Electronic

What’s This Playlist All About?: Tycho’s own productions are the sort of sprawling, epic electronic instrumentals that make every moment feel like you’re watching sunrise at Burning Man, naked and under the influence of some fourth-generation hallucinogenic. He’s probably guilty of making the same song over and over, but it’s a really good song! What You Get: A playlist that captures whatever Tycho is currently listening to. He simply adds songs to the top when the muse strikes. It usually comes in clumps of 30 to 50 tracks and happens every three months of so. If you’re listening to this on Spotify, it’s interesting to see his taste progress through the years. In 2015, he was mainly listening to his own stuff, while 2016 found him branching off into Caribou and Lone, which really isn’t that much of a deviation, to be honest. Confusingly, his early 2018 additions include 2012-era indie darlings Atoms for Peace and Beach House.Greatest Discovery: The Rival Consoles track “Ghosting” initially comes on like minimal darkwave but opens up into a chimey midsection before ducking back down into flanged techno. Will This Make Me Want to Eat Peyote in a Desert and Find Myself?: No, but it might inspire you to buy a sweater at Urban Outfiters.

Deep in the heart of Nicolas Jaars latest album, theres an extended domestic vignette: Jaar, a small boy, at home with his father, the Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar. Their talk, in Spanish, is playful and perhaps inconsequential; its actual content matters less than the way their voices charge the music with a special aura. Here is a tape, the snippet seems to say, rescued from a box long forgotten in the back of a closet; here is a memory brought to the light of day.It signals the extent to which Sirens—depending on how you count, either his second or third or fourth proper album—is the young electronic musicians most personal recording yet. As he explained to Pitchfork, with his previous records, he had taken aspects of his own identity for granted. "But in the months leading up to Sirens," he says, "there was a lot of change in my life—when you come back from a long tour, you really have to pick up the pieces in a way."And the album really does feel like a process of unpacking. It takes stock of the elements that have long characterized his work—the slow tempos, freeform arrangements, and shadowy atmospheres—while confidently pushing into a number of new directions at once. The pensive piano and effects of the opening "Killing Times" give way to a fairly rocking vocal number that sounds for all the world like a cover of the Bauhaus side-project Tones on Tail. "Leaves" incorporates a plucked string instrument—koto, perhaps—with ambient textures in a way that suggests an ambient musician like Biosphere. "No," the song that features his childhood home tape, taps into a spongy reggaeton beat faintly reminiscent of the Berlin producer Poles scratchy ambient dub—though the songs examination of his multi-national identity (Jaar, whose Chilean parents fled their home country after Pinochets coup in 1973, grew up between Chile, Paris, and the United States) also recalls the Ecuadorian-American musician Helado Negros own multi-lingual self-portraits.There are further surprises along the way: "Three Sides of Nazareth" hints at New York proto-punks Suicide as well as the contemporary UK musician Powell—which is pretty funny, because in most respects youd never think to mention Jaar and Powell in the same sentence. And it ends with a gorgeous, airy doo-wop song that cant help but bring to mind the Beach Boys weightless harmonies. Whatever else Nicolas Jaar may intend with his choice of title, theres no denying the seductive power of the final songs ethereal web of harmonies. Like everything on the album, it draws you in.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Visible Cloaks’ Reassemblage is the latest in a string of recent electronic music to investigate the ties between Eastern and Western forms of music, connecting commercial and spiritual art forms to create a mélange of plastic textures and heavenly auras. You can hear a similar—albeit more disturbing—collision in the Internet diaspora of vaporwave, or the constantly shifting configurations of Oneohtrix Point Never. But this meeting of schizophrenic digital assemblage and tranquil meditation stretches back into the ’80s as well, through the extraterrestrial world music of Jon Hassell.In widening the sonic palette of what constitutes easy listening, these artists lead the charge in finding new ways to zone out as we step further into the future, creating a liminal space where film scores, computer start-up sounds, and video game music can all mingle together in the otherworldly deep end. This playlist seeks to piece together the fractured influences of Reassemblage, and to illustrate the lush history of music that pushes the limits of what ambient means.

Source: Warp, YouTubeNozinja has been the producer behind many of the tracks that have put Shangaan electro on the map. The sound is a mix of cheap, MIDI-inspired post new wave electro and bright local folk music. Its deeply infectious, and its great to see Nozinja getsomelooks in the Western world. This is a playlist that his label, Warp, assembled on Youtube.

The party line is that electronics first entered the rock realm via prog rock in the early to mid ‘70s, but in fact, synthesizers were already on the scene when a psychedelic haze was still hanging in the air. Though The Monkees were often derided as prefab pop stars, they were actually the first to employ synths in a mainstream rock context, using one of the earliest Moogs on two of their trippier tracks, “Daily Nightly” and “Star Collector.” The Beatles got their licks in as well, from the big fat synth tones on “Because” to the screeching, Moog-generated white noise that builds up in the coda of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Even the blues-rooted Stones took an electronically assisted sojourn into outer space with “2000 Light Years From Home.” Of course, there were plenty of underground acts incorporating synths into their sound, from the Velvet Underground-goes-electronic vibe of the United States of America to the visionary Silver Apples and their homemade gear. It was an era when anything seemed possible; actor/singer Anthony Newley even teamed up with Dr. Who composer Delia Derbyshire for what was probably the first (and freakiest for its time) electronic pop song, “Moogies Bloogies.” Ultimately, all the aforementioned artists were innovators in electronic rock. With the counterculture in ascendance, the sky wasn’t the limit — the stars were.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!The effects the Internet has had on human civilization can’t be understated. You can see it in our industries, our social behavior, and our very psychological health. The Internet is an invasive presence in our society, pushing us toward the future whether we’re ready for it or not. It’s thanks to the Internet that I have a job, yet it’s also thanks to the Internet that I become intensely anxious about what dumb status I’m going to post on Facebook. Our entire culture has shifted to accommodate the presence of this connecting force that nonetheless seems to isolate us, and now it’s impossible to imagine a reality where we turn back from this road we’re on.Music has reflected these changes in splendid detail, giving us ample reason to be excited about living in such strange times. The possibility of directly reaching listeners all around the planet has paved the way for bizarre and exciting new formats to emerge, such as the hyper-saccharine pop madness of the PC Music collective, or the Chicago street phenomenon footwork, which has already sprouted fans and disciples as far away as Japan. If anything, it’s overwhelming how much incredible music we now have access to thanks to the Internet, the old guards of the industry cast away to make room for new ideas and artists capable of broadcasting to the masses from the comfort of their bedrooms.The music of the Internet era has defined itself through diversity, and there are common, shared ideas that emerge from the ethos of digital art. Much of our recent experimental music finds inspiration in the uncomfortable merging of opposing forms—artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and QT spin fantastic new shapes through the juxtaposition of uncanny sound manipulations and inescapably alluring Top 40 mechanics. A DIY mentality also pulses through a lot of music today, as with the gloriously simple and infectious Internet rap of Lil Yachty, or the barebones, anything-goes mania of DJ Paypal. But to paint the Internet as an entirely positive force would be closing your eyes to its strangely imprisoning nature, a dynamic deeply explored in the schizophrenic rap of Death Grips and the pained electronic distortion of Holly Herndon and Arca.All of the artists on this playlist share a common inspiration: picking apart the nature of society’s new favorite medium and the effects it has on our perceptions, memories, and experiences we subject ourselves to, given endless customization options. The old notion of genres has given way to an endless sea of individuality, where the mainstream has become underground and the underground has gone mainstream. The future is here, and it’s even more horrifying and beautiful than we ever could have imagined. Hit play to take a tour of the sounds emitted from our hyperreal, constantly connected world.

It’s rare that a traveling festival is focused on making ties with its host community, and rarer still that one is concerned with creating dialogues between the artists that reflect into the audience. But MUTEK is special. The Montreal-based festival started in 2000 with the aim of providing a showcase to progressive electronic music and to explore music’s bonds with technology (hence the name MU (music) Tek (technology). Within the next three years, MUTEK would expand and hold festivals in Mexico City and Chile, and, after that, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Dubai, Tokyo and Bogotá, along with one-off events everywhere from Berlin to Moscow.It’s almost odd that they’ve never staged a festival in San Francisco, a city that is known for its affinity to all things tech, but this is actually the first MUTEK in the US. It’s a strong initial offering. Experimental Jamaican dancehall duo Equiknoxx, legendary Vancouver ambient artist Tim Hecker, Techno pioneer Moritz von Oswald top the bill, but there are also strong offerings from techno-electro innovators Aux 88 and Chilean techno artist Matias Aguayo, alongside a broad array of audiovisual and experiential instilliations. If you’re looking for the bleeding edge of electronic music -- far past the usual bluster and bombast of your typical EDM festival -- you’ll want to be in SF in early May.San Francisco MUTEK Festival takes place May 3 - May 6 at various venues. Advance tickets available here.