If ever there were a year that you could feel a seismic shift taking place in electronic music, it was 2019. Almost literally, as a rumbling under your feet. The truth is, the past few years in the genre had been slow: Despite the commercial explosion of EDM at the top of the decade, and the wave of opprobrium it generated from various corners of the underground and middleground, broad swaths of the dance-music scene didn’t offer much in the way of a counterargument—they just kept on doing what they’d been doing for years. And in many cases, that meant familiar, frequently retro-oriented house and techno, much of it indistinguishable from its inspirations from 20 years prior.

But in 2019, the status quo began to crumble, not just in terms of sound but also the people behind it. Much of the most exciting music came from relative newcomers, and many of them were women, trans, nonbinary, or queer, or artists of color, or some combination of the above—a far cry from the hegemony of straight, white dudes that had set dance music’s terms for far too long. The geographical center of power seemed to be shifting, too: London, New York, and Berlin remained key hubs, but some of the most unexpected sounds came via Kenya (Slikback), Uganda (MC Yallah), China (33EMYBW), or the Afro-Lusophone diaspora (DJ Nigga Fox), or from America-based musicians who incorporated their roots into their music (DJ Haram, 8ULENTINA, Debit).

In place of a dominant style, the sound of 2019 mirrored this radical openness. Four-to-the-floor rhythms gave way to the breakbeats and shifting syncopations of AMAZONDOTCOM, AceMoMa, and CCL x Flora FM. Peak-time requisites yielded to ambient instincts in the work of Barker, Leif, and Topdown Dialectic. Tempos swung wildly, from Dj Python’s dembow cadences to the breakneck rhythms of Jay Mitta’s singeli. And even in all this flux, dancers still clustered around a few enormous anthems, like Joy Overmono’s “Bromley” and Schacke’s “Kisloty People.”

These aren’t necessarily the 40 best songs of 2019—to make a list like that would be a fool’s errand. But they all represent chinks in the armor of dance music’s status quo; each one might be its own rabbit hole.

Photo Credit: Jase Cooper

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.It was, by many metrics, a terrible, terrible year. But it happened to be an excellent year for ambient music—and that turned out to be incredibly fortuitous, since nothing works better than ambient music when youre in the mood to close the blinds and crawl under the covers for the next four (or, God help us, eight) years.There was so much great ambient music this year that it inspired a number of commentators to ask whether we were in the midst of a comeback. Id venture that ambient music never went away, assuming you knew where to look for it. But its certainly true that this years crop of quality ambient music amply proved just how varied the form can be. Huerco S. gave us lo-fi ambient techno slathered in tape hiss. Former Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt kept perfecting his blissed-out Tangerine Dreamscapes. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith paired burbling arpeggios with wild vocal processing, while Julianna Barwick looped her own voice into a soft, tenebrous web.There was a surprising amount of guitar-based music that fit an ambient sensibility this year: Christian Naujoks paid tribute to Durutti Column on a lovely LP for Hamburgs Dial label; Tortoise member Jeff Parker explored skeletal atmospheres on his solo album Slight Freedom; and super-producer Daniel Lanois spun pure gossamer out of pedal steel on the masterful Goodbye to Language.One of the years most interesting developments in ambient music may have been the return of what Jon Hassel termed "Fourth World" music. Motion Graphics, Visible Cloaks, and the New York duo Georgia all paid tribute to the digital synthesizers and rippling textures of Japanese ambient and new age music of the 1980s; an artist named Slow Attack Ensemble even covered the Japanese duo Inoyama Lands 1983 song "Mizue" on a beautiful album called Soundscapes for the Emotional-Type Listener. And both Andrew Pekler and the duo of Jan Jelinek and Masayoshi Fujita delved into ideas of otherness and exoticism on their respective albums for Jelineks Faitiche label this year.Thats just scratching the surface; I havent even mentioned the ambient-leaning techno from Studio OST (White Materials Galcher Lustwerk and Alvin Aronson), or the broken-down synthesizer experiments from Kassem Mosses Honest Jons LP, or the jewel-toned clouds of tone Tim Hecker whipped up, or the spirit-channeling mysticism of Anna Homler and Steve Moshiers Breadwoman, an early-80s cassette that the deep-digging RVNG label rescued for contemporary ears. And special mention goes to Sarah Davachi, who is responsible for not one but two of the years finest ambient albums: Dominions and Vergers, both of them examples of drone music at its most meditatively breathtaking. If its respite youre craving, youll find plenty of escape routes on this two-and-a-half-hour playlist.

Brian Eno gave ambient music its name; he also gave the genre its definitive soundbite when he imagined a style "as ignorable as it is interesting." And with a remarkable run of albums beginning in the mid 1970s, he laid the groundwork for ambient at its most all-encompassing. Many of those albums were his own, whether solo or in collaboration: Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a limpid snapshot of generative processes at work, is the ur-text, and is exactly as described: Its less something you pay attention to than a tool for subtly charging the air around you. On Apollo, Daniel Lanois pedal-steel guitar is the filament connecting earthy Americana with Enos vaporous space music. And in his position as label-head (of the short-lived Obscure Records) and curator (of Editions EGs Ambient series), he expanded ambient musics purview with work from Harold Budd, Laraaji, and the Penguin Café Orchestra.

At the heart of all ambient music lies the drone: a single tone, or cluster of tones, that stretches on into infinity, buzzing and shimmering, without end. That coruscating beam was the organizing principle of La Monte Young, John Cale, Tony Conrad, et al in the Theatre of Eternal Music, and has traveled through the work of minimalists like Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, and Pauline Oliveros to arrive undisturbed and unadulterated in latter-day drone artists like Éliane Radigue, Eleh, and Sarah Davachi. Drones can be harsh or soft, deceptively static or wildly dynamic; they can be placed in service to more complex sounds, as in the case of the ambient dub act Seefeels spell-binding "Utreat," or they can be the main attraction, as the Swedish composer Folke Rabes "Was??" proves over the course of 26 mind-expanding minutes.

Its impossible to imagine ambient music developing as it did without the influence of krautrock. In fact, its worth remembering that although Brian Enos Ambient 1: Music for Airports was immediately preceded by an extended period in Germany, producing Low and "Heroes" for David Bowie and recording 1977s Cluster & Eno with krautrock heavies Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Deconstructing western pop down to its most psychedelic gestural properties, German musicians had already struck upon ambient musics defining characteristics, fashioning a sound as ephemeral as vapor. The "Berlin school," meanwhile-a loose assemblage that included Tangerine Dreams Edgar Froese and onetime TG member Klaus Schulze-transformed progressive-rock bombast into increasingly electronic and ethereal shapes, pioneering the glistening timbres and tumbling arpeggios still fashionable in ambient music decades later.

A caveat: This is a personal list, not a purportedly objective overview of electronic music in 2017. Would such a thing even be possible? It’s doubtful, if only because there is no single overarching scene that unites all electronic music. It’s not just about the divide between commercial EDM and everything else; even within the underground, electronic music’s fans are fragmented into innumerable overlapping niches according to subgenres, stylistic quirks, cities, clubs, and cliques. Fortunately, one of the perks of my job—and one of the perks of going out a lot less than I once did, if I’m honest—is that I feel less compunction to pledge fealty to any single tribe. As a critic, I get to eavesdrop on them all. So while I can’t promise that this list is comprehensive, it does encompass a broad array of sounds, from Mark Barrott’s Balearic ambient to Jlin’s flickering post-footwork to Demen’s claustrophobic goth.Given that range, I’ve sequenced the list with listenability in mind, not in any sort of ranked fashion. There are a few principal threads. The first is the strain of jewel-toned, bittersweet house music heard in tracks by DJ Koze, Project Pablo, and Young Marco; for daydreaming dancers, 2017 has delivered in spades. Then there’s a range of heavier, beat-oriented fare, like Proc Fiskal’s brittle, fidgety grime, or Sinjin Hawke’s choral trap. And finally, I couldn’t resist fleshing out my list with ambient tracks like Visible Cloaks’ “Mask” and Kara-lis Coverdale’s “Grafts.” Ever since the disappearance of chillout rooms, ambient has tended to remain at arms’ length from dance music, but with incredible records coming along at an unprecedented clip, there’s never been a better time to close the gap.

New age, long derided as so much crystals-and-incense mumbo-jumbo, has seen its reputation improve in recent years. Partly, thats thanks to compilations like Light in the Attics I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990 and Soul Jazzs Space, Energy & Light: Experimental Electronic and Acoustic Soundscapes 1961-88. Both served to remind listeners that some new age was pretty awesome, even if it did have titles like "Dolphin Dream" or "The Third Eye of Atlantis." Theres considerable overlap between the new age movement and the early years of ambient music. The pioneering synthesizer musician Suzanne Ciani dipped into new age on albums like 1982s Seven Waves. Ambient and new Age pioneer Laraaji ended up recording for Brian Enos Ambient series after Eno heard him playing new age music in Washington Square Park. And today, pioneering new age work is being folded back into the electronic music canon: Consider the case of Pauline Anna Strom, whose ethereal, drifting synthesizer music-recorded at home in the 1980s-was recently reissued by New York experimental powerhouse RVNG Intl.

Dark ambient trails ambient music like a shadow. Leaden, loamy, emotionally numb, it might be the ultimate know-it-when-you-hear-it music. Dark ambients roots are in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as industrial musicians began experimenting with glowering, beatless drones, and it flowered in the early 1990s, as Scorn, Main, Lull, Final, and other similarly sternly named artists collectively arrived upon an echo-laden sound that came to be called "isolationism." Pete Namlook and Klaus Schulzes The Dark Side of the Moog formed a bridge between the space music of the Berlin school and the bleak psychedelia of the 1990s, while Lustmord, Robert Rich, and Steve Roach have translated dark ambients charcoal drama to more expressive ends.

Its not entirely surprising that the British artist Powell once sampled Big Blacks Steve Albini; the Chicago noise-rockers volume and in-your-face attitude go to the heart of what Powell does in his own music and with his label, Diagonal Records. Co-founded with fellow Brit Jaime Williams in 2011, Diagonal pulls together an unlikely mix of sounds: the lurching rhythms of rockabilly, the clang of post-punk, and the eviscerating feedback of the contemporary noise scene, all of which get hammered into a lumpy approximation of techno. (Youll also find Hall and Oates samples, Autechre remixes, and reissues of early avant-rappers Death Comet Crew in the mix; Diagonals vectors are nothing if not far-reaching.) The overall effect is a little like gargling broken glass with a manic grin on your face.

If it was Brian Eno that first gave shape to the idea of ambient music, it was rave culture that gave it wings. While the bass bins of the main stage thundered away, denizens of the chill-out room floated away on a beatless bed of synths and samples. Early Warp compilations like Artificial Intelligence reimagined electronic music for home listening, and Aphex Twins ethereal Selected Ambient Works Volume II soon set the gold standard for late-night soundtracks for insomniacs. Around the same time, Berlins Basic Channel / Chain Reaction crew was applying dub alchemy to techno, rendering it as smooth as a chrome-plated pulse, while Wolfgang Voigts GAS project, along with the Kompakt labels Pop Ambient series, traded minimalist rigor for lush, liquid atmospheres bursting with color.