this several leagues above places six to ten on my list?

Maybe it's the snarling acid on Behind The Stars, the heavenly rave chords of Satellite Snyper, or the clanks and bells and feedback and heavenly choirs of synthdom that eddy and whirl around crisp beats that couldn't beat more crisply even if accompanied by a Walkers advert starring Gary Lineker being thumped to a pulp by sixteen heavily-armed packets of Seabrook. I'm not sure if Black Noise can be topped, but there are four albums on my list that have done just that. Stay tuned.

Bring the Noise: buy Pantha Du Prince's album from Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

Not quite in the top ten (part two)

I'm pleased with my top ten, although excluding any amazing album is a bit like shepherding your ten favourite sheep into the pen then shotgunning the rest into blasted pulps of smoking mutton. Here are more lambs that have been silenced.

Gold Panda's glitchy Lucky Shiner (pictured) probably got bumped because a couple of artists in my top ten are doing similar things. Massive Attack's Heligoland probably got bumped because, although the album was an improvement, it still sounded like veterans keeping the life support going. Also on a mainstream tip, I never quite connected with LCD Soundsystem's swansong This Is Happening.

A notable omission from my top ten is Squarepusher's Schobaleader One project, but I couldn't separate how he could make some tracks on d'Demonstrator sound like Royksopp and then not expect to be compared to Royksopp. He's excluded because he sounds like Royksopp. There, I said it. Squarepusher sounds like Royksopp. Royksopp's funnier the more you say it.

Actress' Splazsh is an essential album for 2010, and I feel pained to exclude it. Oneohtrix Point Never received major acclaim for Returnal and again was a close call. And Starkey's Ear Drums And Black Holes, bringing ballads and grime to Planet Mu Records, also just missed the cut.

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

Ultra-funkulent new band from Squarepusher

Squarepusher's got his funk on with his new project, Shobaleader One.

This ultra-violet super-funkulent video gives us mortals a taste of the eternal bassmasher's new sound  A mini-album with nine tracks (d'Emonstration) is due for release in mid-October. He won't tell us who's in his new band other than to say they are "a bunch of kids" who are "pretty frightening players".

Meanwhile, he has hopped over to Ed Banger Records to release the first track from d'Emonstration: Cryptic Motion is a Daft Punk work-out backed with a sharp-as-hedgehogs Mr Ozio remix.

'Pusher wanted this project to be a "clean break" from his past sound, which may be a relief to some concerned at his inexorable decline into terminal jazz. See what you think. Here's the track list, and snuggled below that is an album preview along with clickable play-bar of Cryptic Motion.

1. Plug Me In
2. Smash Unreason
3. Into the Blue
4. Frisco Wave
5. Megazine
6. Abstract Love
7. Endless Night
8. Cryptic Motion
9. Maximum Planck

Chosen Words: O is for Orbs

Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Orbs and things which are circular are surprisingly common in electronic music.

The Orb started the globular thing when they formed in the 1980s. Their name suggested something new-agey and modern.

Orbital ran with the circular theme, with their talk of loops (or "loopz") and their sampling of Opus III's It's A Fine Day (her with the impressive orb control from Top Of The Pops).

Impressive pendulums have also included William Orbit, Cosmic Baby's Loops Of Infinity, the logo for Warp Records, 'Loops Of Fury', the name Biosphere - the circular theme goes round and round throughout history.

In electronic music, you'd do well to harness the wonders of the ball shape: of planets, of atoms, of pills, of records, of mother earth, of huge ever-growing pulsating brains.

Which doesn't for one moment explain Squarepusher, the contrary git.

Top five musicians with the roundest heads:

- Phil from Orbital
- Brian Eno
- Cee-Lo
- basically, anyone bald
- not Squarepusher

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Massive Attack got soul but Ceephax got swing(ing lampshades)

Hey, look, there is some albums what just come out!

Ceephax Acid Crew

I'm swinging from the bloody lightshade.

United Acid Emirates, the new album from Ceephax Acid Crew, has got me prancing around my mansion like a brain damaged pixie. It's so lurid and colourful, like being stuck in an 8 bit Meg And Mog cartoon.

The drooling, looping trippiness of the acid, splattered all over this album, is a constant, giddy joy. The opener Cedric's Sonnet is a sharp, spikey melodic number reminiscent of his brother Squarepusher in Welcome To Europe mode. Castilian is dragged kicking and screaming by a full-on, bullying bass drum, while the dated click rhythm of Life Funk reminds me of Felix-era house music.

This is, however, not a stupid album. It's a serious step forward for Ceephax, where he demonstrates his various skills at chugging 80s techno anthems (Topaz) or off-kilter chord arrangements (Commuter). And all this with plenty of squelching acid moistness. Highly recommended.

Massive Attack

Are you bothered about a new Massive Attack album?  Of course you are: I can't believe you asked me that, you idiot.

Heligoland has finally, um, landed. It's a full seven years after the band's previous studio album ("If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing slowly," says their MySpace page) and nearly 20 years after their highly influential debut Blue Lines. And actually, it's that memory of Blue Lines that I can hear on Heligoland.

Yes, there are guest vocalists (which The Guardian had down as almost unique in the dance world, despite the Gorillaz, Fatboy Slim and Unkle doing that kind of thing for years). Yes, there is gloominess a-plenty. But what this has, which I think 100th Window missed, is... capital letters... SOUL.

It's an album that is destined for coffee tables, new year's parties and easy headlines about the vocal collaborators (hello, Guy Garvey), and therefore many serious music fans will brush it off their shrugged shoulders. Which is a shame.

What will really get me all excited are those Burial remixes the internet's been promising.

Pantha Du Prince

Also out this month is Pantha Du Prince's Black Noise. Oh, and look, he has vocal collaborations from the likes of Animal Collective, !!! and LCD Soundsystem people. Read this and weep, The Guardian.

Black Noise is awash with clouds. You know how some albums sound urban-y and some sound outdoors-y? This is Heidi the goat-herder's friend flatlining on heroin on the highest mountain in the world while buzzards perform a jagged dance of death around her.

With sharp techno, dizzying loops, spiralling bells and smoky, smoky atmospherics, this will appeal to Susumu Yokota fans looking to grab something a bit more substantial by the goat horns.

Here's the skinny (dip) on Warp's Babe Rainbow and Flying Lotus

And now, some news from the Warp label.

Two of these facts are absolute hogwash and were written whilst I was high on methane. Three of these facts are 100% genuine leather newsbites about Warp Records and their artists.

Babe Rainbow

Babe Rainbow (pictured) is the newest act to sign to the label. He is a Canadian experimentalist sitting somewhere amid Req, Burial and anything ending in 'step'. This has been covered a-plenty by other websites, so I'll post more when his debut Shaved EP hits in February. Listen to loads of Babe stuff on Tumblr.

Achy breaky heart

Last week, Warp Records founder Steve Beckett announced to an astonished media that he was, in fact, Miley Cyrus. Tongues began wagging on the set of the 3D kid's film Bolt, where "Miley" would spend hours listening to mp3 demos from wannabe Squarepushers. Billy Ray Cyrus' first dubstep EP will be out on Warp in the spring.

Flying Lotus

I mentioned the release of Flying Lotus' DJ kicks CD in my 2010 preview, but I can add to that the release of a fully-formed FlyLo studio album too. Cosmogramma will be out on April 20th on Warp. He is quickly becoming the godfather of modern beat production, and all ears will be tuned in. There's even a Massive Attack remix on the way, according to this interview in Pitchfork. I know this is exciting, because on my notes for this blog post, I have scrawled "OH YEAH".

Warp Records for Dummies

This Dummy Guide to Warp Records is wonderful, and a definite must-read for Warp noobs and vets alike. I wish I had written it: Rob Gordon throwing the phone is classic rock 'n' roll angst. It finishes with a list of essential Warp albums, so if you're looking to fill up your virtual music shelves, here's where to start.

Skinny dipping

Warp Records is relocating to the house next door to me. They've decided London didn't really work out, so they've bought a modern semi-detached bungalow complete with swimming pool. I am allowed to skinny dip any time I want, and they have promised to furnish my villa with all-new furniture made with off-cuts from vinyl records. I hope the grooves don't chafe.

Five vocalists I definitely want to work with if I was a music producer who was definitely wanting to work with any one of five vocalists

Wesley Willis

Epically prolific Chicaco-born schizophrenic who reached Shaun Ryder-like heights with Rock N Roll McDonald's. Try this rhyming couplet for size: "A Big Mac has 26 grams of fat, a Quarter-Pounder has 28 grams of fat." Although his vocals were like a drunk hyena being attacked by a cabal of badgers, he brought a warm humanity that would have provided rich material for an overwrought X Factor biography piece - if he hadn't died before X Factor was invented, that is.

Dizzee Rascal

He sounds like he wants to sound like Scooby Doo. Enough said.

The scary woman from Human Nature

Let the carnival begin. Every pleasure every sin. Gary Clail's Human Nature was a strange old beast from the early 90s: a fairly standard dance track with the kind of choppy pianos that were de rigeur at the time, but with added Scary Transvestite who seemed to be dressed in the contents of 20 thousand grandma's jewellery boxes. At least, I think she was a transvestite - or, to be more accurate, drag artist. She sounded like a heroin-hit Boy George. Wait. It's Boy George, isn't it?

50 Cent (pictured)

The second most famous Jackson of all time (yes, that's his real name) decided to Get Rich instead of Die Trying, which must have taken a lot of courage. His rapping is singularly the most awful style since Robbie Williams tried to toast all over his middle eights. I think it's meant to sound lazy, but it just comes across as... well, lazy. He is the Barney The Dinosaur of rap, although in honour of that, his vocal chords should be declared the fifth element of hip hop. Despite my mockery, I would love to hear his version of Squarepusher's Red Hot Car.

Polly Harvey

The Mercury Music Prize got it right in 2001. Potato-gizzling -guzzling* sculptress Harvey is a folk singer from the depths of hell and she is wonderful. She is the most famous saxophonist not primarily known for playing the saxomophone. Her vocals are like felt drizzled in acid. She is definitely not to be confused with the depressive member of East 17, nor with the failed footballer and So Solid Crew MC, nor with the rabbit from Donnie Darko that tormented Jimmy Stewart as he jumped off that bridge (I think I got that right).

* Edit: I preferred 'gizzling'.

Vanilla, Pistachio, Strawberry Swirl, Caramel Chew-Chew, BLOOD

I have neglected this poor old blog recently. It's been more like Attitude magazine and less like an uninformative, lazy swagger through the mucus-infested bowels of electronic music.

Let the staggering resume.

Hey! Look! It's a three-dimensional Squarepusher! As opposed to the two-dimensional one you saw at the Warehouse Project last year! Have a look at more 3D electronica photographs on the Bleep Blog here (all courtesy of Anti-Limited).

Hey! Look! Remember Butter by Hudson Mohawke, covered by this blog last month? You can win a spreadable version of the album: a double vinyl copy of Butter with a T-shirt and sticker in a customised butter tub. Just tell competitions [at] vinylfactory.co.uk which of the following is not a well-known hairstyle:

a) Mohawk
b) Crew Cut
c) Star Crackout

What the hell's a star crackout? OH. Sorry. That's the point. Don't read this paragraph; it may ruin the competition.

Hey! Look! Fat Roland blogging chum Dave Hartley (his pets pictured above) has been shortlisted for a Manchester Blog Award!

Yeah, that last one was nothing to do with electronica, but I'm just trying to throw a mate a fricking bone. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT? BLOOD? SMOOTH, CREAMY ELECTRONICA-FLAVOURED BLOOD? Jeesh.