Electronic

In the spring of 2017, Tijuana avant-electronic duo Los Macuanos released their third album, Epilogo, an equally impressionistic and visceral work that reverberates with the unrest felt all over the world this year. Their Dowsers playlist of key influences also doubles as a history of politically provocative electronic music.

Los Macuanos are very much a product of our time. Reared along the US-Mexico border, on the eve of a very bloody cartel war, weve inherited a trauma and an ultra-political awareness.Upon migrating to Mexico City in 2012, the atmosphere became even more charged. Amidst that year’s tense, fraudulent presidential elections—which many perceived as make-or-break for the country’s democracy—restless youth were eager for socio-political change. All this, while the rest of the world endured seismic events like massive government data leaks, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement, to name a few.Though protest or politically keen music has been sparse in the current generation, a dissentient spirit has risen in an array of electronic sounds across the globe, from Fatima Al Qadiri and Vatican Shadow’s war simulacrums, to James Ferraro’s evocation of barren capitalist wastelands, to more existential explorations in the works of artists like Lotic and Elysia Crampton.With Los Macuanos, we sought to echo this spirit via Epílogo (Nacional, 2017), our third formal effort, which has served as a kind of registry of Mexico’s volatile political milieu, as well as a summary of the sounds we consumed during those tumultuous times.There are common threads, however, in all the works featured on this list: a global-mindedness that still references regional politics; an exploration of the body and identity as affected by larger systems of oppression; and a decolonial and hyper-aware approach to cultural referencing. It is, in broad strokes, the sound of living in the perpetual, perceived end of history.THE PLAYLIST1. “Endzone” is something of an anomaly in Fatima Al Qadiri’s seemingly homologous catalog. You won’t hear the typical Middle Eastern flourishes or swelling sawtooth pads. It is, in fact, a work of great restraint, using a lone pulse to foreground field recordings of the Ferguson protests to truly chilling effect. One writer described Brute, the album in which it’s featured, as “apocalyptic political theater,” which could be an apt description of this playlist.2. Elysia Crampton is an artist whose entire character is inherently political. In the past, the US-Bolivian producer has made mention of their peripatetic lifestyle as something that has inspired their work, as well as a wide array of influences that span traditional Latin American music, avant-garde, jazz, and queer theory, among many others. Their approach to music making, however ineffable, largely functions as a kind of deconstruction and rethinking of identity and the body. It is the sound of liberation.3. Much like Crampton, Lotic can also rightly be characterized as a highly conscientious artist, albeit elusively so. Like his own persona, his music is more often implicitly politicized, through explorations of the body in sound. It delves into a gamma of emotions that derive from his own experiences as a gay black man living in a white heteronormative world: from anger and angst to ecstasy and feelings of confliction, which can themselves conflict.4. Tzusing stands out among other contemporary techno producers, in part, because of the deft manner in which he references his Eastern roots, both instrumentally and thematically. In past interviews, he’s described this practice as appropriating his own culture, a problematic concept. This, nevertheless, speaks to the state of globalization and the increasingly overbearing influence of Western politics on the rest of the world.5. Very little is known of late British producer Bryn Jones—better known by his Muslimgauze handle—other than the fact that he left a prolific body of work, and had an almost pathological obsession with the Muslim world. Nevertheless, the imprint he left on electronic music can be heard in a vast array of artists (many of which are on this list). Though it is said he never visited the Middle East, his works were directly inspired by the region’s ongoing unrest, and serve as a prime example of instrumental electronic music’s early excursions into subtextual politics.6. Vatican Shadow is the work of Dominick Fernow, who also operates under the Prurient moniker. More so than many current electronic music artists, Fernow has achieved such a level of rigor and aesthetic focus that he has managed to create an entire imaginary universe through his discography: shadowy military operations, cryptic historical snippets by way of titles, and portraits (both physical and sonic) of the various characters that comprise the sisyphean War on Terror. It’s all tension, no release.7. In NYC, Hell, 3:00AM, James Ferraro’s more impish sonic excursions are replaced with gaunt production and a pitch-grey landscape of late-capitalist gloom. “City Smells” is as good a summation of that full-length’s aesthetic aims, kicking off with the same disembodied text-to-speech vocals that appear on the album’s opener. The sparse R&B tinges are bookended by audio clips of what are presumably news reports from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It haunts and resonates as the implicit underlying motif of the album, which offsets the glitz of hyper-gentrified New York City in the early 21st century with the specters of disaster capitalism.8. Shackleton is one of those artists that we were listening to during the group’s inception, and rightly, a lot of that project’s sonic and conceptual cues parallel our own. The pathos-laden “Blood on my Hands” is one of the rarer musical works to reference the 9/11 attacks, with its sparse lyrics and a driving ethno-beat that embodies the UK-producer’s tracks. It echoes a lot of the artists featured here: It’s less about a message and more about the mood.9. Terrestre is 100 per cent on point on Secondary Inspection, and “Ejido del Terror” is its flagship production. One of the more venerable acts to come out of the early-‘00s wave of electronic music from the Tijuana-US border, Baja-bred Fernando Corona was diligent enough to break off early from the increasingly kitschy indulgences of Nortec Collective. On “Ejido,” he mastered the formula of micro-tech-house with a smidge of norteño bombast, albeit with a quietly foreboding undercurrent. The album was released in 2004, just a few years after the 9/11 attacks, and already Corona was predicting what would become of the increasingly draconian standard: an ultra-vigilant, militarized border. The wall, or so it would seem, was being built right before our eyes all along.10. “Verdad” (meaning “Truth”) is about as political as overly-abstract producer Siete Catorce can get. Parallel to the song’s melancholic melody is a sample of Mexico’s most infamous TV station’s logotone. Televisa, the channel in question, was blamed for the purportedly fraudulent 2012 presidential elections, during which an angry throng accused the media powerhouse of imposing president Enrique Peña Nieto through its propaganda, thus sparking the #YoSoy132 movement. The logotone evokes a sort of eternal recurrence, as much a prison as an assurance of familial warmth. The work itself is highly intertextual, and only makes sense when heard alongside his earlier song “Mariana,” whose melody it reprises. The whole number could, among many other things, serve as a commentary on the proverbial big lie, as told by the media: of true love (to echo cheesy Telenovelas) or, in the case of Mexico, of real democracy.11. In Amat Escalante’s elegiac, surreal short film about the Mexican revolution, El Cura San Nicolás Colgado, the titular priest and his two young companions trek across a desolate rural landscape, scarred by the remnants of carnage, only to conclude their journey inside a fast-food restaurant. It’s a seemingly anachronous moment that pulls the viewer out of the fantastical celluloid experience and into the hyperreal. The scene haunts with a rare, gelid beauty not unlike that of Burial’s 2007 track, “In McDonalds.” The track, like the film’s closing scene, appears to long for something that has been lost: a lover, a culture, or merely the evocation of something that may never have existed.

What with all the costumes, masks, and other visage-obscuring efforts that have contributed to the mystique of Karin Elisabeth Dreijer, just seeing her face on the cover of her new album may be startling enough. Of course, just like the music on Fever Ray’s Plunge, the grisly nature of the image (seen above) demonstrates her determination to be something far bolder and more provocative than the more passive, pliable, and predictable female stereotypes on which the music industry so often thrives.Taking a plunge into Dreijer’s sound world can be as unsettling as it is exhilarating. Even though the sometimes brutal yet oddly buoyant electro-pop of her (now-defunct) sibling duo The Knife remains a fundamental element of the songs she creates as Fever Ray, the project continues to expose her broad range of influences, from dark metal to African music to the soundtracks of David Lynch and Miami Vice to the work of Meredith Monk and Kate Bush (two other women who’ve been similarly fearless when it comes to demolishing conventions and exploring the properties of their astonishing voices). And while the cumulative effect can be as chilly as a New Year’s Eve party in Göteborg, there’s always a charge—and sometimes even a warmth—thanks to the stormy emotions and vulnerabilities that exist just below the surface. Hit play on our mix to hear the music that’s inspired her and catch the same fever.

A kick drum? A tambourine? Foot stomps and spoons? One very tired Razeem? It’s impossible to imagine what hip-hop, house, and techno might have used for a rhythmic foundation block if not for the 808 beat.That’s why the impact that inventor Ikutaro Kakehashi had on the last four decades of music is incalculable. The news of the Osaka-born engineer and Roland founder’s death on April 1 at the age of 87 has prompted a deluge of grateful tributes from just about every music maker who benefited from his innovations, most prominently with Roland’s most iconic drum machine, the TR-808. One of the earliest programmable models, its sound was initially criticized as too synthetic when it was introduced in 1980. But with its tight snare and booming bass, Kakehashi’s contraption proved to be more adaptable than anyone could’ve dreamed.Since the fine 2015 documentary 808 tells you everything you could want to know on the subject (and way more), we’d prefer to let the music do the talking with a set that includes many of the most famous uses of the 808 (and its successor the TR-909) by early adopters like Arthur Baker as well as such present-day devotees as Kanye West, who transformed the beat into the sonic epitome of emotional desolation on 808s And Heartbreak. Roland developer Tommy Snyder said it best in his farewell: “He was a super funny, wonderful and gifted human being, and his contributions to the musical instrument world and music touched millions of people worldwide.” To which we can only add: let the rhythm hit ‘em forever more.

Whats This Playlist All About? The Dutch DJ extraordinaire reveals all: These are "tracks that I love to listen to at home or play out at a party." Its safe to say this spunky upstart totally brings the party with him everywhere he goes——even in the comforts of his own home.What Do You Get? An ever-changing weekly collection of buzzy, bass-y feel-good anthems, dizzying dancefloor-fillers, and——if the feel is just right——some frayed, frenetic house and bass experiments. Like any DJ worth his/her salt, Garrix is both calculated and playful with his selections, slipping in some esoteric sounds between poppy earworms.Biggest and Best Surprise: James Blakes sticky, splintered cosmic-electro-soul single "If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead."Can You Pull This Off As Your Mix At Your Next Party?: Nope, sorry. This is expert DJ stuff. No way your friends will believe you have such hip, eclectic tastes.

This is everything that a mood-based playlist should be: expertly curated, fun and both universal in its theme and very specific in its selection. Not everything on here is minimal techno, per se, but its hard to argue that anything is less than great. There are a lot of more obscure tracks by Pantha Du Prince, DJ Koze and Matthew Dear. Jess has always a solid writer and really knowledgable about music. Beats is fortunate to have him.

The word "ambient" literally means "encompassing"; it etymology derives from the Latin for "going around." But one of the genres most captivating strains might better be described as going into the mist, the water or even the earth. This strain emphasizes the grain of sound, the rumble of resistance, the thingliness of the recorded medium itself. This school of thought is best exemplified by William Basinski, whose album Disintegration Loops famously captured the sound of years-old piano sketches being played back on crumbling magnetic tape; it also comprises the full-bore intensity of artists like Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Fennesz, who whip up shoegaze-grade distortion and then grind it down to dust.

Home to international stars like Hugh Masekela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and, um, Die Antwoord, South Africa has always been known for its music. Even during the days of apartheid, this country of 55 million people was a hotbed for pop, jazz, choral, and dance music. While Paul Simon worked with South African musicians back in the 1980s to make his career-defining album Graceland, these days it’s artists and label heads like Kode9 who are looking to the country amid the rising global popularity of gqom, the moody, broken-beat take on South African house that was first divined with the help of cracked Fruity Loops setups in the coastal city of Durban.Piotr Orlov, a writer for NPR, the New York Times, and The Guardian among others, has done an admirable job at offering an overview to a scene that is still largely unfamiliar to American audiences. A former editorial lead for now-defunct MTV streaming service Urge, Piotr intimately understands the playlist format, mixing a DJ’s ear for flow and sequencing with a musicologist’s vast knowledge and a critic’s natural discernment. Compiled after a recent trip to the country, the resulting playlist is illuminating, enjoyable, and erudite, and offers a glimpse at some of the best music coming out today.Highlights from the 24-track, 2.5 hour playlist (titled after the Xhosa word for South Africa) include Floyd Lavine’s smooth house jam “Saint Bondon” and Big Nuz’s kwaito party banger “Tsege Tsege”—the latter of which evokes pure sex with its shaking, moving, plucking, and pumping beat. There’s also more out-of-the-box fare, like Gumz’s unbelievably funky “Yoruba Brass” as well as “B U,” a cut from Okzharp & Manthe Ribana’s well-received Tell Your Vision EP, released last year on Hyperdub.Mzansi: Now! is bracketed by two tracks from the award-winning songwriter Thandiswa Mazwai, who began her career in the late ’90s as frontwoman of the kwaito pioneers Bongo Maffin. Just as nice is “Anonymous in New York,” a Mingus-y composition by the emerging jazz combo Skyjack. Alas, not every track on the collection is a winner—Thor Rixon and Alice Phoebe Lou’s twee electro-pop number “Death Pt II” lacks the charm of Rixon’s wonderfully weird “Fuk Bread” from 2015, for example.Still, there’s enough good stuff here to keep you engaged, and send you digging for more. And, ultimately, that’s the goal of a playlist that surveys scenes still largely foreign to its target audience. Mzansi: Now! makes a great case for both modern South African music and the professional curator class.

What’s This Playlist About: Post-everything It boy Nico Jaar releases a playlist of fluttering lo-fi, Indian-inflected jazz, sound collages and SFX recordings. Occasionally, a recognizable name will pop up——Leonard Cohen, Actress, Dirty Beaches——but most of this is exalted esoterica, perfect for a morning coffee with mysterious deities. It would also feel at home in the more psych-oriented valleys of Jaars own meandering DJ sets. Overall, the playlist answers the question: If music is background noise, why not make background noise music?Biggest Surprise: How Jaar weaves Eastern music into the mix. The rhythms have always been present in his own tracks, but the sounds here are foregrounded and unfiltered.Greatest Discovery: "Ein Wort" by 70s multimedia electronic collective Monton, who skirt the boundaries of Krautrock, dub, and ambient.Hmmm, I’m Not So Sure About: The numerous sound effect tracks that make up a majority of the playlists last portion.

Nicolas Jaar has commitment issues. His music slithers between psych-speckled post-rock, world-building ambient, minimalist techno, hip-hop-inflected house, and reconstituted pop. Sometimes it’s slinky and sexy, other times it maps out a cavernous space that is icy and foreboding. As an artist, Jaar can be thought of as an arch conceptualist or a sharp-eyed technician, a festival-headlining electronic music god or a museum-dwelling avant garde knob twiddler.He’s all these things, of course. Regardless of the medium, the most interesting artists are the ones who spend their careers negotiating contradictions. Jaar is no different. He’s the NYC club kid, the omnivorous intellectual, and a product of South America’s political unrest. His tireless pursuit of Born in 1990, Jarr came up in the late-’00s NYC house scene, playing Brooklyn’s Marcy hotel parties. Gadi Mizrahi, who hosted the parties as one half of the legendary NYC house duo Wolf & Lamb, heard Jaar’s early compositions — which veered toward experimental atmospherics — and suggested that he add a 4/4 house beat beneath them. Within two years, Jaar had become one of the hottest DJs in NYC’s house scene, releasing his first EP (The Student) and starting his record label (Other People). At the end of this hot streak, he turned 20.Making a playlist of Jaar’s best music is difficult, to say the least. Figuring out how to sequence the euphoric house of his A.A.L. project with the austere techno of his Nymph EPs is a fool’s errand, while blending the Southwestern inflected psych twang of Darkside’s “Golden Arrow” with the sorrowful piano tones of his 2013 Leonard Cohen cover, “Avalanche,” is near-fucking-impossible.And what does one do with Pomegranates? The 2015 release was intended as a soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 Soviet-times movie The Color of Pomegranates, and combines scraps of electronic debris to approximate noisy ambient music. The music at the beginning of the collection is largely abstract sound design — the whizzing harmonics of opener “Garden of Eden” gives way to the clattering, gear-crunching ambience of “Construction” — but this leads to some of Jaar’s most beautiful music: the twinkling, near-East melodies of “Tourists,” the pastoral sheen of “Shame,” and the haunting piano ballad “Muse.”It all makes a little more sense if you’ve seen the movie. Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates is considered one of that era’s definitive underground films. In it, as well as its predecessor, 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Parajanov bucked the state-sanctioned aesthetic of social realism — a stylistically rigid movement that celebrated the nobility of the proletariat — for an hallucinatory style that veered between esoteric, Freudian examinations of a vast innerspace and oblique, symbolist critiques of Soviet politics and society. Upon release, Parajanov’s films were generally panned by native critics and banned by the censors, and Parajanov himself was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Siberia (ostensibly for his homosexuality).In many ways, Parajanov’s sideways agitprop is a fitting corollary to Jaar’s own work, but Jaar has definitely had an easier go of it. By the time Pomegranates was released in 2015, Jaar was one of the most celebrated producers and DJs in the world. He had a teaching gig at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His collaborative side-project Darkside had released their critically acclaimed debut, 2013’s Psychic, and became a touring powerhouse, treating audiences worldwide to their loose, spaghetti techno. And Jaar formed an interdisciplinary arts collective called Clown & Sunset Aesthetics that performed inside a geodesic dome at MOMA’s PS1 contemporary art museum. His 2012 BBC Essential Mix was named Radio 1’s Essential Mix Of The Year, while his 2011 debut, Space is Only Noise, was named album of the year by Resident Advisor, Mixmag, and Crack Mag.But Jaar’s breakout composition was 2010’s “Mi Mujer,” which remains his most streamed track on Spotify. It was a song that was never intended to come out — Jaar had laid down the Spanish language vocals of his mother, somewhere between a tribute and a joke — but Jaar released it after bemoaning the appropriation of Latin music samples in electronic music.This is not the only time that Jaar’s family showed up in his work, nor the only time that he has engaged with the issues surrounding the Latin American diaspora. Jaar is from New York, but his family is Chilean. His father, the celebrated multimedia artist Alfredo Jaar, was born in the Chilean capitol of Santiago in 1956. Alfrado’s family soon moved to Mozambique, but they were devoutly liberal, and when the socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected in 1972, the family returned to Santiago. Unfortunately, Allende’s reign was short lived, and the following year, when Alfredo was 17, Allende was assassinated as Augusto Pinochet rose to power in a bloody coup.Much has been written about Pinochet and Allende, particularly of the CIA’s involvement, but the net of it was that 3,000 were killed and many more “disappeared,” tortured, or imprisoned by the Pinochet-backed Chilean death squad the Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte). Jaar’s family stuck it out in Chile for nearly a decade after Pinochet took power before moving to New York in 1982. Pinochet himself held onto power until March 11th, 1990, when he was disposed following a country-wide referendum. At this time, Nicolas Jaar was 3 months old.Nicolas Jaar has never been an explicitly political artist, but this particularly gruesome chapter of history shows up in his work, particularly on Sirens, from 2016. That album is both his most personal and political work to date. If Pomegranates and the Nymph EPs found him exploring particular strains of his music — musique concrète and fractured techno, respectively — then Sirens is a synthesis, blending the warbling post-rock wanderings of his Darkside project with the textural elements of Pomegranates and the conceptual, cinematic framework of Space, while adding a veneer of pop to give the songs more structure. The collection also, perhaps tellingly, abandoned sampling, and was solely constructed with live instrumentation and Jaar’s voice. “The Governor” and “Three Sides of Nazareth” have a presence that’s lacking in his other work — in particular, the cowpoke vocals and driving baseline of “Governor,” which are juxtaposed with the swirling, subterranean sound effects.The spectre of violence and political unrest hangs over all of Sirens, but the most pointedly political track is “No.” It contains one of the albums few samples — a clip of Andes folk music — and its title references the 1988 referendum that would eventually bring down Pinochet (the choice was, effectively, “yes, he stays” or “no, he leaves”). Speaking to Pitchfork, Jaar noted, “What interested me a lot was that, in 1988, there was a referendum that asked the Chilean people: ‘Do you want Pinochet to stay for eight more years?’ That simple, yes or no. So the resistance—which was artists, leftists, activists—created a campaign for the ‘no.’ They effectively turned a negative message into a positive message, which seems like the most elemental change that you can do.”The track ends with a snippet of sampled dialogue between Nicolas and Alfredo Jaar taken from when the former was a child. It can be translated as such:“Alfredo: Stay against the wall. Put yourself against the wall. Go there and tell others. The one you like, tell a nice story.Nico: Once upon a time there was a little bird that was flying. And there, there was a man with a very big gun and did like this (gunshot).”It’s tempting to view Sirens as a culmination (or synthesis) of Jaar’s approach — the marriage of the personal and political; narratives built from scraps of memories and noise — but 2012 – 2017, his 2018 release under the moniker A.A.L. (Against All Logic), displays yet another side of Jaar. The tracks are hedonistic, transcendent, and eerily (for Jaar) coherent. “Rave On U” builds off clomping high-hats and smeared synth textures for a banger, while “Cityfade” comes outfitted with gospel handclaps, a streaking piano line, and a submerged children’s choir, and is his most accessible work to date. “I Never Dream,” meanwhile, is pure dancefloor euphoria, building off shuffling rhythms and lightly processed female soul vocal for a finish that’s as pretty and blissful as anything Jaar or any of his contemporaries have ever made.When building a playlist, the curator always tries to find the center of an artist or a genre. With Jaar, that’s nearly impossible; his work is endlessly digressive and varied. There are strains of ideas and sounds that appear and reappear, but putting a finger on one feels impossibly reductive. The journey may be bumpy, but it also includes some of the most important and idiosyncratic music created this decade.

As music scholar Tim Lawrence brilliantly makes the case in his recent book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983, disco couldn’t die no matter how hard the haters tried. Instead, as the new decade began, disco mutated into a variety of exciting and scintillating new strains. Though Lawrence’s book is primarily concerned with the influence of hip-hop and post-punk experimentalism on what dance music was becoming—as well as the wizardry of DJs like Larry Levan and the socioeconomic conditions in New York itself—there were also developments of a more technological nature.It’s easy to hear how the plush strings of Philly soul were giving way to layers of synthesizers and sequencers: This was funk and R&B for a new space age, the latest sonic innovations creating a dramatic spike in the bounce-per-ounce ratio. Sadly, Roger Troutman never provided a firm indication of the winning ratio, not even on the opening track of Zapp’s epochal 1980 debut album, but he did help provide a synth-funk blueprint that continues to yield some of the plushest and most pleasurable music known.Nite Jewel—the Los Angeles singer and musician otherwise known as Ramona Gonzalez—has been one of synth-funk’s foremost purveyors in contemporary times, since her music began showing up on MySpace in 2008. With such fellow Angelenos as her husband and producer Cole M.G.N. and the ever-industrious Dâm-Funk, she’s fostered a sparking new golden age for synth-funk fantasias like the kind that used to flow freely from the likes of Zapp, Mandré, and the SOLAR Records stable. As Nite Jewel drops her fourth album, Real High, it’s high time to head deep into the neon-lit nights this music evokes.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.