Love them or hate them, end of year lists are a great way to check in at the end of the year and see what you might have missed along the way. Personally, I use them as a means of keeping things a bit more organized and breaking down the music I enjoyed over the year into something not so overwhelming. So I've decided to kick things off with a few lists, broken into genre. As a rule, I'll try to avoid anything too obvious in hopes of shedding some more light on lesser known stuff, but there are a few that I can't help but mention regardless of their popularity. Anyways, without further ado, here is the first part. In no particular order, my favourite electronic releases of the year.
DJ Python - Dulce Compañia
Labelled as "deep reggaeton", this is an unlikely pairing of genres that works far better than it has any right to. Deeply submerged sounding synth pads carried by hypnotic syncopated hand percussion, wrapped in a thick warm bass, all bubbling towards the surface to create the perfect soundtrack to my daily swim (more on the miracle of waterproof mp3 players later). You'd be hard pressed to find a more deeply enveloping and relaxing, yet entirely danceable record from this year.
https://djpythonnyc.bandcamp.com
Second Woman - S/W
The project of Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel-Aviv) and Turk Dietrich (Belong) continues to deliver and expand on their signature sound of microscopically produced glitched out dub music, introducing a little bit more structure amongst their usual chaotic stutters and overall blatant disregard for the laws of space and time. This is the sound of a time machine imploding inside the heart of a black hole, gears and plate metal expanding and shifting into something weaponized and deeply alien. The fact that this is music made by actual humans escapes my comprehension.
https://spectrumspools.bandcamp.com/album/s-w
Karen Gwyer - Rembo
Karen Gwyer's music contains just about everything I love about electronic music in one not so neat package. Deeply abstract and untethered to the rigidity of pure techno, yet always maintaining a propulsion and kineticism at it's core, making this the kind of music you can completely zone out to while still keeping you on the dancefloor. As far as dance music goes, this is a dense record (in the best of ways) and I still find myself discovering new layers on each listen. Psychadelic techno for deep travellers.
https://karengwyer.bandcamp.com/album/rembo
Nadia Struiwigh - Lenticular
Sitting somewhere between the more modern analog synth explorations of Kaitlin Aurelia Smith, and the late 90's/early 2000's spaced out ambient-electronic/sometimes downtempo acts like Bola and Carbon Based Lifeforms, the music on this record feels at once futuristic and nostalgic, like exploring the ruins of an ancient alien civilization, only to find it looks vaguely like the pixelated levels of some 1990s PC shooter. But let's be clear, there is nothing ironic about this music, and it does not bathe in the nostalgic. Airy and atmospheric, rhythmically propulsive, and packed full of interesting experiments in sound, this is the kind of unashamedly genuine"space" music that you just don't come across much anymore.
http://shop.cpurecords.net/album/lenticular
Chloé - Endless Revisions
Like many of my favourite electronic albums, this one's particularly dense and tough to pin down. 67 minutes or 13 tracks ranging from the ambient-techno, to the kind of hazed out, hard hitting industrial techno tracks I'd imagine hearing in a smokey hidden basement club in berlin, pulsing rhythms and confident, swaggering spoken word hooks, distorted into something both less and more than human. Pretty much the coolest, most self assured record I've heard all year. Going to be unpacking this one for a long time.
https://lumierenoirerecords.bandcamp.com/album/endless-revisions
JASSS - Weightless
You might be noticing a trend here; most of my picks for electronic albums of the year are by female artists. Although I strongly believe woman deserve more representation than they get in electronic music (and music in general), the prominence of females in my list was not intentional. It just so happens to be that woman are making my favourite electronic music right now. Anyways, the album. If the Chloé record mentioned above was hard to pin down, then this is like it's more mysterious, broodier, slightly gothy cousin. After listening to this one for months I still have no idea what's going on, and it keeps me coming back for more. At times industrial and rhythmically relentless, at others abstract and smokey, a ghostly echo just barely grasping on to any semblance of form or structure, this covers so much ground and sounds like nothing else. Maybe you can tell me what this album is all about, because I'm still figuring it out, and loving every moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK3jInNjyEw
Equiknoxx - Colón Man
Hailing from Kingston, Jamaica, Equiknoxx take the building blocks of dancehall music, melts them down with a blowtorch, and sculpts them into a samurai sword. Razor sharp production is the name of the game here. Birdsong, wooden mallets, wind chimes; Every single element is exactly where it needs to be, samples placed with expert precision, the restraint of a master. This music is so far removed from many recognizable points of reference in North American/European electronic music, the feeling results in something deeply forboding, like being dropped into the middle of a jungle with nothing but a pocket knife.
Mori Ra - 12''s (Trapped in the Sky, Brasserie Heroique Edits 3, Jongno Edits 4 )
This spot goes to three different 12'' records released this year by the same artist. From what I can gather, these are heavily edited/sampled/reconstructed versions of some obscure music from around the world, ranging from the balaeric and afrobeat of Brasserie Heroique, to the South Korean pop of Jongno Edits, to the psychadelic disco-funk of Trapped in the Sky (my personal favourite of the bunch). What is made immediately apparent is that these edits are the result of a dedicated crate-digger, of some one in love with both his craft and his influences. One can almost feel the same excitement the artist must have felt upon discovering these old forgotten gems, hidden amongst dusty old grooves, before breathing a new vitality into them with the respect of a historian. In a world where creative license is often disputed, and we are led to question where art and reference should meet, it becomes difficult to argue over the sounds of something so undeniably groovy.
https://soundcloud.com/user-468051371/sets/trapped-in-the-sky-mori-ra-episode-1
https://soundcloud.com/kemal187/sets/bh-035-mori-ra-the-brasserie
https://soundcloud.com/jongno_edits/forthcoming-jongno-edits-vol4-mori-ra-may-2017
Skee Mask - EP's (ISS002, 2012)
Another spot going to multiple smaller releases by the same artist, this time both released on the same label, the always consistent Ilian Tape. Skee Mask has only been on my radar for the passed year or so (ever since the release of his excellent 2016 record Shred), but in my opinion, this guy is one of most exciting artists in electronic music, delicately balancing this perfect mix of warm, submerged atmospheres, and cutting edge production techniques. Skee Mask always seems to be at the forefront of what I thought is possible in electronic music, creating something that is at once cold and artificial, yet somehow feeling perfectly organic in it's delivery, like the movements of a microscopic machine traversing it's way through the human blood stream. These two releases cover quite a bit of ground, taking breakbeat and jungle (and other such subgenres I admittedly am not super familiar with), and turning them into something modern, if not downright futuristic. Looking forward to the next Skee Mask release, which will inevitably rewrite, once again. what I thought I knew about electronic music
https://iliantape.bandcamp.com/album/iss002-skee-mask-iss002
https://iliantape.bandcamp.com/album/iss001-skee-mask-2012
Gosheven - Leaper
Probably the strangest and most abstract album on this list, and likely the most emotionally effecting as well. Hailing from Budapest, Gosheven eludes any easy categorization, the ritualistic guitar experiments on here sounding ancient and mystical, bringing to mind unexplored labyrinths and incense smoke. Employing the use of a specially developed guitar as well as some hugely underutilized and unconventional guitar tunings, the result is nothing less than a revelation, bringing to surface timbres and textures that sound conjured moreso than played. These are the sounds of the ether, briefly reaching into the corporeal to give us a mere glimpse of what lies beyond.
http://opaltapes.com/album/leaper