Electronic

Whats This Playlist All About? The LCD Soundsystem mastermind and pals David & Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax and 2ManyDJs got back to spinning vinyl (and only vinyl) at their 2018 Despacio party residency at Queens Knockdown Center. If you were there, you may have enjoyed the set while sipping on wines from Murphys restaurant, Four Horsemen. If you werent, Brooklyn Vegans Arielle Gordon graciously compiled this mix featuring highlights from the first of three nights.What Do You Get? A whole lot of classic disco, New Wave, and house, all on the headier end of the dance spectrum. It kicks off with one of Paul McCartneys weirdest (and best) synth experiments ("Check My Machine"), then digs into classic Bowie, Byrne, and Carly Simon, alongside a few Soulwax remixes of French artistes Charlotte Gainsbourg and The Peppers. In between, theres just enough dance-floor cheese sprinkled about (including some "Jungle Boogie") to keep the mood pleasantly lighthearted.Greatest Discovery: The 1983 collaboration between French composer Hector Zazou, Congolese singer Bony Bikaye, and electronic duo CY1, who mixed analog synths, krautrock, funk, and African influences into entrancing tracks like "Lamuka."Guiltiest Pleasure: Lyn Christophers slinky, sexy funk-pop sizzler "Take Me With You."Best Surprise: Black Sabbaths psychedlic slow-burner "Planet Caravan." It glues together the surrounding disco beats and funky grooves surprisingly well.Toss Up: James Murphy Spinning This Mix or an All LCD Soundsystem Set? Were going to go with the former here, if only because were getting a little older and hearing these classics alongside a couple glasses of that wine sounds pretty nice right about now.

Jamie XX links up with Complex to give a themed favorite tracks playlist. You get a sense of the broad range of influences that goes into his own music, from the lo-fi electric blues of Love Sculptures "Blues Helping" to the skeletal proto-dubstep of Buriels "Forgive." The Walls and Steel An Skin tracks are simply sublime (Jamie samples the latter on his own "Sleep Sounds").Songs to Relax To: Love Sculpture, “Blues Helping”Songs Most Proud of Making: Radiohead, “Bloom (Jamie xx Rework Part 3)”Album that Made Him Want to Start Producing: Burial, BurialFavorite Song With Steel Drums: Steel An’ Skin “Afro Punk Reggae Dub”UK Garage Track He Cant Stop Playing: DJ Zinc “138 Trek”Album that Inspired Him While Recording In Colour: Walls, WallsTrack that Encompasses Everything He Loves About U.K. Rave Culture: Jamie XX, "All Under One Roof Raving"Favorite song from his label, XL Recordings: Roy Davis Jr. f/ Peven Everett “Gabriel”Go-to song for DJing: Bileo, “You Can Win”Song that makes Him Excited About Dance Music: C.P.I., “Proceso (Barnt Remix)”Want amazing playlist delivered to your inbox every day? Click here to subscribe to the Dowsers e-mail!

His landmark debut album with Air, Moon Safari, just turned 20, but Jean-Benoît Dunckel isn’t looking back. On March 16, he releases his new solo album, H+, and to prep us for its cinematic dream-pop synth-scapes, he’s made us a playlist of widescreened inspirations. “These days, Im listening to more soundtracky music, music for cinema, because I’d like my life to look more like a movie. I would know the scenario in advance, and I would meet anybody I fancy for real, as I’d take care of the casting as well. This playlist is for traveling safely, and to bring comfort and relaxation.”—Jean-Benoît DunckelWatch the video for the latest single from H+, “Transhumanity”:

From the warped breakbeats of drum n bass to the frenetic 808 attack of footwork, the last two decades of electronic music history have been marked by a fetishization of the drums, as technological advances have allowed producers to go ever deeper into rhythmic design.Black Origami, the remarkable second album from Gary, Indiana, producer Jlin is one of the most important recent developments in the history of electronic percussion, a brilliantly overblown yet mind-glowingly complex album of rhythmic possibility.Jlin emerged from the world of footwork in the early 2010s with the track “Erotic Heat,” which appeared on volume two of the iconic Bangs & Works compilation series on UK dance label Planet Mu. But if that track was an outlier in the footwork world of dance battles and frenetic DJ cuts, her 2015 debut album Dark Energy would see Jlin gravitate further into her own darkly elegant orbit, incorporating operatic arias (on “Black Ballet”) and Chinese erhu violin (on “Unknown Tongues”).Black Origami sees Jlin blow open the definition of what footwork can be. You can still feel the influence of footwork producers like DJ Rashad on a track like “1%” (featuring Holly Herndon), with its skittering hi-hats and coal-black synth lines, but elsewhere Jlin widens her global percussive net to take in everything from tabla drums (notably used in electronic music by London producer Talvin Singh) on “Kyanite” to the djembe on “Nyakinyua Rise,” all of which battles against Jlin’s drum-machine finesse in a global-percussion street fight. Jlin also takes on sounds that are closer to home: “Challenge (To Be Continued)” is a brilliant rhythmic tussle between US marching band and footwork hi-hats, while “Hatshepsut” throws a Joey Beltram hoover sound into the mix.Black Origami is also notable for its eye-opening array of collaborations, which veer several steps into the left field of electronic music. “Holy Child” sees Jlin work with minimalist composer William Basinski, the haunting “Calcination” features the gothic vocals of Fawkes, while the hip hop-ish “Never Created, Never Destroyed” includes vocal work from Cape Town rapper Dope Saint Jude that Jlin chops and splits to her own devices.Black Origami bears the influence of each of these collaborators and yet it sounds like none of them. It’s a footwork album but only in the very widest sense of what footwork can be. As such, Black Origami resembles—in spirit more than in sound—the work of 90s electronic-music producers like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Photek, and Remarc, who took the chopped up breakbeats of drum n bass and pushed them to ridiculous new levels of subatomic complexity, creating something quite revolutionary in its pointillist intensity. Black Origami is a worthy successor to these names, a jaw-dropping work of percussive complexity that marks out Jlin as a singularly brilliant talent.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Chicago’s underground has been on fire the past few years. Every other week seems to deliver a new batch of releases from the Hausu Mountain label, purveyors of madcap electronics and cyborg-bopping eccentricity. The shadowy Beau Wanzer, whose icy and forlorn productions disintegrate the divide between post-punk and techno, is nearly as prolific—and that’s just one dude. And then there’s Jaime Fennelly’s always progressing Mind Over Mirrors project: his latest album, the critically lauded Undying Color, wanders dense, rippling expanses of pastoral art folk and baroque électronique.Of course, “underground” means a lot of different things to a lot of different heads. For denizens of the city’s thriving avant-garde jazz and hardcore punk scenes, it conjures up a significantly different cluster of artists. So for this playlist, we focus primarily on musicians, bands, and oddball geniuses who stalk the back alleys, linking DIY electronics, industrial, droning experimentation, and mutant dance music. At first blush they may seem too far apart to link, but in Chicago, where musicians from different disciplines have always mingled freely, the overlap between them is substantial.This idea is reflected in the growing catalog of Midwich Productions, a label specializing in “electronic music from the urban wilderness of the Midwest.” Founded by longtime resident and musician Jim Magas, it’s home to both HIDE (pictured at top), who unleash mechanized nightmares that carry forward the city’s electro-industrial tradition, and Alex Barnett, a composer whose quirky, bubbling pieces ooze a cozy sense of nostalgia for ’70s synthesizer music.As you can probably guess, a lot of this music gets awfully weird—Fire-Toolz’s collision of boom-box EDM and grindcore rasp makes zero sense. Yet a good deal of it is deeply beautiful: Quicksails, an alias for multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington, crafts flickering avant-pop that bridges DIY electronics with the city’s deep reverence for jazz and free improv. It’s music that could only come from Chicago.

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.

At the turn of the millennium, it seemed unlikely that an aging record nerd hollering about his favorite bands could possibly become the vessel for an entire angst-ridden generation—but that was before we had Sound of Silver. When James Murphy released his second full-length as LCD Soundsystem 10 years ago, he revealed the deeply sentimental roots behind all the dance-punk chic, the hopelessly melancholic critic who, no matter how many albums he might amass in his enormous collection, still can’t escape the simple truths of getting older and saying goodbye to all your friends. Though their short-lived retirement is now over, with the arrival of their first new album in seven years, it wouldn’t be LCD Soundsystem without gazing longingly towards the past. So we’ve taken the occasion to unpack James Murphy’s shining moment, the weepy behemoth of a dance record that is Sound of Silver.Murphy’s influences are as vast as they are easily traceable (all one has to do is look up the lyrics to the climactic band-listing outburst of “Losing My Edge”), yet the real magic of the album is how confidently it inhabits its own skin, effortlessly mixing the mechanic rhythms of Kraftwerk, the starry-eyed synth-punk of New Order, and the reckless rock worship of Lou Reed into something as comfortable in the club as it is at home on a turntable. Its endlessly looping electronics nod to the simple majesty of Detroit techno as well as the prickly brain-funk of the Talking Heads, yet what’s fascinating about Murphy is the way that he turns his love of these disparate artists into his own defining quality. LCD Soundsystem is a band of fanboys and fangirls playing for devotees of their own, celebrating the act of loving music and creating something entirely theirs in the process. Sound of Silver was the moment where Murphy’s band ceased to be a loving tribute to the many shapes of punk and New Wave, and became a fully-armed dance unit for the 21st century. Without further ado, we present our mix of the many sounds the fuelled one of our era’s most distinguishing voices.

In the 10 years since London’s enigmatic Burial released his boundary-breaking sophomore LP Untrue, the face of electronic music has changed dramatically. Not only have new arenas opened up for ambient-leaning producers to bring their experimental soundscapes into the spotlight, but the divisions between such typically at-home forms of listening and more club-oriented sounds have continued to blur. Though his releases seem to come less and less frequently, Burial’s thumbprint still courses through dance music today, whether in his haunting, intimate use of vocal samples, his brisk, tactile beats, or his free wandering into the kind of ethereal abstraction usually reserved for avant-garde composers.Part of what made Burial’s sound on Untrue so inspiring was his willingness to tackle original rhythms, without regard for what scenes he might be breaching. At turns reminiscent of house, garage, dubstep, and hardcore, Untrue is as bracingly pulsing as it is forlorn and relaxed, capturing the sounds of dance music at their most provocative, enveloping, romantic, and pain-ridden all at once. You can hear his influence in the dark nightclub ruminations of Dean Blunt, the grimy bass sculptures of Andy Stott, the ethereal beatmaking of Jamie xx, and even the minimal rhythms of latter-day Radiohead—all of whom have taken his blueprint for emotional, mysterious dance music and carried it valiantly forward into the future. Burial left an undeniable mark on music with Untrue, and with this playlist, we explore the many ways that his vision lives on today.

In September 2017, Colombian-Canadian experimental pop artist Lido Pimienta shot straight out of the Toronto avant-indie underground to the international spotlight when her most recent album, La Papessa, became the first self-released album (not to mention the first sung entirely in Spanish) to win Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize. Here, she shares the soundtrack to this transformative year in her life. “This year has been an exciting one for womxn in music and queer artists, like it always is, but the notoriety that womxn are getting as not just singers but producers is really inspiring and motivating. I am drawn to these songs because they carry interesting point of views and production. I enjoy making experimental music, so this list too reflects my personal taste and inspiration.”—Lido PimientaNote: Lido also wanted to include Xenia Rubinos’ “L.O.V.E.” on her playlist, but the song is not available on Spotify. You can listen to it here.

This is a track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far)for regular updates.If Daniel Avery’s 2013 debut, Drone Logic, was a techno record that was frequently districtacted by the drone and twitch of experimental electronic, then his 2018 follow-up, Songs for Alpha, flips that equation. The songs feel like steely, minimalist sculptures -- chunks of audio constructed with dubby electronic flourishes and swooning synths envelop and at times overwhelm the beats’ more austere techno wiring. The entire album is great, but “Sensation” is an obvious standout for us. It feels utterly alien, with a vibe that is both barren and majestic, like the song a DJ would play at the sunrise of the apocalypse. If you want to explore the outer limits of techno in 2018, it’s a great place to start.