DJ Richard – Bane



This is the highlight of the excellent LP Grind, on which the co-founder of the punk-ish techno clan White Material, DJ Richard, started going deeper and more ambient but with attitude. Bane is its most emo moment, but this agonised track shows everything that techno is capable of: lighting up life by the microsecond as it scythes forward. It’s deceptively simple, with a steady kick, a ticking snare, and a synth line spiking and falling within a single key. The claps though, offbeat and untamed, maintain a crucial edge of mania. It’s so beautiful I can hardly bear it, and scrunch up my face in a kind of pain when it’s on – the kind of embarrassingly keen feeling that age will hopefully never wither.

Insanlar – Kime Ne (Ricardo Villalobos remix 1)

Positively brief compared with the likes of his 32-minute DJ Pierre remix last year – and considerably shorter than the original track by Turkish band Insanlar – this 16-minute treatment still shows that Villalobos can work on a large canvas better than almost anyone. He brings up the tempo to an anxious strut, takes away the soft acid squelches, and focuses on the melodies of the guitar-like bağlama, which move between spaghetti western themes, ruminative pilgrimages of sound, and spooked-out shivers – all of them mirrored by the stirring vocals. Listening to Villalobos at his best – and this is right up there – makes the world feel more resilient and spiritually rich. Where so many dance producers try to merely shoo away the banalities of everyday life with blustering distractions, Villalobos quietly exposes those banalities by lifting you clear of them, suggesting you dream a little bigger.



Levon Vincent – Launch Ramp to the Sky

You could convincingly argue that the dominant theme in electronic music this year has been pessimism. Arca, Rabit, Kamixlo, Lexxi, M.E.S.H. – their work has seemed fixated on war and digital exhaustion. But the most powerful records of all have been ones that find a route out of the mire. Levon Vincent’s self-titled album, briefly available for free, came with a bracing manifesto against the straight life: “This is music for the ugly ducklings of the world. Music for swans. If you are a member of the rat race, climbing around a dumpster with the other rats vying for power, you may of course listen, but know – this is not music for you. This is action against you.” But this wasn’t a howl of pain or a study in obscurity – it was a generous, beautiful and populist record. Indeed, its highlight Launch Ramp to the Sky has the kind of killer melody that could be chanted on a Mediterranean playa by the very racing rats Vincent is railing against. Like Villalobos though, Vincent shows there’s more to dance culture than pilled-up escapism: it can be a collective space to insulate yourself against self-interest and violence.



Holly Herndon – An Exit

Another anti-corporate and utopian producer this year was Holly Herndon, whose highly collaborative album Platform attempted to provide just that for a series of talented peers. As she told me in an interview: “The right is really good at coming up with a paradisiac alternative to whatever the current condition is, and it’s usually pretty racist and nasty, but the left sometimes fails to come up with their own paradisiac alternative. That’s where music can come in. Because one thing music is really good at is getting strangers in a room together to emote.” Tracks like Chorus and DAO brought them together to dance, but An Exit went further, influenced by Suhail Malik’s idea of the “exit” in contemporary art – that rather than act in angry opposition to an existing aesthetic or marketplace, we just walk away, facing towards the future. An Exit was the intellectual heart of the album, arguing for a totally new way of being; but it was also its emotional core, an overwhelmingly gorgeous ballad that hinted at an exit from a relationship – or indeed a whole way of life. The track’s co-producers Amnesia Scanner are meanwhile likely to be one of the cornerstone acts in 2016’s electronic underground.



Elysia Crampton – Petrichrist

A trans Bolivian now living in Virginia, Elysia Crampton is another tremendously exciting utopian. Like Herndon, she believes that “it’s not a matter of simply tearing things down, but actively building, negotiating futurity”. The new future she wants is messy and multifaceted, a world away from the rigid structures that white men built. Her stunning album American Drift is appropriately sprawling, a proggy trip through new age, crunk and contemporary classical music (its prettily synthetic flute motifs meanwhile recalled another of 2015’s finest breakthrough producers, Kara-Lis Coverdale). Petrichrist is the standout, a rap production DJ Mustard might have made after six months with a swami. It worries through a scatterbrained three minutes before the chords change – a heart-stopping moment of communion and reconciliation, even if it’s steeped in a sudden sadness. Like all of 2015’s best work, Crampton shows that electronic music remains the most vital – and least didactic – medium for working through all the psychological weirdness of living in our digitally connected moment.

