There's nothing pretty or polished about what remains of this set, which tape compression has rendered murky and flat. (The set has apparently been on SoundCloud for six years, but May's recent post has shone a fresh spotlight on it.) Beneath the hiss, though, you can still get a sense for the off-the-wall energy in the room as he tears through cuts like Marshall Jefferson's “Move Your Body,” Mr. Fingers' “Can You Feel It,” Rhythim Is Rhythim's “Beyond the Dance (Cult Mix),” and a handful of unreleased Mayday joints.

Elysia Crampton – Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Time Slide… (Or: A Non-Abled Offender's Exercise in Jurisprudence)

“The future is our domain; the here and now is a prison house,” says a narrator toward the beginning of this dense, dazzling set, paraphrasing the introduction of José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Futurism has always played a central role in electronic music, but Elysia Crampton's work approaches it differently: as the potential bound up in trans identity, which she has described as “always already in becoming”; as the longtime perspective of the postcolonial subject; and even as a kind of folk music, “because folk music recovers what was lost.” Throughout the set, traditional modes of timekeeping are thrown radically out of joint: Bolivian woodwinds collide with gothic trap and classical minimalism, while queasy FM synths and digital pianos give way to explosions, screams, roaring lions, and the sound of water running down the drain.

I:Cube – Trushmix 96

The French electronic musician I:Cube once recorded a live album in a planetarium, and it's easy to imagine the same setting—a favorite hangout of Pink Floyd fans in the 1980s—offering the starry-eyed backdrop for this keenly psychedelic mix. While the second half of the mix could double as a nightclub warm-up set, stealthily building from slow-motion disco to fleet-footed new wave and digi-dub, the first half is all about lying back and sparking up: drum-machine jazz, gothic folk, and burbling ’60s electronics, all of it stitched together with incidental sounds like crickets and freight trains. The Dude himself probably wouldn't be mad at the "Hotel California" dub that incongruously bubbles up after a particularly unhinged eruption of radiophonic fizz.

Alvin Aronson – Level Radio 11.21.16

Alvin Aronson's DJ sets are like moving walkways for the mind; they make for excellent headphone listening while navigating around a city, if only because the smoothness of his blends and the steadiness of his rhythms make negotiating even the most congested trains feel absolutely frictionless. His latest is no different, even when he swaps out a steady four-to-the-floor in favor of snapping electro cadences from Drexciya and Cybotron. Balancing soft, elegant techno with woody clatter and mechanical chug, the set manages to sound effortlessly controlled even when it tips toward mayhem.

Andrew Pekler – '(N)E(W)XOTICA' Mix

Andrew Pekler's recent album Tristes Tropiques, for Jan Jelinek's Faitiche label, treats exotica like an intercepted radio broadcast from another galaxy. Rather than condescending to the Other, Pekler elevates it to near-transcendence. Despite the anthropological title, Pekler's album is less concerned with specific musical traditions or cultural signifiers than a vague (yet totally visceral) idea of the tropical, expressed in gurgling modular synthesizers and analog insect hum. His “‘(N)E(W)XOTICA’ Mix” works in similar ways: Watery electronic atmospheres mix with field-recorded jungle sounds, while snippets of ’50s Congolese music serve as a Rosetta Stone linking techno's repetitions with Europe's colonial past. The whole thing puts a primacy on befuddlement and wonder, and it's about as easy to pin down as a dewdrop on a leaf. Hypnotic and deeply entrancing.

No Frills - Tikoro nk__ɔ__ agyina

While Berlin duo No Frills' sets at joints like About Blank and Suicide Circus are dancefloor journeys through ambient, world music, techno, and disco, this one sets its sights on a certain point of origin. Reflecting a year's worth of effort, the DJs say, the set surveys an array of records from West Africa—in particular Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. Titled "Tikoro nkɔ agyina" (Twi for “Two heads are better than one,” a Ghanaian proverb), the mix ranges from highlife to disco-funk to modern (for the ’80s, anyway) dance tracks pounded out on electronic keyboards and drum machine. It's all tied together by springy talking drums, vocal harmonies, and an omnipresent vinyl hiss—evidence of the long journey that each of these platters has traveled over the decades.

Edward – Boiler Room Berlin Studio DJ Set

When Giegling's Edward played live at Krakow's Unsound festival in late October, he cut an unusual pathway through techno by favoring rhythms freed from the anchoring kick drum. Despite the 4/4 time signature, it was decidedly not four-to-the-floor. He does something similar throughout much of this DJ set, selecting tracks with a light footprint on the downbeat, and putting his focus on scratchy percussive rhythms in the high end. There are a few extended passages of techno stomp and breakbeat tumble, but for the most part, veering through krautrock and electro, this set privileges the drift, making it the perfect headphone accompaniment for shuffling through the last of autumn’s leaves.

Jackie House – Sunday Morning 23

Danny Daze's Sunday Morning mix series definitely lives up to its name with this installment from Jackie House, aka Jacob Sperber, a founding member of San Francisco's Honey Soundsystem. The mix doubles as a tribute to the downtempo that ruled San Francisco in the ’90s, as well as a personal scrapbook of Bay Area memories: moving in down the street from the apartment where DJ Shadow recorded Endtroducing, playing Oval's Systemisch until it’s scratched to hell (oh, the irony). Tempos hover in head-nodding altitudes as Sperber flips through classics from Dabrye and Dubtribe Sound System; further into the set, he pulls out recent tracks from Dorisburg and Traumprinz that tap the same vibes. It's a pitch-perfect evocation of that back-in-the-day feeling of trekking between the Amoeba and Open Mind Music in search of downbeat gems to match the city's foggy mood.

K. Leimer – Mixtape.One

Seattle's K. Leimer began making ambient music in the mid ’70s, around the time that Brian Eno codified the genre with Music for Films, and some of his work (including that of his side project Savant) still sounds ahead of its time. This set focuses mostly on material he's released on his Palace of Lights label over the past few years, both solo and in collaboration with his longtime colleague Marc Barreca. Drifting synths, distant pulses, dubbed-out pianos, and digital artifacts all contribute to the wintry-yet-cozy vibe of a mixtape that goes to the heart of Eno's maxim that ambient music should be "as ignorable as it is interesting."

Steph Rod – Colonel Abrams Vinyl Tribute Mix

The Detroit-born, New York-raised house icon Colonel Abrams died in late November, a little less than a year after Marshall Jefferson asked fans to support a GoFundMe campaign meant to aid the ailing, homeless musician. In tribute, California's Steph Rod has put together a 93-minute mix of the singer/songwriter/producer's work. Full of springy organ bass, sparkling digital synths, and uptempo house beats, the set makes for a great time capsule of late ’80s and early ’90s production styles—and, more importantly, a loving showcase of Abrams’ richly melodic, gospel-inflected bellow. Despite the sadness of the occasion, the set is 100 percent life-affirming.