Электронная музыка рейва: 16 лучших композиций эпохи танцев

Marina Herlop: Nekkuja

Marina Herlop’s fourth album is loosely based around the idea of the garden; sure enough, if you scrape around the stems of her pretty musical flowers, the dirt emerges. Nekkuja has all the gorgeously textured vocal experimentation of the Catalan producer’s breakthrough album, Pripyat; but it comes caked in nurturing muck, be it the double-time jazz drums of “Cosset” or the wormlike bassline and take-no-prisoners piano of “Reina Mora.” After Pripyat’s fireworks, Herlop has come up with something wholly distinct: earthy, tough, yet tender. –Ben Cardew

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Studio Barnhus

Call Super: Eulo Cramps

When Eden Samara sings, “These are the branches between the spaces,” on Call Super’s “Sapling,” she’s nearly describing the sound of the whole album—wooden snaps and leafy rustling proceed with unhurried grace, and spread like a climbing vine. JR Seaton’s fourth album integrates an ear for earthy, improvised-seeming sounds—drum fills, staccato strings, undulating woodwinds—with the pointillist precision of microhouse and ’90s braindance. Seaton has suggested that this is their most personal album yet, a framing that often implies the artist is trying to reach some sort of understanding with the listener. But if the anagram-like song titles don’t make it clear that Seaton doesn’t want to reveal the whole picture, the voluptuous strangeness of this music certainly will. –Daniel Bromfield

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

InFiné

Toumba: Janoob EP

There’s a seismic intensity to Toumba’s beats, as though he were tracing the fault lines where tectonic plates rub together. Where styles like house, techno, and jungle rely on a long-established set of cadences and tempo ranges, the Amman-based producer looks to rhythms from his native Jordan, fleshing out a palette steeped in drum’n’bass and grime with loping triplets and intricate syncopations. The result, on the six-track Janoob EP—titled in reference to the southern Jordanian region that inspired its drumming—is a dizzyingly destabilizing approach to bass music that throws off sparks when mixed with more conventional club styles. –Philip Sherburne

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Voam

Avalon Emerson: “Dreamliner”

Avalon Emerson shifts away from club music and toward pop on her debut album, but she doesn’t entirely abandon the sound that has made her a celebrated DJ across the last six years or so. On “Dreamliner,” she bridges the transition across the course of the track: Thumping kicks and stiffly sequenced arpeggios evoke the mechanical techno of her back catalog, but the dance groove gradually subsides, making space for a playful synth melody that carries the song’s second half. Through it all, her cool, muted vocals do double duty as both pointillist tone color and hummable melody—a reminder that, for a musician with the requisite vision and skills, you can, in fact, have it both ways. –Rob Arcand

Further Reading: “Why Techno Rule-Breaker Avalon Emerson Traded Club Bangers for Featherlight Dream-Pop”

Listen: Avalon Emerson, “Dreamliner”

Innovative Leisure

Blawan: Dismantled Into Juice EP

Spending time with Blawan’s Dismantled Into Juice EP feels like taking a ride on a malfunctioning ghost train. Scary noises leap out at you at random—degraded, rotten and lasting just that little bit longer than they should—while the rhythmic chassis that carries you along starts to splinter at your feet. If you’re looking for human comfort, you won’t find it in Monstera Black’s artfully deconstructed vocal lines, which eschew girded words and melodies in favor of Elizabeth Fraser-esque obfuscation. You can just about hear the connection to the industrial-strength techno that is Blawan’s daily bread. but Dismantled Into Juice is largely out on its own, a murkily inventive post-generic creep show. –Ben Cardew

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Can You Feel the Sun

Kieran Hebden / William Tyler: “Darkness, Darkness”

As Four Tet, Kieran Hebden has been blueprinting new possibilities for mixing beats and samples of acoustic instruments for more than two decades. Unsurprisingly, this union with William Tyler, the virtuoso finger-picking journeyman, is a perfect match. Centered on a thick chunk of “Darkness, Darkness,” a 1969 obscurity from soul-pop singer turned Days of Our Lives actress Gloria Loring, the song is a 10-plus-minute slow-burner that builds from psych-folk meditation to mid-’70s Miles Davis-style supernova, with Tyler channeling forefathers like Sonny Sharrock and Pete Cosey as Hebden shell-games the rhythms. The producer says a full album is on the way; it should be a mindbender. –Will Hermes

Listen: Kieran Hebden / William Tyler, “Darkness, Darkness”

Hyperdub

dj +1: Aromáticas

Colombian producer dj +1’s Aromáticas draws inspiration from the herbal teas his mother would make to survive the seasonal changes of his hometown of Bogotá. Despite the project’s herbaceous origins, dj +1 infuses each song with a celestial glow. “Menta” is iridescent, full of rolling bass and shimmery, cosmic-dust synths. The swirling contours of “Romero” resemble a spiral galaxy; astral pads and waves of reverb twirl into a collection of stars, interstellar gas, and dark matter bound together by gravity. For all its abstract shapes and oblique angles, Aromáticas is playful and curious. Listen to it while gazing up at the night sky, and be hypnotized by the gaseous nebulae sparkling more than 40 trillion kilometers away. –Isabelia Herrera

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

Príncipe

DJ Danifox: Ansiedade

Like the rest of his cohort on the great Lisbon label Príncipe Discos, DJ Danifox makes batida, a creeping and skeletal club music shot through with African polyrhythms. His tracks may be best experienced in a smoke-filled room with a banging system, where the heaving bass applies full-body pressure and the spaces between their minimal elements start to feel like literal voids you could trace in the air around you. But Ansiedade, Danifox’s latest album, sounds great in headphones too, where you can more closely appreciate the elegant and sometimes disorienting accoutrements to his beats: minor-key piano chords, throaty synth effects, and snatches of muted vocals, giving the music a sense of melancholy and unease to go along with its slo-mo swagger. –Andy Cush

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Nyege Nyege Tapes

Skrillex / Fred again.. / Flowdan: “Rumble”

Skrillex is back; Skrillex never really left. Instead, he simply morphed along with each mutation of sweaty, bro-beloved electronic music—after cementing his stamp on dubstep, he pumped out tingling, EDM-infected Top 40 hits, and now he pops up at Coachella as a mediating force between Four Tet’s airy thumps and Fred again..’s sentimental bangers. After a quiet few years, Skrillex came through with two albums this year, and “Rumble” is a pyrotechnic highlight from those records—an enthusiastic return to ruckus. Veteran grime rapper Flowdan snarls between strobing bass hits. Fred again.. helps slam home effect after effect: lion roars, water plops. The beat whirrs and whirls, sounding like wind buffeting through a helicopter’s rotors. No one ever accused Skrillex of subtlety, and this is prime in-your-face fun. –Dani Blum

Listen: Skrillex / Fred again.. / Flowdan, “Rumble”

Ninja Tune

So, What Is Electronic Dance Music?

Electronic Dance Music, while the abbreviated EDM term came much later, is essentially any form of music that is both produced electronically with digital (computers) and analogue equipment, and is designed to be danced to.

Simple.

You can tell because it normally contains instruments and sounds like synthesizers, drum machines, processed samples and recordings, and normally has an inherent ‘electronic nature’ to the sound of it.

It sounds precise, full and loud.

You have complete control over the sound of the music.

Especially compared to acoustic genres, which often require a massive amount of audio engineering trickery to get them to sound as clear as an electronic record.

In electronic music, you aren’t limited to a ‘live’ recording situation, so you have complete creative control over every second of a song.

You can place a kick drum exactly on the beat at whatever tempo you want. Synth not ‘fizzy’ enough? You can add something on top. Vocal sample sucks? Just replace it with one of the thousands in your sample library.

As a result, EDM tunes sound inherently bigger and cleaner because there is more control in the process, from the initial idea to the final product.

Dance vs. Electronic

However, it’s worth noting that some people define electronic and dance music as separate genres, because not all electronic music is necessarily made for the clubs.

But anyway, I don’t want to confuse you anymore.

All that aside – it’s exactly these characteristics that define EDM as one of the big umbrella genres, like rock, jazz or hip-hop.

Even Spotify has a Dance/Electronic category.

And as we’ll get into, you really don’t need much to make this kind of music. Well, at least not as much as everyone makes out.

But what you will need is to dedicate yourself to the craft and to mastering it, which takes time.

It’s not as simple as ‘pressing a button’ and music is made.

But first, let’s look at how we got here.

A Brief History of Electronic Music

It has its roots in a form of music known as Musique Concrete – a french term for musical collage.

In this form of music, samples of recorded sounds were arranged into a musical piece on primative technology (groundbreaking at the time).

Eventually, early synthesizers were created and these were starting to be used in this form of music.

Over time, the same electronics started to get used both in existing acoustic genres but also pioneered new ones. House music was one of the first.

Influences by it’s acoustic-driven counterparts like disco, funk, soul and jazz – house music had a distinct electronic sound, driven by dusty drum machines, timeless synth sounds and cut up samples.

This was one of the first forms of ‘danceable’ electronic music, distinct for it’s 4-on-the-floor rhythm. At this point, the term EDM still did not exist, and normally it was called ‘dance music’.

We have thank house for a lot of other subgenres, namely not only the newer forms of house, but also UK garage, trance, techno, and pretty much everything.

Fast forward about 10-20 years and electronic dance music moves from analogue equipment to computers, where it becomes a lot more accessible and doesn’t require you to sell you car to afford to make it.

Early macs were often the computers of choice for producers.

EDM subgenres are popping up left, right, and centre – jungle, garage, hip-hop, techno, trance, electro house, progressive, eurodance etc.

And in the last 10-15 years, electronic dance music stopped being the weird younger sibling of music, and started to gain notoriety and appreciation by the public en masee – it wasn’t just for the clubs anymore.

This is where the term ‘EDM’ first started circulating, because it was a simple and repeatable term to describe any sort of electronic music that you can dance to.

And now, you’ve probably come home from a rave and typed ‘what is EDM’ into Google, and here you are.

But EDM is a big beast, with many different styles and subgenres. So lets break it down.

Overmono: “Good Lies”

On the title track of their debut album as Overmono, dance producers (and brothers) Tom and Ed Russell dissect and rearrange Smerz’ hallucinatory “No harm” like plastic surgeons for hire, facelifting the Norwegian duo’s murky R&B into an ecstatic festival anthem. Every inch of enigmatic unease lurking around the original vocals is shaved off, resulting in something like the soundtrack to meeting the love of your life while walking across the Williamsburg Bridge at golden hour. A clever stroke of emotional alchemy, “Good Lies” flips its source material’s defensive crouch into an airbrushed head-rush of sweet possibility. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

Listen: Overmono, “Good Lies”

Hessle Audio

3phaz: Ends Meet

Like his Cairo peers—ZULI, ABADIR, and the community of artists represented on the did you mean: irish compilation series—the anonymous musician known as 3Phaz creates tracks that skew club music’s traditional geographic center, displacing American and European reference points in favor of regional sounds like shaabi and its electronic variant, mahraganat. 3Phaz’s tactile timbres shapeshift between leathery drum hits, metallic drones, and piercing digital accents, while his rhythms twist peak-time pacing into elastic new configurations. His hybrid approach can make even classic sounds appear new: Just check “Shabber,” which injects the decades-old Dutch style known as gabber with a lightness of spirit its headbanging originators never would have imagined. –Philip Sherburne

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Ninja Tune

Jlin: Perspective EP

Perspective is what happens if you leave Jlin with a whole room of percussive instruments to sample, courtesy of the Third Coast Percussion ensemble. It’s blissful for her, perhaps the best drum programmer in modern electronic music, and heaven for us: The one-time footwork producer constructs puzzle-like assemblages that are both intricate in their construction and incredibly weighty, like an anthill rendered in titanium. Not everything on this six-track EP derives from the sound of sticks hitting objects—“Paradigm” has an absolutely squalid electronic bass line, “Derivative” a tortured synth lead—but everything feels like it wants to be, making this the most brilliantly drum-heavy release of Jlin’s brilliantly drum-heavy career. –Ben Cardew

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Local Action

James Holden: Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities

If we could do as veteran UK producer James Holden suggests and actually imagine a high-dimensional space of all possibilities, then we probably wouldn’t need the entrancing highs of this album. Our limitations, then, are also our gain. The Border Community head’s latest LP is a winding, grooving, electro-organic dream of a record that sees possibility on all shores. The album is situated in the deep, wild field between the tranced-out techno with which Holden made his name and the unbridled expression of a lysergic jam, where fripperies such as repetition, form, and convention are abandoned in favor of perpetual onward motion. Like a musical Mandelbrot set, you can zoom in or out to your heart’s content, micro and macro detail emerging at each turn. –Ben Cardew

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Hyperdub

Verraco: “Escándaloo”

Verraco’s moniker means “boar” in Spanish, but it could also be a reference to the Colombian slang term for someone who’s a hard-working motherfucker. “Escándaloo,” the lead single from the Medellín producer’s eponymous EP on Blawan and Pariah’s Voam imprint, reflects both readings. A galloping bassline charges forward atop a loping drum groove, animalistic in its persistence. Thick swirls of robotic whirring resemble a spaceship’s warp drive booting up; bellowing airhorns and stone-cold kick drums draw the tune’s orbit back toward Earth. Along with friends DJ Lomalinda and Nyksan, Verraco heads up TraTraTrax. While European and U.S. producers may garner much of the credit for integrating Latin American rhythms into the international electronic landscape, the label reminds listeners that these styles are first and foremost from the Global South. “Escándaloo” is a pressure cooker of a track, but it’s also a demand to put any colonial assumptions about what counts as avant-garde to rest. –Isabelia Herrera

Listen: Verraco, “Escándaloo”

XL

Anthony Naples: Orbs

Anthony Naples built his reputation on bruising, distorted club tracks, but Orbs is the latest and most accomplished manifestation of the NYC musician’s drift toward placid atmospheric sounds. It distinguishes itself from the recent crop of ambient-adjacent music through its emphasis on twitchy rhythm—Naples hasn’t forgotten the lessons of the dancefloor—and its deft mixture of electric bass and guitar alongside the usual aqueous synth pads. The music’s resonances creep up on you: With repeated listens, tracks that at first may seem like background music reveal nuanced emotional arcs. –Andy Cush

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Warp

Peverelist: Pulse Modulation EP

Like many club producers, Livity Sound boss Peverelist appears allergic to the album format. It’s been six years since his last full-length, and he had everything he needed to follow it up this year with a concise yet varied set of lean, live-wire techno. Instead, he split the eight cuts—simply titled “Pulse I” through “Pulse VIII”—into two EPs released with little fanfare. October’s Pulse Modulation EP is the more exciting of the two records, by a hair: “Pulse V” channels classic Detroit, “Pulse VII” plays rude bass off ambient pads, and the jungle throwback “Pulse VIII” balances stone-faced fury with weightless bliss. (“Pulse VI,” meanwhile, will be manna to heads who believe that minimal techno peaked with DBX’s 1994 classic “Losing Control.”) Put together, the two EPs might have made for one of the year’s landmark club albums. But hey, coulda, woulda, shoulda—whether individually or as a complete set, all eight tracks bang. –Philip Sherburne

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Peak Oil

Aphex Twin: “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f”

Aphex Twin’s first song in five years hums with gentle nostalgia, blurring at the edges like a happy memory that’s fading away. Dedicated to his late parents, “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” begins mellow and summery, with much of the warmth and comfort of 2014’s Syro, seen through a softer filter. The bob-and-weave drum programming counters pretty synth melodies that float like celestial bodies. More elements eventually get stacked on—punchy breakbeats, crash cymbals in clusters—but the sentimentality at its core can’t be obscured. –Dean Van Nguyen

Listen: Aphex Twin, “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f”

Another Dove

Hudson Mohawke / Nikki Nair: “Set the Roof” [ft. Tayla Parx]

In a year when many DJs reached for edits of Y2K-era chart pop by the likes of Britney, Vengaboys, and t.A.T.u. whenever they needed to energize the dancefloor, Scottish vet Hudson Mohawke and Atlanta upstart Nikki Nair proved that an original banger could still take the club by storm. An irreverent continuation of dance music’s long-running transatlantic conversation, “Set the Roof” joyfully sits somewhere between UK garage and hip-house. But it’s the chipmunked vocals of Tayla Parx, whose sassy delivery recalls the days when Rye Rye was the hottest thing on the Hollerboard, that make the track such a sugary delight: Her maniacally looped phrasing can and will unlock the serotonin pathways of every raver in earshot. –Shawn Reynaldo

Listen: Hudson Mohawke / Nikki Nair, “Set the Roof”

Border Community

Nikki Nair: “Can’t Wait”

Atlanta’s Nikki Nair established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting new voices of the post-pandemic era without even releasing a full-length. Following his output as a producer so far has meant collecting breadcrumbs: from EPs, collaborations, and the occasional unreleased loosie dropped into the percussive madness of his DJ sets. In the absence of a single definitive statement, each of these has presented its own angle on his identity as an artist—party-starting populist; no, virtuosic breakbeat scientist. “Can’t Wait” offers the most surprising addition to that list yet: deadpan synth-pop singer-songwriter. Over jazzy chord changes and through a robotic vocoder effect, Nair croons like a Randy Newman for our age of perpetual burnout, delivering a character study from the perspective of a working stiff who’s trying to reconcile his appetite for hedonism with his apparently sincere desire to help his company grow. Is it a lark? A sign of things to come? With Nair, you never know. –Andy Cush

Listen: Nikki Nair, “Can’t Wait”

T4T LUV NRG

Sofia Kourtesis: Madres

A song called “How Music Makes You Feel Better” could go wrong in so many ways, but on Sofia Kourtesis’ life-giving debut album, it’s clear that the Peruvian artist innately understands the healing properties of vibrating waveforms. Like all her work to date, Madres is built around house music’s celebratory thump, but the dancefloor is just the starting point for an expansive set of collages that fold in field recordings of Afro-Peruvian drumming, protests from across Latin America, and snippets of conversation with friends and family gathered on her travels around the world. If there’s a mournful undercurrent, it’s surely related to caring for her mother, who was being treated for cancer—and eventually recovered—while Kourtesis was recording the album. But that openness to pain is what makes Madres feel so emotionally cleansing: It’s a bittersweet dose of our deepest fears, a homeopathic remedy administered via sound. –Philip Sherburne

Further Reading: “Sofia Kourtesis on Her Debut Album Madres and Subverting Techno Perfectionism”

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Domino

Pangaea: “Installation”

A decade and change since the electronic producer Pangaea pulped UK clubland’s collective brain with the diced syllables and drunken percussion of “Hex,” he repeated the feat—but sweeter, sexier this time—with “Installation.” The tongue-juggling vocal chops are still front-and-center, but where “Hex” swirled around drum hits that seemed to disintegrate just as they reached your ears, “Installation” pumps a full-blooded Jersey house bounce through bubblegum-pop framing and demands a singalong—even if you’ve got no idea what the words are. I’m going with “eso es,” or Spanish for, “That’s it!” –Will Pritchard

Listen: Pangaea, “Installation”

Lapsus

Everything But the Girl: “Nothing Left to Lose”

While married couple Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have had their hands full with creative projects over the past two decades, it was a welcome surprise when their beloved group Everything But the Girl released Fuse early this year. The album highlight “Nothing Left to Lose” picks up where 1999’s Temperamental left off. Watt’s icy, slinky, and carefully structured production hides outsized emotions beneath garage’s lithe profile. Thorn’s exquisite, melancholic alto sings of the unbreakable bond between love and pain. “Kiss me while the world decays,” she pleads with the kind of passion that explains the duo’s reputation as dance music’s dreamiest couple. –Cameron Cook

Further Reading: “Everything But the Girl on Their Peculiar Journey Through Pop and Their Comeback”

Listen: Everything But the Girl, “Nothing Left to Lose”

Text

Four Tet: “Three Drums”

Four Tet just might be the most unlikely mainstream breakthrough star of the year. After spending the last two decades honing his luscious, humanistic take on dance music, he suddenly became a Coachella and Madison Square Garden headliner alongside buddies Fred Again.. and Skrillex, dishing out EDM euphoria to the masses. But “Three Drums,” released three days after the Coachella gig, has him back in classic mode. Stately and tranquil for its entire eight-minute run, it’s better suited for the ocean floor than the dancefloor. Turns out the same things that make him a fantastic party-starter—patient builds, detailed textures, pitch-perfect percussion—are also what make “Three Drums” so gripping on headphones. –Patrick Lyons

Listen: Four Tet, “Three Drums”

PAN

Purelink: Signs

Purelink have never cared much for drama. Even when the Chicago trio flirted with the dancefloor, they favored stillness over momentum, peace over chaos. One early single felt like a statement of intent: “Maintain the Bliss.” Since then they’ve continued peeling off layers and slowing the pace of their foggy melodies and shuddering rhythms, a process that ultimately resulted in this elusive ambient album. Signs’ six tracks are deceptively dynamic, continually shifting from new-age gasps to the sorts of minimal glitches that scuffed up albums on Mille Plateaux in the early 2000s. Subtlety is the order of the day; it can be easy to miss their slight variations, like when a plush synth pad enters the mix. But gently insistent repetition makes each idea linger, like an image burned into an LCD screen. –Colin Joyce

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Eaux

Julio Bashmore: “Bubblin”

Bubbling, surging, rolling, funking—whatever you want to call it, Julio Bashmore’s comeback single had it in abundance, the bottom-of-the-stomach, blood-fizzing, somehow-can’t-not-dance club energy that makes electronic music irresistible. “Bubblin” sits somewhere between the fashionable low-end shuffle of 2-step and the equally modish filtered burble of the French house revival; that would seem like canny decision-making for the Bristol bass maestro if “Bubblin” sounded anything like a calculated move. It doesn’t, though: Instead “Bubblin” is the echo of pure, instinctive joy unleashed in the service of dancefloor havoc. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Julio Bashmore, “Bubblin”

Psychic Hotline

Yaeji: With a Hammer

On With a Hammer, Yaeji forgoes the usual metaphors for change—the inexorable marches and slow evolutions—to explore her own vision of enlightenment: a total teardown where we finally get to build the future right. Balancing heart-racing garage rhythms and buzzing vintage indie rock with themes of social responsibility and creative transformation, the singer-producer’s full-length debut is whimsical like its synth-flute overture and totally serious, too. Her colorful, blobby style brings a hopeful glow to eternal human projects like processing anger and fostering community—and she begins by granting broad latitude to like-minded contemporaries including Loraine James and Nourished by Time. Like a great big tap on the shoulder, Yaeji’s smiling sledgehammer arcs across languages and generations to say: time to get to work. –Anna Gaca

Further Reading: “Yaeji Gets Ragey”

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Olof Dreijer: Rosa Rugosa EP

The Knife were never known for their easily approachable warmth, which is why Olof Dreijer’s first solo project in nearly a decade is so refreshing. Knife watchers will find elements here to remind them of Dreijer’s former band, notably the witchy, pitch-bent melodies on the title track. But the bulk of the EP feels like summer breaking out over Sweden’s icy shore, from the kuduro-indebted beat of “Rosa Rugosa” to the flamenco-esque handclaps of “Cassia” and the bizarrely jaunty jazz swing of “Camelia.” An unexpectedly happy return from an artist better known for keeping fans feeling unsettled. –Ben Cardew

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

XL

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