Electronic

If the Stranger Things soundtrack has you jonesing for modern synthesizer music, then jam this playlist as soon as you’ve devoured season one. For those new to the movement, the otherworldly arpeggios and gaseous drift of composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein surely sound novel and exciting. But truth be told, synth-based exploration has been going strong for nearly a decade now. Cleveland’s Emeralds, as well as their myriad side projects, deserve the lion’s share of credit. As far back as 2008, the trio were busily transforming elements of Kosmische Musik, proto-New Age, vintage sci-fi and horror soundtracks (John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s especially), and avant-garde electronics into a uniquely 21st-century voice. Other vital contributions have been made by Panabrite, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Tim Hecker, each one pushing these ideas into thrilling, new territory. -- Justin Farrar

Masked electro-rock assassin Sir Bob Cornelius Rifo—a.k.a. The Bloody Beetroots—is back with another blast of riffed-up and roughed-up EDM, The Great Electronic Swindle (Last Gang/eOne), which features cameos from the likes of Perry Farrell and Gallows’ Wade MacNeil. But while the album is an ideal soundtrack for late-night mayhem, Sir Bob has kindly provided The Dowsers with this mix to help you get back on your feet in the morning. “This is the music I listen to during my workout of the day... including recovery times, Enjoy!"—Sir Bob Cornelius Rifo

The erudite Brian Eno once said, “There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk, and Klaus Dinger’s Neu!-beat.” They are so great, in fact, that strains of their DNA can be detected in practically every groove-based genre of the last 35 years. These include not just hip-hop and techno, but industrial and jungle/drum ’n’ bass as well. Bringing together landmark recordings from all three, this playlist is a sprawling tapestry of densely undulating polyrhythms, purring 4/4, and ecstatic syncopation punctuated with seriously nasty breaks. The bulk of the tracks feature Kuti, Brown, or Dinger, obviously. There are exceptions, however. Kraftwerk, for instance, explored Dinger’s motorik rhythm to great effect years after the group and drummer had parted ways. Hit play and find out why Eno knows what the hell he’s talking about.

Bleep, the moody northern English take on techno, was arguably the UK’s first homegrown take on electronic music.The origins of bleep lie in Northern English breakdancing crews. Bradford’s Solar City Rockers crew was home to both George Evelyn, who would later form Nightmares on Wax with Kevin Harper, and Unique 3, who in 1988 recorded what is generally acknowledged as the first instance of bleep: “The Theme,” a record that nailed the acidic squirts, looming sub bass, and icy synth melodies that would later define the genre. One year later, “The Theme” would be joined in the shops by Nightmares on Wax’s debut single “Dextrous” (which the group would later re-work) and Forgemasters’ ominous “Track With No Name,” the first record on Sheffield indie label Warp.Warp—now home to everyone from Aphex Twin to Flying Lotus—would make its name as a bleep label, with its iconic purple record sleeves a guarantee of steely Sheffield quality. In 1990, Warp released an astounding run of bleep records, from LFO’s hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck self-titled classic to Nightmares on Wax’s “Aftermath,” Sweet Exorcist’s “Testone,” and Tricky Disco’s eponymous hit, which bothered the higher reaches of the UK charts (annoying mainstream radio DJs considerably on the way).In the same year, Birmingham’s Network Records (Warp’s only serious competitor for the bleep crown) put out two enduring bleep classics in the form of Nexus 21’s twinkling “Self Hypnosis” and Rhythmatic’s circuit-bending “Take Me Back,” while in the US a young Roger Sanchez gave the bleep sound a New York spin on Egotrip’s Dreamworld EP and Underground Solution’s “Luv Dancin’.” DJ Moneypenny (as Chapter 1) and Bobby Konders (as Freedom Authority) were among the other American producers to catch the bleep bug, with the former’s 1990 release “Unleash The Groove” even featuring a “Love in Sheffield” remix. Meanwhile, down in Miami, Ralph Falcon and Oscar Gaetan (a.k.a. Murk/Funky Green Dogs/Intruder/Liberty City) were clearly paying attention. The duo included Nightmares on Wax’s “Dextrous” on their brilliant 1998 mix CD The House Music Movement and you can hear echoes of bleep’s spacious, sweet-and-sour ambience in songs like Liberty City’s “Some Lovin’.”In 1991, Warp released debut albums by both LFO (Frequencies) and Nightmares on Wax (A World of Science), but by 1992 bleep was definitively on the wane, as the release of Warp’s seminal Artificial Intelligence compilation saw the label move towards the kind of brainy techno that would be later known as IDM. By this point, Nightmares on Wax had also moved on, edging towards the downbeat hip-hop for which they are known today. But bleep was by no means dead. LFO would release two more albums, 1996’s Advance (including the brilliant “Tied Up”) and 2003’s Sheath (home to “Freak”), and the group’s Mark Bell would go on to work as a producer with everyone from Björk to Depeche Mode before his death in 2014.In the UK, the influence of bleep could be heard in contemporary musical genres such as rave (e.g., Altern 8’s “Infiltrate 202”) and jungle (as on A Guy Called Gerald’s “28 Gun Bad Boy”), later filtering through to UK garage (Dem 2’s “Destiny”), dubstep (Benga & Coki’s “Night”), bassline (T2’s “Heartbroken”), grime (D Double E’s “Streetfighter Riddim” or Maniac, Maxsta, and Boothroyd’s “No Retreat”), and even footwork (DJ Taye x DJ Manny’s “The Matrixx”).In many cases, the influence of bleep was more subliminal than direct, as Neil Landstrumm explained in a 2014 Resident Advisor history of bleep. “Every few years [bleep] seems to pop up,” he said. “Think of grime, sub-low, dubstep, garage, speed-garage, the new techno styles, new house… the ghosts of bleep are still in there, whether consciously or not. I doubt, for example, More Fire Crew had ever heard of bass and bleep, or many of the first wave of dubstep artists, but its there.”Elsewhere, the influence of bleep has been more overt and none more so than in the work of Neil Landstrumm himself, who has released a number of records that consciously reference bleep’s Northern sound, including his 2017 EP A Death, A Mexican And A Mormon, from which “The Tomorrow People” is taken. Doncaster’s Mella D is another producer who has taken the influence of bleep into the modern world, notably with “Movement,” from his 2017 Warehouse Music 001 EP, a song that proves the enduring appeal of bleeps, bass, and thundering beats.

For 20 years, Kevin Martin has explored the sonics of urban decay as The Bug. Most recently, that’s arrived in the form of his ground-shaking collaboration with Dylan Carlson of drone metal outfit Earth.Martin’s music is most often rooted in the deep bass and reverb-heavy drum sound of dub reggae, giving the style a cavernous, concrete makeover better suited to city streets. So, stylistically, hip hop isn’t necessarily the first sonic palette that comes to mind when one thinks of Martin’s work. But when tasked with making a playlist for Crack magazine, that’s exactly where he went.The playlist offers insight into Martin’s work as The Bug as a kind of production roadmap. Featuring cuts from Public Enemy to Cannibal Ox, and newcomers like Vince Staples, Hip Hop Narcotic Vol. 1 is a throughline in dense production styles. After you hear Jahlil Beats’ air-raid sirens follow Bobby Shmurda, or the thick hallucinatory cloud of El-P’s dank influence hovering over Cannibal Ox America, hip-hop will no longer seem like a complete world away from what The Bug is doing. If anything, these artists see the same darkness down their own city streets.

In 2015, Caribou famously posted a 1,000-track mixtape that served as a journal of his musical discovery over the past few years. It’s a lot to digest, to say the least. The Canadian electronic artist has omnivorous taste, for one. New Wave freakout king Gary Wilson bumps up against a particularly eerie track from jazz icon Nina Simone. There’s disco legend Cerrone on the groovy “Got to Have Loving” and also lots and lots of Velvet Underground (of course). You don’t have to make sense of any of it, of course, but, if you squint just so, you can piece together Caribou’s own aesthetic roots.The squiggling synth lines, and bouncy beat of “E.V.A” from Moog pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey reflects Caribou’s own tendency to reconcile more experimental strains of electronic music with an overarching pop sensibility, while the hanging-off-the-bone, mandela hip-hop of Madlib is a natural fit for an artist who started his career focused on lo-fi psych sounds. The delicate, understated intensity of Caribou’s most recent album, 2015’s Our Love, is captured in tracks from Radiohead, Koushik, and Shuggie Otis, and house and disco-derived sounds figure in heavily—in addition to Cerrone, the playlist also contains Sylvester, Derrick May, Moodymann, Larry Heard, and Chez Damier—which tracks nicely with Caribou’s own pivot towards more dance-friendly beats for his Daphni project.The original YouTube playlist was nearly one hundred hours of unsequenced music (in the note that came with the mix, Caribou suggests that it be listened to on shuffle), and it’s obviously sprawling. Even in this slightly abridged Spotify version—presumably, the 204 tracks not included here weren’t cleared for digital music services, sadly—it’s easy to get lost. Ultimately, this feels more like a radio station than a “mixtape” or a playlist. The listener lets it spin passively in the background, occasionally swooping in to figure out who exactly is doing what. The contextual editorial information that Spotify offers comes in handy—YouTube provides no similar key, and you’re constantly flitting between Google and YouTube to discover who the hell is Asa-Chang (a Japanese percussionist and leader of the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra) or Hal Blaine (Phil Spector’s go-to drummer). But this isn’t really an academic course as much as it is a party, or a celebration of the scattershot, sublime aesthetic of one of indie music’s most vital and unpredictable artists.

When Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter—two denizens of Germany’s musical underground—founded Kraftwerk in 1970, nobody could have imagined the impact they would have. But all these decades later, few corners of popular music are untouched by their influence. The sounds they crafted in the ’70s and ’80s with Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür resonated worldwide, influencing post-punk, synth-pop, New Wave, hip-hop, techno, and more.

Kraftwerk were among the first to use electronics as a tool for fashioning pop music. Even though their first few albums employed electronics in a more experimental way, they broke through internationally in 1974 with “Autobahn,” their mechanically paced hooks and android image positioning them as the Beach Boys of the robot revolution, pointing toward an entirely fresh musical future.

Before the ’70s were over, disciple David Bowie had released the Florian homage “V-2 Schneider” and incorporated Kraftwerk’s influence in his legendary “Berlin trilogy” of albums, and Gary Numan had channeled the band’s inspiration into the first flowering of synth-pop, which would continue to bear Kraftwerk’s mark in the ’80s.

From there, Kraftwerk’s electronic innovations went on to profoundly affect hip-hop and electro, starting with Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock” and continuing through countless samples. This fed into the band’s influence on Detroit techno (and subsequently the international IDM scene). By the 2000s, the band’s influence was doubling back on itself via the ’80s-retro electroclash movement.

Today the majority of pop and hip-hop is created with electronics, and even artists who have never heard a note of Kraftwerk in their lives owe some of their existence to them, whether they realize it or not. Schneider left the band in 2008 and Hütter continued to lead a new lineup in occasional tours, but when Schneider passed away on April 30, 2020, at the age of 73, even though he was no longer working with the band, it marked an epoch’s end. Gathered in the accompanying playlist is a tiny percentage of the countless artists indebted to Kraftwerk’s fearless vision.

In 1989, a robotics scientist from MIT wrote an academic paper titled "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System," predicting that the future lies in arrays of tiny robots that will function like swarms of mechanical insects. Just a few years later, dance music got its own fast, cheap, and out-of-control movement — jungle — in which bootlegged funk breaks were sped up, looped, and paired with thundering dub bass lines and unhinged MC chat until the whole riotous affair seemed ready to go completely off the rails. Probably just coincidence, but jungles careening robot funk also had its own insectoid qualities: voices pitched helium-high, hi-hats twitching like antennae, snares that rattled as though there were a centipede sitting behind the drum kit.Nineties jungle was a singles-based phenomenon, and it was largely a sub-rosa affair, too; why bother clearing a sample for a record whose natural habitat was the white-label 12"? All of this means that classic jungle hasnt necessarily fared very well in the streaming era, but Resident Advisors Classic Jungle playlist does a great job of compiling classic cuts. Theres a little something for everyone here: LTJ Bukems "Atlantis (I Need You)" pairs Detroit technos jazzy, optimistic sensibilities with breaks that roll like a mountain stream; Congo Nattys "Junglist" nods to roots reggae; and cuts from Source Direct and Photek go in hard on sci-fi affect. Origin Unknowns "Valley of the Shadows," meanwhile, samples the Apollo 11s Lunar Module landing from 1969, taking apart yesterdays high-tech dreams like so many scissor-handed nanorobots.

Classixx released their sophomore LP Faraway Reach in 2016, and signaled a more straightforward pop aesthetic for the band that was in part responsible for popularizing the tropical house sound. There’s no contextual information that accompanies this playlist, and the user is left to guess at the theme, if there is any. There’s a lilting quality to tracks like Bobby Briggs’ reggae jam “Love Come Dow” that tilts its hand to Classixx’s own beachfront fireside vibe, and the emphasis on yachty electro-pop signals that perhaps this can be seen as a key to Classixx’s sonic formula.

Anthony Gonzalez is a singular force in French electronic music. Since 2001, operating primarily as M83, he has created everything from nostalgic shoegaze rock and pulsing electronic dream pop to film soundtracks, asserting his meticulousness both as a composer and performer. 2003’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts explored the intersection of sampled sound, electronic synths, and post-rock, evoking both Mogwai and My Bloody Valentine, while the melancholy and ecstatic Saturdays = Youth stands strong as 2008’s best ‘80s album. Employing battalions of excellent vocalists, mixers, engineers, and more, Gonzalez always manages to push his perfect rhythms into crystalline atmospheres of sound. His expansive music is equally perfect for midnight cruises with friends and packed music festival fields, insisting that feeling sad can feel good, as long as you are dancing through it.