Electronic

Though best known as the electro-pop Pied Piper of the Baltimore underground, DIY deity Dan Deacon has also delved into modern-classical composition through commissions for Kronos Quartet and scores for ballets. His latest project marks his first full-album foray into the form—a soundtrack for Theo Anthony’s new documentary, Rat Film, an examination of the rodent infestation in their hometown and, by extension, the systemic poverty and racism that suppress the city’s underclass. For this playlist he created specially for The Dowsers, Deacon selects the film music that put him in a cinematic state of mind. “Music composed with the intention of being paired with a moving image is written with such a different mindset than music written for any other context. Being able to listen to soundtracks separate from the films allows my imagination to seep deeper into the universe of the films. For example, listening to Bernard Herrmanns themes for Taxi Driver or Jerry Goldsmith’s music for Total Recall puts me in the mindset and emotions of the characters and transports me to the locations. It adds levels of depth that further my enjoyment for subsequent re-watchings of the films. This playlist contains some of my favorite music for films available on Spotify.”—Dan Deacon

Whats This Playlist All About? The London DJ and producer offers an ever-expanding mix of "the music in his head," and, thankfully, it doesnt just stop at 2017.What Do You Get? Much like Averys own moody, minimalist translations of classic club sounds, this lengthy collection is all about harnessing negative space to create dark, disturbing, sometimes disorienting, alien atmospheres. As the playlist takes several celestial detours, current tracks (including selections from his own 2018 EP, Slow Fade) seamlessly mix with older classics from New Order and exotic gems like the dizzying 808 experiments from Hypnobeat.Greatest Discovery: The rare, rather inviting voice comes from Australian singer/songwriter Carla dal Forno, whose hypnotizing track "Clusters" is dark and dreamy, all while laced in a soft lo-fi buzz.Will This Playlist Ever End? Currently at 103 songs and nearly 11 hours, it does have its moments of seeming endlessness, where beats and loops refuse to cease. This may admittedly cause some slight anxiety, but theres enough transcendent bliss in between to set you at ease. In other words, the real answer to that question is: We hope not.

According to one account, disco was born on Valentines Day, 1970, in New York City. It certainly couldnt have come at a better time. Nixon had been president for a little over a year; the Vietnam War was dragging on, and the unrest of the 60s had settled in like a hangovers dull throb. Some groups had it worse than others: In New York, it was still illegal for two men to dance together, and while the Stonewall Riots of the previous year had helped kick a nascent gay-rights movement into gear, undercover cops were still busting gays, lesbians, and transsexuals in dimly lit bars.So you can understand why a young, bearded bohemian named David Mancuso wrote "Love Saves the Day" on invitations announcing a private party at his home, a loft in a former warehouse in a deserted corner of lower Manhattan. A little positive energy was needed. A safe space was sorely needed—space to dance, space to socialize, and space simply to be oneself. ("Love Saves the Day" might also have been a way of hinting at the mystery ingredient in the punchbowl, but what world-changing musical event hasnt come with its own social lubricant?)Mancusos private party eventually became a regular shindig, known simply as the Loft. Its trappings became legendary: the scores of multicolored balloons hugging the ceiling and bobbing along the floor; the sumptuous fruit spread; the Klipschorn speakers, so clear that listeners heard details in records theyd never noticed before. Two elements above all were paramount: the mixed crowd—a joyfully nonhierarchical sampling of sexualities, genders, ethnicities, and social classes—and the music, chosen and sequenced according to Mancusos own impeccable instincts.And while it wasnt a club, by any stretch of the imagination—for one thing, the Loft remained a members-only event, and strictly BYOB—in its focus on the music and the crowd, its attempt to carve out a refuge from the pressures of the outside world, the Loft established the blueprint for the discotheque and the modern nightclub. Thats not to say that many modern clubs live up to the example set by the Loft; most dont. (As Mancuso himself told Red Bull Music Academy in 2013, "For me the core [idea behind the Loft] is about social progress. How much social progress can there be when youre in a situation that is repressive? You wont get much social progress in a nightclub"; for Mancuso, the non-profit motive was crucial to preserving a venues liberatory potential.)Mancuso didnt call himself a DJ; he preferred to be known as a "musical host," and somewhere along the line, he even stopped blending his transitions, simply letting each song play out in full before starting the next one. But the open-mindedness of his selections helped establish disco, at least before it codified into an oonce-oonce beat, as a zone of possibility rather than a narrowly defined genre, and that message continues to resonate with DJs today. This Spotify playlist gathers more than 100 songs that Mancuso played at the Loft: deep, ecstatic funk (Wars "Me and Baby Brother," The J.B.s "Gimme Some More"), African funk (Manu Dibangos "Soul Makossa," a song Mancuso popularized), classic soul (Al Greens "Love and Happiness"), house music (Fingers Inc.s "Mystery of Love"), even folk-rock (Van Morrisons "Astral Weeks"). No playlist can replicate the way he played the music, though, juxtaposing songs to play up their lyrical themes, or building intensity as the party crept toward dawn.In Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, Tim Lawrence asks various New York DJs who came in Mancusos wake if they had ever danced at the Loft. "Time and again," he writes, "they would describe Mancuso as their most important influence, a musical messiah who also happened to resemble Jesus Christ."That messiah died on November 14, 2016, after a protracted illness, at the age of 72. It seems a cruel irony that he should leave us now, precisely when safe spaces, both real and metaphorical, suddenly feel more necessary than ever, their survival even more precarious. His followers can only hope that love might save the day once more.

Thanks to the Dusty Rhino Camp, Tycho has become something of a fixture at Black Rock City in recent years. The San Franciscan’s gauzy, intoxicating mixes have served as the soundtrack for many a dust-covered, scarf-wrapped Burner tripping, twirling, or cycling across the Nevada desert in insect goggles. This year’s sunrise set is reflective of Tycho’s signature style as a DJ. Featuring Boards of Canada, Cubenx, Tourist, as well as a few of his own productions, it’s 72 minutes of ambient-drenched electronica and avant-rock that, while psychedelic, remains safe and comfy throughout. Beats are present, but they’re like phantoms emerging from a hazy drift only to return before assuming corporeal form. Showing off his deep knowledge of genres outside of electronic music, he closes out with a profoundly meditative slice of West Coast acid rock from L.A. hippie Jonathan Wilson. Well done, Tycho.

If Reflections - Mojave Desert proves anything, it’s that Floating Points 2017 is essentially an ongoing conversation between two different musical beasts who may share DNA and musical influences, but who end up in very different places.Floating Points 1 is Sam Shepherd, the electronic-music producer and DJ responsible for early Floating Points classics like Nuits Sonores and Sparkling Controversy and who is still capable of going back to back-to-back with Caribou/Daphni and Four Tet on marathon DJ excursions.Floating Points 2 is a group of musicians that Shepherd put together to promote his excellent 2015 album Elaenia. It is this group that made Reflections - Mojave Desert, an album that has its origins in recordings made last year when Floating Points traveled to the Mojave Desert to rehearse in between U.S. tours. Struck by the desert’s unique ambience, the band recorded a soundtrack that would reflect their arid, alien surroundings and also accompany a short film made with director Anna Diaz Ortuño.Reflections, then, is very much a band record, based around the two lengthy central tracks on Silurian Blue and Kelso Dunes. The former is a sparse, atmospheric guitar and synth number that brings to mind emotionally charged, classically expansive Pink Floyd numbers like “The Great Gig in the Sky” or the soft-focus, sun-blushed ecstasy of Slowdive’s “Souvlaki Space Station”; the latter is 13 minutes of nervous guitar propulsion that rides the kind of militant Krautrock beat that NEU! or CAN made their own. Both, however, are burned through with a scorching ambience that suggests the desert-noir stylings of Calexico or John Phillips’ soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth.Around these central poles lie three songs that set the album’s atmosphere. Opener “Mojave Desert” is pure ambience, a soundscape that combines the noise of the wind and the rustling of bushes with woozy synth chords, like Brian Eno hooking up with Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack to an apocalyptic Western. Album closer “Lucerne Valley,” meanwhile, is three and a half minutes of beat-free melodic noodling that gently guides the listener back to real life after their dreamy desert excursion.For all that it is a band record, Reflections isn’t entirely without electronics. The brilliant “Kites” sees Shepherd take a synth loop for a walk; as a swinging super-directional microphone captures the valley’s natural reverb, the loop gradually increases in speed, ending up as a wonderfully simple, atmospheric piece of electronics that recalls early Tangerine Dream.Reflections - Mojave Desert should not be confused for a formal follow up to Elaenia, an album that topped many end-of-year lists in 2015. It’s more jammy, less sculpted, more concerned with atmospherics and ambience than melodies, and you can feel the warm desert grit up your nostrils throughout. But as an example of what Floating Points the band can do with the bit between their teeth and an environment to inspire them, this album is hugely worthwhile.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Panicked by the backlash and other problems caused by disco’s market oversaturation, most of the big record labels had abruptly shuttered their dance-music departments by the end of the decade. Yet they overlooked something that should’ve been obvious: A whole lot of people hadn’t tossed out their boogie shoes.And so those dancers found new havens in places like the Paradise Garage, where DJs like Larry Levan and François Kevorkian fostered new innovations in the art of the mix. In so doing, they inspired musicians to try their own experiments in disco science. One Paradise Garage regular was a downtown cellist and composer named Arthur Russell who began releasing a more avidly peculiar brand of dance music under names like Loose Joints and Dinosaur L. Elsewhere in New York, punks and no-wavers developed their own take, with labels like ZE Records and 99 Records becoming hotbeds for the “mutant disco” sound pioneered by acts like ESG (pictured) and Liquid Liquid. Meanwhile, hip-hop began its move from the Bronx to Manhattan, the first step in a burgeoning revolution.Back in the overground, labels like SOLAR and acts like Shalamar and the S.O.S. Band ruled the radio with a shiny, synth-heavy sound that bridged the gulf between disco and the urban pop that would define the new decade. A 1979 masterpiece that built something shiny and new out of the old aesthetic, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall had already shown what was possible. Rick James and Prince had their breakouts next. In Chicago, DJs and producers found new ways to sate their dancers’ undimmed appetites for disco by integrating the sounds they wanted with Italo disco and electro, and the result became known as house. Meanwhile, a New York club kid named Madonna was paying very close attention to everything that was going down.As wild and adventurous and modern as this music could be, all of it had disco in its DNA. And as this playlist of post-disco essentials demonstrates, many of these mutations have proven to be just as hardy.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Over the course of 1975 and 1976, disco was most definitely ascendant as radio programmers and DJs fed the new appetites and clubs competed to have the most advanced sound systems and the largest glitter balls. The apex was reached in 1977 as Studio 54 swiftly became not only the most famous disco in New York, but the world, too. Later the same year (and well into the next), Saturday Night Fever turned America into a land of wannabe Tony Maneros in tight-fitting white suits, strutting down every street to the ubiquitous sound of the Bee Gees’ soundtrack.At its worst, disco in its imperial phase was a whitewash of the dance music that preceded it, the blandest examples removing soul’s passion and funk’s hardness. But the foremost practitioners—like Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, also architects of hits for Diana Ross and Sister Sledge—made music of indisputable sophistication. It could be also be cheekily subversive, like when French producer Jacques Morali cast a series of hunks, dressed them up as gay archetypes of the era and somehow sold the Village People to Middle America.Like all parties, this one couldn’t last forever. By 1979, disco suffered a fatal counter-attack by its haters, i.e., the white dudes whose traditional position of privilege was threatened by a cultural surge that was so strongly female, African-American, and gay. But no matter how many records they tried to blow up in baseball parks, there was no way to erase the mark made by so many of the tracks on this playlist.

Subscribe to Cloud Daze here, an regularly updating playlist that features a heady mix of ambient house, cloud disco, recombinant techno and other genres that we’re making up on the spot. This week’s offering revolves around the latest Koze release, Knock Knock.Over the past five years, DJ Koze has become one of electronic music’s greatest narrative producers. All songs tell a story, to one degree or another, but instrumental electronic music tends to evoke a vibe or push its listener towards the ecstatic highs or darker recesses. It’s rare that this emotional coloring gains nuance and texture or shifts from track to track or second to second. But Koze knows this track. This world-building, narrative-driven approach was there in the woozing shifting textures of the German producer’s epochal 2013 album Amyglada, and it’s evident on his two remix compilations -- 2009’s Reincarnations and 2014’s Reincarnations, Pt. 2. His 2018 Knock Knock finds the DJ as technically capable as ever, but it also marks his evolution as a storyteller. This maturation is clear in the album’s first two minutes. On lead-off track “Club der Ewigkeiten” (roughly translated, “Club of Eternity”), tangled strings, bubbling synth taps and a squealing vocals conjure a taught, anxious space before a warm, round melody appears and the track takes on different, brighter characteristics. Throughout Knock Knock, there is a constant ebbing and flowing. Like the best psychedelic music, the music creates its own internal logic, and it uses that logic to guide the listener through a journey. This isn’t to say that Knock Knock is a difficult listen. The songs congeal and groove, and the tension is generally soft-lit -- a warbling dissonance creates a creeping, unnamed anxiety that cuts through the smeared slice of Bon Iver vocals in “Bonfire,” while “Pick Up” positions a lovely and sad sample of Aretha Franklin next to the euphoric disco beat from Melba Moore. For long stretches, things are light and breezy, and the album frequently achieves lift-off, especially towards the end. The opening stuttering, boom bap-era rhythms of “Lord Knows” sounds like a lost, mid-’90s Pete Rock joint, while the space-age modular synth lines of “Seeing Aliens” is sublime and ecstatic. It’d be easy for Koze to end the album on that high note, but then he cuts to “Drone Me Up, Flashy” -- 6 minutes of floating disjointed Kraut ambience that feels heavenly and lost. It may not be exactly the place we wanted to land after this 78-minute journey, but it feels honest.

Whats This Playlist All About? DJ Seinfeld is at the epicenter of the lo-fi house explosion. Imagine the first-pumping heavy bass of deep house suffused with crackling samples and a touch of pop culture flavored kitsch and you’ve gotten a pretty good handle on the vibe of the Swedish DJ/producer. For “Dancefloors and Departure Lounges,” he selects “music I’m playing in DJ sets, at clubs, at festivals, and a few things I listen to while on the train, the plane, or sitting in the hotel room, chilling.” What You Get: A pretty compelling survey of a certain sector of modern house music, with a few detours to outre hip-hop, electro, and R&B. The great Moomin brings the deep house bonafides on the slinky “The Story About You,” while Black Madonna delivers her epic 2013 house quake “A Jealous Heart Never Rests.” Seinfeld gives props to his buddy Ross from Friends with the inclusion of the latter’s breezy 2018 cut “John Cage,” and also throws in “I Would Do Everything I Did Again and Again,” a blurry assemblage of cut-up vocal samples from Seinfield alias Rimbuadian. As you would expect, it all has a very nice flow, and is generally a fun, effervescent mix, perfect for Bushwick BBQs (think hipsters with spatulas). Greatest Discovery: The 1983 track “Sleeper in Metropolis” from British singer Annie Clack is a pretty great slab of trashy minimal wave and is totally unexpected on this mix, though it totally fits. It’s also nice to see Seinfield give props to the endless influential but oddly unheralded LA hip-hop group Sa-Ra Creative Partners.

There is something special about Kranky Records. Amidst a sea of labels that release a consistent bill of fare, Kranky puts out everything from avant-garde electronic and ambient to noisy dream pop, going out of their way to shed light on original and imaginative voices. Since its founding in Chicago in 1993, Kranky has released albums for such visionary artists as Deerhunter, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tim Hecker, and more. In her time on the label, Liz Harris (Grouper, Mirrorring) has developed a wholly unique and prismatic aesthetic, while Bradfox Cox (Deerhunter, Atlas Sound) took his bedroom pop project to its post-punk and shoegaze fruition. With hazy synths, towering guitars, impressionistic vocals, and a decidedly experimental sensibility, Kranky Records really does do it all. -- Adam Rothbarth