Back in January, dance music was still in a deep funk: Clubs remained shuttered, the prospect for summer festivals was iffy, and everyone was burned out on livestreams. But then, miraculously—and however temporarily—things began opening up again. Club producers came prepared. There was no shortage of big, bold, absolutely jubilant anthems this year, from LSDXOXO’s sexed-up “Sick Bitch” to SHERELLE’s no-holds-barred “160 Down the A406.” Jayda G helped us focus our desires with “All I Need”; Anz raved ’til the lights came up on her All Hours EP; Danny L Harle gave us license to let off steam via the unabashedly over-the-top “Boing Beat.”
But we aren’t out of the woods yet, and much of this year’s best electronic music, both on and off the dancefloor, attempted to channel the mixed emotions of the present day. Loraine James, Space Afrika, Perila, Muqata’a, the Bug—all of them reminded us that electronic music can also be a vehicle for contemplation, sorrow, and even fury, while simultaneously testing the possibilities of their chosen forms.
Below, we round out entries culled from our overall albums list with more LPs and EPs just as worthy of your time, which are listed alphabetically.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2021 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Astrid Sonne: outside of your lifetime
Last year, the brittle synthetic harpsichords of Astrid Sonne’s “Swirl” made for one of the highlights of Kulør 006, creeping like frost crystals across the Danish compilation’s largely placid, ambient surface. On her 2021 album outside of your lifetime, the Copenhagen musician maps new routes through the uncanny valley between acoustic and electronic tones. The pinging arpeggios of “Mirror Behaviour” conjure funhouse-mirror visions of Baroque chamber music; at the other end of the spectrum, “Greener” meditates on seemingly unadorned strings, while “Fields of Grass” sets a cappella choral music against a background that might be rushing traffic. Each song suggests its own era and its own space, and the cumulative effect is a garden of forking paths where every listen leads somewhere new. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Amazondotcom: War Bride EP
In the two years since Amazondotcom’s breakthrough EP, Mirror River, the world’s second-largest retailer has somehow not yet gotten wind of the Los Angeles musician Stella Ahn and her cavalier approach to copyright. Thus unencumbered by unwanted cease-and-desists, she returned this year with War Bride, whose five skeletal tracks telegraphed even more unease than their predecessors. Consisting of little more than sub-bass and empty space pricked by brittle percussive stabs, War Bride flips tropes cribbed from grime, UK funky, and other forms of bass music into an ominous club-music amalgam that positively oozes dread. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Anthony Naples: Chameleon
Anthony Naples always had a record like Chameleon in him. From his debut album, Body Pill, the Brooklyn producer and Incienso co-owner has balanced experimental club music with ambient explorations. On Chameleon, Naples is a one-man band—he both produced the record and plays every instrument on it—but makes the release sound strangely expansive. It’s easy to be engulfed by the Durutti Column-esque “Devotion (SSL Mix),” a track composed of glowing guitar riffs and synthesizer drone. As the album marches on, he further mutates this collage of dubs and post-punk. The contours of this change can be heard on “Massive Mello,” a late-album stunner of skulking bass and distended percussion. Just as you think you know where it’s going, a guitar appears, soloing outwards into territory unknown. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Anz: All Hours EP
Anz turned heads last year with the crowd-pleasing, faintly throwback garage sounds of Loos in Twos (NRG), her Hessle Audio debut, but this year’s All Hours EP constitutes an even more marked inflection point in the Manchester producer’s career. On tracks like “Last Before Lights” and “Real Enough to Feel Good,” she proves herself capable of the sorts of adrenalized rave anthems that enliven the night (and stick in your mind for days later). But “You Could Be,” featuring George Riley, is the real tour de force: a giddy dose of nouveau freestyle that shudders like a time machine shaking off the dust of 1983. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
aya: im hole
Throughout aya’s debut album, voices rush the ear and then denature. Half-sung, half-shouted words slip in pitch, puddling into an artificially low register. “Come over/We can fuck the void out of each other,” she chants, multi-tracked high and low, both channels scoured raw and loaded with grit. The UK musician’s melting electronics and sour club progressions slink around an emptiness that threatens to obliterate the self as it dares you to consider that we’re all just bricolage plastered together from haphazard experience, trash in orbit around the gaping hole. –Sasha Geffen
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
The Bug: Fire
Fire opens with a monologue from a grim near future: Lockdowns are ongoing, fresh food is only available on the black market, the world has forgotten compassion. To soundtrack that dystopia, Kevin Martin returns to the scorched dancehall rhythms of classic Bug albums like London Zoo. There are few chords, melodies, or even discernable pitches; beats hulk and lurch like rusty robots and basslines burble like tar pits. MCs including Flowdan and Moor Mother come across like Mad Max-ian post-apocalyptic warlords, their verses mixing righteous political fury with cartoonishly menacing boasts. –Andy Cush
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Burial: “Dark Gethsemane”
The beloved and enigmatic Burial resurfaced this year with Shock Power of Love, his split EP with London producer Blackdown. Of its four songs, the undeniable highlight is “Dark Gethsemane,” a cinematically sprawling track clocking in at 10 minutes. Burial opens with a subtle, searching garage beat, beneath which snakes a stream of sirens, chimes, and police radio chatter. The constant vinyl crackle has a lulling quality; not so the fiery gospel cry that follows: “We must shock this nation with the power of love!” Those words loop over an incandescent choir until Burial pitches the phrase down to a darker register. Armed with bellowing horns and driving bass, the incessant sermon becomes something fiercer: a battle cry. –Madison Bloom
Listen: Burial, “Dark Gethsemane”
Danny L Harle: “Boing Beat”
MC Boing, the pitched-up voice on Danny L Harle’s post-trance rave-up “Boing Beat,” is a blobby blue cartoon character that looks like a cross between Crazy Frog and a character from a Red Bull commercial. Such absurd imagery suits the song’s delirious swirl of internet-addled Eurodance refractions and pitched-up sugar-rush rapping, which is credited to the animated avatar. The euphoric, otherworldly track arrived in January, while clubs across the world were still shuttered and the long nights out that “never, never, never end” were still a distant dream. Though dancefloors have filled back up, the music’s yearning is still palpable—few songs better capture the feeling of desperately straining for an ecstatic experience that’s just out of reach. –Colin Joyce
Listen: Danny L Harle, “Boing Beat”
Dax Pierson: Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction)
A former member of Anticon-affiliated groups Subtle and 13&God, Dax Pierson has been involved in the Bay Area music scene since the early ’00s. His solo discography in all that time might have been more voluminous, had a 2005 van accident on tour not left him paralyzed from the torso down. It took him years to develop a compositional method adapted to his disability, and it’s tempting to say you can hear that gestation in his debut solo album, Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Satisfaction), which overflows with ideas. Created on iPads and Ableton Live, the album flows like the output of a machine with a mind of its own. Elements of techno, acid, industrial, rap, and synth pop collide and combine, spinning off fractured beats into uneven time signatures and flurries of post-classical melody. Yet for all its turbulence and contrasting emotions, it is a remarkably focused sound, sure in its purpose as it carves a twisting path to the stunning finale of “NTHNG FKS U HRDR THN TM,” a 12-minute descent into some of the headiest, most introspective dark ambient of the year. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Equiknoxx: Basic Tools
Basic Tools, the fourth LP from Kingston group Equiknoxx, is a whiplash voyage through their kinetic take on dancehall. Comprised of producers Gavsborg and Time Cow alongside vocalists Shanique Marie, Kemikal Splash, and Bobby Blackbird, Equiknoxx twist hallmark characteristics of the genre—irresistible refrains, mechanized beats, filtered basslines—with clever production choices, ornamenting some songs with sputtering synths and cutting elements of others down to spare, hypnotic parts. With their playful rhymes and downright absurdist lyrical scenarios, Basic Tools makes for a thrilling peek into the group’s surreal and occasionally chaotic world. –Eric Torres
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Facta: Blush
Wisdom Teeth co-founder Facta has his roots in the sparse, shadowy strains of bass music of the early ’10s, but in recent years, both he and his label have been exploring a comparatively lush, colorful sound, trading post-dubstep’s skunky haze for a more melodic style shot through with fresh air and sunlight. His debut album, Blush, showed how much he’s evolved in a relatively short amount of time: Where just last year he was still doling out late-night floor-fillers, Blush is aglow with whisper-soft synth pads and glancing beams of light. Nodding to dub techno, ambient jungle, and even nu-jazz, its grooves seem to hover a few feet off the ground. Once upon a time, horizontally inclined records like this were branded as “comedown albums,” but this year, released while clubs were still shuttered, Blush proved substantial enough to be the main event in its own right, no matter how supine. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
FAUZIA: flashes in time
FAUZIA only started releasing music a year ago, but the East London artist has already crafted a distinctly unique experimental sound. On the brief flashes in time, the producer weaves together electronic, ambient, post-punk, folk, and dance music, with her silken voice as the music’s guiding light, whether spliced into a chattering sample or leading a captivating chant. FAUZIA keeps things to the point—her songs fade out just as you begin to grasp their vaporous dream logic, leaving roving synth lines and clattering drum patterns in their wake. flashes in time invites you into a mind rich with possibilities, merging different strains of electronic music into one heady brew. –Eric Torres
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Foodman: “Parking Area”
True to his name, Foodman loves to eat. Some of his favorite places to grab a snack are the michi no eki (service stations) which dot Japan’s highways—often sprawling campuses with spas, cafés, and farmers markets. Foodman pays tribute to these roadside oases on his 2021 album Yasuragi Land, and on “Parking Area,” he sketches a scenic view that might entice a weary traveler to pull over. His palette is more spacious than usual; a breezy, digitally altered guitar drives the melody, leaving more room for his nimble beats to ping-pong around than his often jam-packed tunes typically do. “Parking Area” invites you to take a moment to enjoy life’s simplest pleasures. Treat yourself. You deserve it. –Shy Thompson
Listen: Foodman, “Parking Area”
Giant Claw: Mirror Guide
Keith Rankin’s music as Giant Claw thrums with kinetic energy. Mirror Guide traces a tangle of intersecting lines—bursts of woodwinds, harp glissandi, THX-grade crashing-spaceship effects—but it is principally built upon intricate and elastic microrhythms that recall violin bows bouncing against taut strings. In places, the music shudders like pinball bumpers on the fritz; elsewhere, it’s drops of water in an oiled frying pan, or freezing rain scattering across one of Frank Gehry’s curved glass facades. Yet for all its undercurrent of chaos, Mirror Guide is also infused with an almost beatific sensibility, posing the question: How can something so jittery feel so enveloping? –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Jayda G: “All I Need”
Canadian house phenom Jayda G’s “All I Need” is dance music that feels like an out-of-body experience, untethering you from your most mundane worries. The lyrics are just empty enough to serve as an incantation (“Putting up, putting up our walls/I’ve given you all my worlds”) or a vessel, a container for whatever you’re exorcising on the dance floor. The retro melody evokes simpler times and simpler pleasures: sweat and oblivion, body and blood. –Linnie Greene
Listen: Jayda G, “All I Need”
Jlin: “Embryo”
More than a decade after emerging from the Midwest’s footwork scene, Jlin still sounds like she’s only just getting started. Across three albums between 2015 and 2018, she proved herself capable of head-spinning abstracted beats, globe-shrinking traditional instrumentation, and even a modern-dance soundtrack of ambient minimalism. On the title track from her first proper solo record in three years, Jlin once again shows the unpredictability that has been her enduring strength. It’s difficult to imagine this song, originally written for a contemporary classical group, being played by human hands; it’s an exercise in controlled chaos that reveals Jlin at her most maximalist—and audacious—yet. Beneath a buzzing synth, the hyper-rhythms of “Embryo” bounce like Aphex Twin in a corn popper and shift shapes like a life cycle with only one stage: constant metamorphosis. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Jlin, “Embryo”
Joy Orbison: “better” [ft. Léa Sen]
Presented as a mixtape, Joy Orbison’s long-awaited debut full-length, Still Slipping Vol. 1, is meant to be consumed as a complete, luscious whole, but album highlight “better” beautifully encapsulates the UK producer’s timeless brand of post-dubstep street soul. Dreamily drifting along the edge of the dancefloor, the track rests atop a bed of plush deep house that recalls the pillow-soft sounds of Larry Heard; its silky, dimly lit groove centers the R&B-infused vocals of fellow Londoner Léa Sen, who delivers a heart-twisting tale of late-night longing. –Shawn Reynaldo
Listen: Joy Orbison, “better” [ft. Léa Sen]
Kasper Marott: Full Circle
If Danish producer and DJ Kasper Marrott says his ideal club set lasts five to eight hours, then his debut LP, Full Circle, is the album-length interpretation. Opening on the acidic rave-up “Mr. Smiley,” Marrott works in selectors’ utility picks like “Mini Trance” and “Missing Link,” then pauses for a sampled moment of “solitude” on “Pling”; by the time he reaches “Sol,” the sun’s coming out. But just because the beats seem to scramble in place on a crowded neon dancefloor doesn’t mean nothing is happening: In the first 30 seconds of “Mere,” he stacks a breakbeat, a finger snap, a phaser charge, and what sounds like an impression of dial-up internet, wiring chunky, knockabout sounds into sophisticated patterns full of surprising little chambers of rhythmic possibility. Full Circle feels not just like a great night out, but a rare offer to see how it’s done. –Anna Gaca
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Loraine James: Reflection
Reflection is always surprising, from the errant percussive barrage of the title track to the sibilant rap and aquatic dub of “Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery” to the vertiginous IDM of “Self-Doubt (Leaving the Club Early).” But the fluidity of London electronic experimentalist Loraine James’ third album peaks on the penultimate “Running Like That.” Starting off with the angelic voice of Eden Samara, the song might initially be mistaken for one of Cocteau Twins’ weightless confections, were it not for the persistence of the grinding drums. James’ wild sleight of hand here—masking the beat’s hectic energy with Samara’s cool, calming voice—crystallizes her daunting, and thrilling, unpredictability. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Lost Girls: Menneskekollektivet
Menneskekollektivet is Norwegian for “human collective,” and Norwegian experimentalists Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden duly summon a sound larger than themselves on their first album as Lost Girls. Over churning house beats, keys and guitars tangle and detune; hypnotic arrangements sprawl to 15 minutes long. Hval’s spoken-word vocals are like eavesdropping on someone’s inner monologue. She muses on the strangeness of lockdown, meditates on the nature of fiction. In one song, she quotes a 1984 poem written by a computer program, which seems fitting: Collaboration, Lost Girls suggest, is itself a kind of artificial intelligence—greater than the sum of its parts, spitting out an endless and uncontrollable stream of ideas, sounds, and desires. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
LSDXOXO: “Sick Bitch”
LSDXOXO cuts straight to the point on “Sick Bitch,” an immaculately filthy statement of intent: “I’m a sick bitch/And I like freak sex/If you want to test the limits of my gag reflex,” the Berlin-based producer growls coolly. It’s techno for the sluts who’ll emerge from all-night dick appointments with their eyeliner still looking immaculate. Over a bed of dial-tone synths, thumping kicks, and laser zaps, LSDXOXO goads someone to “go berserk” and deliver on rough sex; the pièce de résistance is cut-up moans that simulate being edged, culminating in blissed-out aaaaahhhs. It’s not for the faint of heart, but “Sick Bitch” contains so much pleasure. –Cat Zhang
Listen: LSDXOXO, “Sick Bitch”
Lucy Gooch: Rain’s Break EP
Rain’s Break is a more audacious exploration of the nether realm between ambient music and pop that Lucy Gooch staked out on her debut EP. The synth tones are crisper and more forward; the compositional arcs are more dramatic; the harmonies occasionally pile into unexpected dissonances before resolving again. If her earlier music seemed at times like a breathtaking landscape viewed from afar, now we’re zooming in on the flora and fauna, taking in their strange, fidgeting life. –Andy Cush
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Muqata’a مُقاطَعة: Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص
Imperfection is a key part of Muqata’a’s process. On Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص, the Palestinian producer reconstitutes brutally suppressed memories by using found sound and old Arabic records, embracing “errors and glitches” as productive elements in his quest. “Shay’an Fa Shay’an شَیئاً فشَیئاً” is a stuttering puzzle of computer application sounds, sinister bass, and swirls of noise, but it manages to rock forth on its own descending groove. “Bilharf Alwahad بالحَرف الواحَد” pauses its barrage from time to time, leaving micro-moments of silence before entering liminal drum’n’bass. The final track “Ikmal إِكمَال” moves between a sample and a wild set of effects—browser window opening clips, dubstep drops, and piano lines—played all at once and then dropping out. It’s resistance at its most joyous. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Oneohtrix Point Never / Elizabeth Fraser: “Tales From the Trash Stratum”
The original “Trash Stratum,” on 2020’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, entwined distortion and euphony in familiar Dan Lopatin fashion. This year’s reinvention lovingly collages ’80s production motifs: pizzicato string flutters as fragrant as Enya, blobs of reverb-smudged piano that evoke Harold Budd, high-toned pings of bass that could be the Blue Nile or Seventeen Seconds. Like a bowerbird building a glittering nest, he succeeds in reeling in onetime Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. Fraser’s contributions—ASMR-triggering wisps of sibilant breath, chirruping syllables from a disintegrated lullaby—are closer to a diva’s warm-up exercises than an actual aria, and sometimes you long for her to take full-throated flight into song. But it’s lovely to hear the goth goddess brought into the glitchy 21st century. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Oneohtrix Point Never / Elizabeth Fraser, “Tales From the Trash Stratum”
Peggy Gou: “I Go”
“I Go” was engineered to motivate. The Korean lyrics were pulled from a note Peggy Gou wrote to herself on her phone—some words of encouragement after seeing just how exhausted she looked in an airport bathroom mirror. Her vocals are gentle, but her promise of persistence (“I go I go, I go I go”) feels powerful. Throbbing drum machines further bolster her energizing message, turning a personal pep talk into a lull-crushing banger. A six-minute ’90s dance megamix that feels 10 minutes too short, it definitely goes. –Evan Minsker
Listen: Peggy Gou, “I Go”
Perila: How Much Time It Is Between You and Me?
Stitched together out of little more than rustles, whispers, and hiss, Perila’s music belongs to the shadows. But the Russian ambient musician took a step toward the light on this year’s How Much Time It Is Between You and Me? Recorded during a solitary retreat in the mountainous French countryside, then reworked on modular synthesizer back in Berlin, the album’s 11 tracks constitute a hazy mixture of found sounds, abstract drones, and even faint singing–a rarity in her catalog. The results are strange and captivating—a half-hidden dreamscape that lingers in the mind, long after its specific contours have dissolved. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Purelink: “Maintain the Bliss”
Twenty-eight years since Basic Channel established the template for dub techno, it takes more than mere competence to make the oft-imitated style stand out. But Purelink’s “Maintain the Bliss” is liberally sprinkled with enough fairy dust that its magic is immediately apparent. Recorded live in the studio, the debut offering from the Chicago trio of Millia Rage, kindtree, and Concave Reflection is a delicate amalgam of flickering rhythm and airy atmosphere. For more than seven minutes, it seems to hover in space, occasionally emitting soft, rolling explosions of bass. The song doesn’t so much move or even morph as simply change colors as the light around it shifts—a modest cross-section of infinity. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Purelink, “Maintain the Bliss”
RP Boo: Established!
In a year when pioneering Black producers passed away at a heartbreaking clip—RIP Lee “Scratch” Perry, Paul Johnson, and K-Hand—the return of Chicago footwork legend RP Boo felt like a life preserver. His fourth album, aptly called Established!, eschewed the minimalism of his previous work, instead offering a set of dancefloor fillers tracing the roots of footwork through careful, uproarious samples: the swing of gospel and swagger of early-’70s funk, rap’s macho peacockery, the fierce ecstasy of house. After two decades behind the boards, Boo is still making tracks that make the ears (and ass, and feet) work. Long may he reign. –Jesse Dorris
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
SHERELLE: “160 Down the A406”
Sherelle Thomas has spent the past few years making her name with a hard-charging style of footwork and jungle that’s as joyous as it is thrilling—see, for example, her 2019 Boiler Room set, 50 minutes of giddily unbridled ecstasy doled out at 160 beats per minute. Few DJs bring as much self-evident passion to the decks as she does, and on her debut single, “160 Down the A406,” she translates that abundance of spirit into a flickering footwork/house hybrid that’s unexpectedly sweet-natured. The rolling drums keep the energy high, but a wordless vocal hook adds a hint of melancholy, while a trim little vibraphone melody gestures at points unknown, far from London club culture’s typical stomping grounds. It’s a wildly self-assured debut from one of dance music’s most promising rising talents. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: SHERELLE, “160 Down the A406”
Skee Mask: Pool
Stillness and motion are one and the same on Pool, an album where no breakbeat skitters for very long without a few placid tones to soften its edges, and no stretch of ambience is complete without a red-hot bassline slashing through. Skee Mask seems immune to genre dogmatism and agnostic about how listeners might interact with this music. A 150-BPM frenzy might open suddenly into loping half-time; a rowdy jungle workout might dissolve in a wash of dubbed-out horns. At three LPs’ worth of music, Pool is sprawling but not overlong; Skee Mask’s restless invention and ceaseless attention to detail make every moment count. –Andy Cush
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Sofia Kourtesis: Fresia Magdalena EP
What was a house producer to do during a time when many clubs still lay dormant? For Berlin-based Peruvian musician Sofia Kourtesis, the answer was obvious: Make an EP so astoundingly bittersweet that it would tug at the heartstrings even when experienced on the crappiest of laptop speakers. Fresia Magdalena—the title is a reference to her mother, while standout track “La Perla” is dedicated to her late father—is above all else personal, a marriage of electronic inspiration and human commotion across five beautifully cathartic songs. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Space Afrika: Honest Labour
Space Afrika’s 2020 mixtape hybtwibt? flew in the face of Brian Eno’s dictum that ambient music should be as ignorable as it is interesting: Filtering the experience of racial oppression and urban anomie into captivatingly bleak soundscapes, they practically dared listeners to treat the soundtrack of their lives as mere background. On Honest Labour, they turn intimacy into similarly uneasy listening. The album’s songs are short and largely formless swirls of backmasked synths, tape hiss, and field-recorded atmosphere punctuated by the occasional searching vocal sample. “I realize that I’m not the nicest person in the whole world, you know what I’m saying,” says an unidentified woman, haltingly, on “Preparing the Perfect Response~.” “It’s like, I have a good heart, but it’s like, I tend to shut people out a lot—it’s like, I’ll let you come so close, but that’s it.” In its muted colors and abstract forms, it seems at first like Honest Labour is doing something similar. But spend some time with it, and an unusually empathetic, open-hearted album snaps into focus. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Topdown Dialectic: Vol. 3
It’s been eight years since Topdown Dialectic released their debut cassette. Seven recordings later, we still don’t know much about the project. The artist behind it remains anonymous. Their untitled tracks remain identical in length, at exactly five minutes a pop. And there’s still little clue as to the origins or structural underpinnings of the music’s foggy swirl. These eight tracks were sourced from the same sessions that yielded the artist’s first two albums for Los Angeles’ Peak Oil label, yet they still stand on their own: They’re pricklier, moodier, and even less forthcoming, if such a thing is possible. By refusing to meet listeners halfway, Topdown Dialectic succeeds in drawing us deeper into their own gravitational field. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Tristan Arp: Sculpturegardening
In August 1969, Robert Moog hosted the first-ever live performance of his Moog synthesizer to a packed house at MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden in Manhattan. Producer and Human Pitch label co-founder Tristan Arp brings a similar sense of modernist play to Sculpturegardening, an album of elegant, organically inspired synth compositions informed by the funk and techno he grew up with near Detroit and the leafy environs of his current home in Mexico City. Balmy as spring and soft as snowfall, Sculpturegardening sets the watery blips of contemporary IDM against meditative sounds evocative of singing bowls and steel hand drums, while Arp’s signature polyrhythms bring an element of surprise. He learned to play cello for this album, and the weighty curves of the strings anchor the effervescent music to earth. In October, Arp brought Sculpturegardening full circle, curating and sound designing a Mexico City art installation titled “Nada Se Pierde; Todo Se Transforma”—“Nothing Is Lost; Everything Transforms.” –Anna Gaca
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Yu Su: “Xiu”
秀 (xìu) is used as an English loanword, pronounced nearly like “show”—it can mean “excellent,” “elegant,” or “to show off, give a show.” Balanced on pentatonic synths that beam like carnival lights, Yu Su’s “Xiu” feels very much like that titular exhibition. The Chinese-born, Vancouver-based musician’s gentle ambient vocalizations layer like interlocking puzzle pieces over pulsating waves of drum’n’bass. As an opener, the song contrasts with the rest of the placidly flowing Yellow River Blue, but it stands proudly on its own as a lush, energetic jump start. –Zhenzhen Yu
Listen: Yu Su, “Xiu”
