The best Electronic Music of 2024: Albums
My top 30 albums of 2024, in no particular order
Following yesterday’s round-up of my favorite EPs and singles of the year, here’s my top 30 favorite albums of 2024, arranged in no particular order. I hope you might come across something you like on this list, and see you in the new year! — Vincent
E.R.P. - Faded Caprice [Apnea]
Have you ever waited fourteen years for an ID? Because I have. Some time in late 2010, 17 year-old me came across a grainy ten minute YouTube video of Gerard Hanson (aka Convextion, aka E.R.P.) playing an early morning live set at the legendary Labyrinth festival held deep in the foggy Japanese mountainside. The atmosphere conveyed by the video is one of a party that's been in progress for a while, with tired, but happy looking punters relaxing in lawn chairs and dancers slowly swaying to Hanson's mystical electro grooves, the vast forests in the background. Then, around the six minute mark, a new track comes in, changing the entire scenery, lifting the misty early morning atmosphere of the previous track with its glittering arps, like rays of sunlight shining through the grey of the clouds … whatever the promise of electronic music may be, this right here has to be it, I thought.
After going out and searching for the track high and low, finding nothing, I concluded that it had to be unreleased, the only hope being some future release. And then, just like that, fourteen years passed, I had mostly forgotten about that video — that is, until earlier this year, when I was browsing through upcoming vinyl releases and saw there's a new E.R.P. album, promptly skipping through the tracks until I hit play on "Comfortable Pants", and suddenly, there it was … time was nothing, fourteen years later but it was like not a moment had passed, I was there, in 2010, up in the Japanese mountains, in fleeting possession of whatever it is that this music promises.
Jules Reidy - Rave Angels [Longform Editions]
The evocatively titled Rave Angels consists of a single twenty minute long piece that starts out slow and carefully, with sparse and slowly glistening harmonics that then gradually openen up, interweaving with shimmery pads, never in a hurry, always patient, honing in on that sense of weightless floatation as its primary mode of being.
J. Albert - I want to be good so bad [Self-Released]
I want to be good so bad is a strange and elusive record that marries dusty ambient dub exercises with hidden traces of trance euphoria. The fifteen minute long opener "Auto-Life" is all bass and hiss and aliasing noise, but nested deep within that hazy landscape are small, whispered melodic fragments that subtly gestures to the vital life vibrating at the heart of the whole thing. "Demi" builds euphoric harmonies by sequencing and layering up a variety of chopped female vocals, reminding me of some of the 00s epic trance I used to listen to in my teens that also made heavy of use of chopped vocals, although here, everything has been totally disintegrated and granulated to its minimum substrate, the phantasmagoric remains of what I listened to in 2007 — no drums, no strings, no breakdowns, no supersaws, just a voice in the ether humming out the ghostly traces of what might have once been a song. But somehow, that adolescent euphoria still shines through all the layers of dust, perhaps more present than ever.
SnPLO - Lastday Cookie [Pin]
Incredible things are happening in Montreal, they are inventing new genres every day over there, secret genres only known to the real heads that know … reverse shoehatgaze rubberdub, no-hats pitch-glide reverb donk, cookiecrumble-noise loopcore, and even more secret ones yet to be revealed.
Perila & Ulla - Jazz Plates [Paralaxe Editions]
My favorite live experience this year was seeing Ulla and Perila at Silent Green Kulturquartier. I had previously seen Perila perform an A/V heavy laptop set, so I was expecting something similar. What I witnessed instead was a mostly acoustic performance, with Ulla on oboe and sax and Perila on vocals, both improvising, patiently spinning long harmonies over sparse electronic backing tracks. The artists were sitting on a small platform located in the middle of the roundly shaped room, with the crowd forming a sitting circle around the center. The room was almost fully darkened, with the only source of light coming from a number of lit candles, giving the performance the vibe of a séance … and for close to an hour, that room really was a world onto itself, only inhabited by the unhurried swathes of sounds floating through the damp air.
One of the pieces I distinctly recall hearing — now released on Jazz Plates — is the sublime "a josh outside the window", a sparse ambient sculpture loosely structured around a cycling piano loop and occasional sub-bass fragments, leaving enough space for the vocals and wind instrument harmonics to playfully dance around each other, with no goal other than to exist in this other world for a little while longer.
Loidis - One Day [Incienso]
I've been somewhat surprised at the relatively large amount of press that One Day has received (it's RA's record of the year, among other accolades), considering that this is basically a Savvas Ysatis and Stewart Walker — two mostly forgotten tech house producers from the early y2k era — tribute album. I suppose this is one of those cases where the draw of a relatively big name like Huerco S. helps. It also certainly doesn't hurt that One Day is one of the most perfectly executed techno-house records in ages, packed to the brim with damn near flawless grooves. There's just something about the contrast between weird digital artifacts and band-limited lo-fi warmth — as well as the interplay between clicky micro-house percussion on the top and massively chugging basslines at the bottom — on this record that really hits the spot, making for seductive and almost infinitely replayable tracks. Click, loop, repeat, do it again.
Sunik Kim - Tears Of Rage [ROPE Editions]
Sunik Kim continues to push the boundaries of computer music by untangling it from its academic conventions and established structures. "Tears of Rage" sounds like ... digital birds? Video game sounds from a corrupt save file? Karaoke keytars from hell … — or all of the above all at once? What makes the piece interesting is precisely that indeterminacy of the question mark, the refusal to provide easy answers to what it really is that you are hearing.
Meanwhile, "In Praise of Death / A Thousand Tearz" sounds like if Tiesto had spent time studying at IRCAM, trancing the digital glitch to its emotional breaking point and embracing hints of bad taste in a way that defies conventions. The third piece "Beautiful as the Moon" goes in a different direction entirely, sounding like an algorithmically generated 70s TV theme that approaches the auditory uncanny valley, leading to a playful, but tense sense of unease.
Various - Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999 [MFM]
This is a great re-issue package that collects some lesser-known Japanese ambient techno from the 90s, mostly focusing on that transitional early to mid 90s period, when producers started taking the forms of house and techno beyond the dancefloor, but "non-dancefloor" genres like ambient and IDM hadn't quite been codified yet — resulting in tracks with a special techno-soul naivité that can also be found on the "pre-IDM" home-listening experiments of European producers like Speedy J. But despite these clear parallels, there is also something particularly Japanese about these tracks — perhaps owing to Japan's rich and unique history with electronic music — that you can also hear in the work of producers like Susumu Yokota and Ken Ishii.
TWR72 - iOi [OOM Records]
I've always had a certain fondness for the most stripped down, almost perversely functionalist kind of DJ tools, tracks so radical in their single-minded appeal to function that they almost come out of the other end as weirdly avant-garde. The ten tracks that make up the extended digital release of iOi are lean and ascetic even by the standards of the Dutch DJ-tool expert TWR72, eschewing even the usual techno synth riffs one would find in such tracks. Instead, virtually all melodic and harmonic duties are taken over by layers and layers of pitched percussion, making for tracks that are pure exercises in drum programming.
"Ivory" is a great example, a track that starts out with a metallic, bell-like line that is joined by a flurry of hectic and airy percussion; both dancing tango over a foundation of galloping boomy lowend to form a beautifully brutalist techno sculpture. "Pulse" and "Nudge" play around with similar tricks, while tracks like "Rattle", "Unison" and "Shimmer" transform sampled snippets of human voice into yet more percussive elements, because all that exists within the world of these tracks is percussion.
Xenia Reaper - Luvaphy [INDEX:Records]
I have no idea who is behind the Xenia Reaper alias. But whoever that is, they are a master producer because this is simply one of the best sounding records I've heard in a long while. Everything slots together in perfect balance, be it the little digital fragments and noise blips that carefully drift through the vast depths of aural space, the kicks and basses that hit hard with lethal precision, the percussion work that is both agile and thickly textured, or the pads that glow and shine with warmth and light. Everything just feels vast and weightless, but also vibrant and dense, emphatically sounding alive. The track as an organism.
Christopher Rau - Better Times [Smallville]
On his latest album, house veteran Christopher Rau delivers some prime thumping deep house cuts centered on slamming oldschool drums and the 90s boom-bap-style sampling of jazzy rhodes figures and dusty bass loops, hitting just the right mix of bouncy roughness and nocturnal lushness that is essential to the classic deep house sound.
Catherine Christer Hennix - Further Selections From The Electric Harpsichord [Blank Forms]
The Blank Forms label has unearthed some crucial old-new material from the late polymath CCH, expanding on the 2010 release The Electric Harpsichord. The full 46 minute piece presented here is both disorienting and awe-inducing, continually flickering back and forth between different panned dissonant harmonic patterns, resulting in an intense rhythmic and harmonic clash that over time ultimately ends up revealing a deeper, cosmic kind of harmony.
Skee Mask - ISS010 [Ilian Tape]
ISS010 is the best Skee Mask in a while, a quality double-pack of dubby up-tempo tech house hits. "Dub Schneider" is a fun, chord-driven number with skittish hats, quirky resonant chords and bumpy low-end. "Matchpoint" brings heavy bass pressure over deep-fried stabs, while "Stomp" throws glistening delayed chord fragments over flanged percussion. Finally, the closer "Small Stone S700" goes mega-deep with swinging rhythms and calmly phased pads.
Ana Dall'Ara-Majek - Radiolaria [empreintes DIGITALes]
Radiolaria is a collection of vintage Buchla exercises that imagine the life cycle of "marine life, most notably plankton, which is made of a large variety of both microscopic and macroscopic animal and plant species that are adrift, carried by water currents." And things are adrift indeed here, with rich layers of microscopic sound-matter floating and drifting across the stereo field as if they were tiny organisms. I suppose you could call this a "concept album", but that really undersells how fun of a listen this is.
Seidensticker - “Scribbled” Lowtec Extended Remixes [Workshop]
The latest Workshop comes with a 3x12” of dusty and tracky house constructions with sparse, yet seductive drums, gentle, sun-dried chord motifs and a little bit of occasional vocal melodrama. This is music that always starts right in the middle, just shuffling along at its own medium pace, not in a hurry to end up anywhere in particular — it's about the journey, not the destination.
Bernard Parmegiani & François Bayle - Divine Comédie [Recollection GRM]
Astonishing early 70s material from two of the great electro-acoustic composers presented in its entirety for the first time here. Parmegiani and Bayle employ electronic music as a narrative tool to construct a rich sonic imagery to accompany Dante's infernal ur-text. What does hell sound like, rendered through waveforms and modulations? This is the kind of project that is still so shockingly ambitious and utterly alien sounding that it makes a lot of music that isn't fifty years old seem downright toothless. File under "research".
Stef Mendesidis - Decima [Klockworks]
Somewhere around 2018, the modern techno sound that first took form in the late 00s was starting to feel a bit long in the tooth, with people continually rehashing the same techniques and motifs. In that context, Stef Mendesidis’ arrival on the scene felt like a real fresh breath of air, with his intense, rapidfire retro-future sound centered on gritty, cassette-degraded timbres, pulsing 16th basslines and a clever techno refunctioning of weird 90s JV-ROMpler presets. While the Decima double-pack doesn't quite reach the heights of his first Klockworks records, these tracks are still a fair cut above your usual techno fare, with sweeping dubby builders like the opener "Minore", fat and noxious acid slammers like “Super Septima" or the bizarre banger that is "Cyberfox", with its pressurized bassline, snake-charming vocal swells, hypnotically phased bass sequence and alien bell lead.
Ulla & Ultrafog - It Means A Lot [Motion Ward]
Ulla Straus and Japanese producer Ultrafog team up for an album of sparse, skeletal ambient collages. On It Means A Lot, things tend to happen in quick spurts, which are followed by stretches of silence or near-silence. What emerges out of that silence tends to be careful and unassuming — little swirling granulated bits of guitar, breathy vocals, small glitches and spectral pads, all slowly oozing out of the music’s negative space at an unhurried pace.
Will Long - Acid Trax [Comatonse]
Truth be told, I've never been the biggest acid head, but every once in a while, there's an acid record that really resonates (heh) with me. Just like its artfully generic title suggests, Acid Trax is about the little silver box and nothing else, with two CDs worth of extended and stripped-down 303 rhythm tracks. Aside from the excellent, addictively hypnotic sequence and drum programming, the use of reverb on these tracks is quite remarkable, drenching the acid lines in large swathes of metallic mono reverb, making them sound strangely celestial. As expected, the two DJ Sprinkles remixes freely pull from the classic house motif crate, marrying these minimal acid workouts with lush rhodes chords, gentle pads and classic house basses to create something that is strangely soothing.
Angelforces - Spaun [Superpang]
Some of the most fun computer music I've heard in a while. For an experimental record, Spaun is surprisingly flamboyant, going beyond the usual austere academic exercises in feedback and digital noise. "Rave Brain" has fun with a gigantic gabber kick that only appears every other bar and leaves a trail of pitch-shifted digital vapor in its wake. "Beyonsense" sounds like Armin van Buuren on DMT, with its faint trance motifs being run through the chaotic DSP ringer. "Legato Toy Brain" makes use of drastic pitch glides in a way that sounds almost comedic — when's the last time you've heard experimental computer music that was funny? Avant-garde through silliness.
Donato Dozzy - Magda [Spazio Disponibile]
After a string of more experimental albums, Donato Dozzy has finally caved in and is delivering us some major musical fan service with an album that harkens back to the sound of his flawless ca. 2008-2013 run. While Magda doesn't quite reach the heights of an Aquaplano Sessions or Voices From The Lake, it is still a very enjoyable record; a deep and enveloping experience full of lush, calming pads and hypnotic Berlin-School style sequences that evokes the warmth of a lazy summer day at the Adriatic sea.
Hanno Leichtmann - Outerlands [Discrepant]
Outerlands is a collection of sparse ambient pieces largely composed with the obscure early 20th century Villa Aurora Organ. I particularly dig the labyrinthine, sacral sounding patterns on tracks like "Tramanto" and "Lucero" here.
Laurel Halo - Octavia / Jessica Ekomane - Manifolds [Portraits GRM]
Laurel Halo goes spectral on Portraits GRM with an extended DSP-treated piece that starts out with glistening, melancholic string harmonics that — out of nowhere, and only briefly once — turn into a pitch-gliding spectral waterfall, almost making you question if you really just heard what you’ve heard. On the flipside, Jessica Ekomane's "Manifolds" is a dissonant, haptic piece that morphs through a number of textural landscapes, recalling 80s era IRCAM / GRM in a way that is immediately satisfying.
H TO O - Cycle [Wisdom Teeth]
On Cycle, Japanese producers H. Takahashi and Kohei Oyamada gently invite you into their shimmering realm of blissful pattern-driven ambient miniatures, gently chirping arps, goldenly shimmering pads and carefully ringing, bell-like ornaments. This is diminutive music that never demands your attention, instead opting for the most gentle and careful of enticements, knowing well that fragility and smallness can also be seductive.
DJ Nigga Fox - Chá Preto [Príncipe]
The Príncipe crew is getting downright weird on Chá Preto, a record full of weird, dissonant sounds and quirky, deliberately sloppy rhythms. This tonal and rhythmic weirdness is contrasted with an oddly clean and tidy textural and timbral palette, creating an ambiguous, but fascinating mix of calmness and unease.
Gi Gi - Dreamliner [Quiet Time]
Excellent lush downtempo fare here, sitting somewhere between murky early 90s ambient dub and chill out, Berlin School noodling, trip hop, shoegaze and even — dare I say it — "Balearic" vibes. Pulling from such a wide range of different influences could easily end up being a mess, but what holds together all of these ingredients are the strong and memorable melodic hooks, acting as a guiding light through the thickly layered atmospheres and dreamscapes.
Patrik Carrera - Depths Of Dopamine [Mord]
Every one of these twelve tracks is a stone cold, loopy techno sequence-grinder, starting with the churning Regis-like hypnosis of "Profusion" and the booming rumble and atonal high-pitched clang of "Benefits & Uses, over to the misty sine bleep sequence and swiveling shakers of "Isolating Reality or the throbbing all-metal low-end and demonically chirping sequence of "Runglr6", and finally, the large, cavernous atmosphere and slicing hats of "Watercourse Way". There are no tricks here, just pure and unadorned techno that is weirdly beautiful in its total refusal to be anything other than itself.
Maria Bertel - Monophonic [Relative Pitch Records]
Monophonic is an album of twisted, organic feedback exercises. Distorted folds of sound sputter and ache, twist and turn as they are forcefully pushed up against their limits. And yet, for all that sonic violence there is still a strong sense of lightness and playfulness here, for example on "Rotundity", where the feedback sounds like a mix between a roaring engine and a guttural animal voice, constantly morphing and moving as if it were some kind of living being.
Felix K - Sudbaism [Nullpunkt]
On Sudbaism, Felix K dives deep into the depths of his singular sound with an album of pitch-black breakbeat techno-bass abstractions. The basslines are massive, the drums are clangy and driven by slow and lurching rhythmic structures; the synths imbued with a dusky, metallic shimmer. This prevailing sense of darkness is occasionally contrasted with bouts of lightness in the form of warm pads or emotive arps, like on "Love". Although my favorite moments here are the ones that go all in on the gnostic darkness, like on "Transport", which sounds like a bizarro dub techno track emerging straight out of the deepest depths of hell.
Circadian Rhythms - Basic Moves 20 [Basic Moves]
Circadian Rhythms is an alias of Belgian producer Christophe De Groot, who is almost entirely unknown outside of his native Belgium but has been DJing since the 80s and was highly influential on the early local dance music scene. According to the press blurb, the tracks collected on Basic Moves 20 are bedroom one-takes written between 1993 and 1999, made with no intention of ever being released. Being able to finally hear such intensely private material now, thirty years later, feels quite special, like encountering a perfectly preserved musical time capsule filled with rare and precious things — like the track "Party Night", an infinitely yearning first wave track that could have only ever been made in those days when everything felt possible.
Other tracks like "Miracle" reveal the private handwriting of a bedroom producer from an era when the machines still seemed mystical, all dusky and moonlit, with bubbly synth motifs, shimmery pianos and romantic horn samples. The aptly titled "Birds In Jazz" is a techno-jazz hybrid reminiscent of Robert Hood's Nighttime World albums, lush and nocturnal, gesturing towards a hidden pathway into the depth of the night. Should a release like this be cause for celebration, knowing that such precious unheard material is still lying around in crates full of dusty DATs? Or should we instead be mournful, knowing that this supply is intrinsically finite and eventually the well of the past will have run dry, with every secret having been revealed and every obscure bedroom sketch having been remastered and re-released? Perhaps both are true.