Exclaim!'s Top 10 Dance and Electronic Albums of 2017

Kieran Hebden’s restlessly inventive, genre-splicing music is often as unpredictable as it is hypnotic. That holds firmly on his ninth album as Four Tet, where harp-mottled openers “Alap” and “Two Thousand and Seventeen” suggest the supple, folk-inflected electronic of 2003’s *Rounds* but soon give way to singular experiments in ambient techno (“LA Trance”), head-nodding deep house (“SW9 9SL”), and abstract neoclassical (“10 Midi”). As ever, Hebden builds his music with precision, warmth, and a rare gift for consuming melodies.

Even in the increasingly crowded field of electronic music, Kelly Lee Owens’ debut album arrives as a wonderful surprise. An album that bridges the gaps between cavernous techno, spectral pop, and krautrock’s mechanical pulse, 'Kelly Lee Owens' brims with exploratory wonder, establishing a personal aesthetic that is as beguiling as it is thrillingly familiar.

Planet Mu are very excited to announce Jlin's long awaited second album “Black Origami”. A percussion-led tour de force, it's a creation that seals her reputation as a unique producer with an exceptional ability to make riveting rhythmic music. “Black Origami” is driven by a deep creative thirst which she describes as “this driving feeling that I wanted to do something different, something that challenged me to my core. Black Origami for me, comes from letting go creatively, creating with no boundaries. The simple definition of origami is the art of folding and constructing paper into a beautiful, yet complex design. Composing music for me is like origami, only I'm replacing paper with sound. I chose to title the album "Black Origami" because like "Dark Energy" I still create from the beauty of darkness and blackness. The willingness to go into the hardest places within myself to create for me means that I can touch the Infinity.”  Spirituality and movement are both at the core of “Black Origami”, inspired largely by her ongoing collaborations with Indian dancer/movement artist Avril Stormy Unger whom she met and collaborated with at her debut performance for the Unsound festival – ”There is a fine line between me entertaining a person and my spirituality. Avril, who collaborates with me by means of dance, feels the exact same way. Movement played a great role in Black Origami. The track "Carbon 7" is very inspired by the way Avril moves and dances. Our rhythms are so in sync at times it kind of scares us. When there is something I can't quite figure out when it comes to my production, it’s like she senses it. Her response to me is always "You'll figure it out". Once I figure it out it's like time and space no longer exist.”  Similar time shifting/folding/disrupting effects can be heard throughout the record – especially on “Holy Child” an unlikely collaboration with minimalist legend William Basinski. She also collaborates again with Holly Herndon on “1%”, while Halcyon Veil producer Fawkes' voice is on “Calcination“ and Cape Town rapper Dope Saint Jude provides vocals for “Never Created, Never Destroyed“. Jlin will be touring extensively this year and is currently lining up appearances including Sonar festival. She also has plans to collaborate with acclaimed UK choreographer Wayne McGregor who played her music recently on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and described her music as “quite rare and so exciting".

Contemplative, colorful electronica from the UK producer. On his sixth album, Simon Green explores the theme of migration through global sounds. His references are subtle, but not overly serious; he drifts from old-school Brandy samples (“Kerala”) to Moroccan Gnawa musicians (“Bambro Koyo Ganda”) with signature restraint (“Outlier”). There are a few high-profile guests along the way, including Nicole Miglis (Hundred Waters) and Nick Murphy (Chet Faker), but they’re not the main attraction—this LP is about the ride.

New music from Simon Green aka Bonobo is always an event, but when it heralds the arrival of a whole new album (his first since 2013’s “The North Borders”), it’s really something to get excited about. The masterful, magisterial “Migration” is Green’s sixth album and it’s a record which cements his place in the very highest echelons of electronic music and beyond. Lead track ‘Kerala’ was the first track Green recorded for the new record, putting together a rough version of it on the tour bus while DJing across the States in 2014. It’s both a classic piece of Bonobo music and a development, all arpeggiated, twisted, layered strings and shuffling dancefloor rhythm. The music gradually builds until his introduction of a sample from RnB singer Brandy, itself cut up and dealt with as a further texture, with the whole sitting in a sweet spot of uplifting euphoria that he’s so adept at finding. The hypnotic video (also released today), has been directed by Bison (Jon Hopkins/London Grammar/ Rosie Lowe). It compliments the shuffling arpeggios and beats perfectly by creating staggered loop effects where the lead Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace/Inside No. 9) battles through a mysterious, distorted reality with a meteor flying overhead. In particular, there is a theme on the upcoming album of migration, eruditely put by Green as “The study of people and spaces,” he expands, “It’s interesting how one person will take an influence from one part of the world and move with that influence and affect another part of the world. Over time, the identities of places evolve.” Indeed there is a “transitory nature” to the album, not only through its themes, but also through its guests and found sounds. Michael Milosh, from the LA group Rhye, for instance, is originally from Canada and recorded his affecting vocal on ‘Break Apart' in a hotel room in Berlin. Green, meanwhile built the structure of the track during a transatlantic flight. Nick Murphy (formerly known as Chet Faker), on the other hand, is from Australia, but a shared love of disco brought the pair together for the hugely emotive ‘No Reason’. Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters, originally from Florida, delivers a superbly understated vocal for the glistening textures of ‘Surface’, while Moroccan band Innov Gnawa, based in New York, provide the vocals, on ‘Bambro Koyo Ganda’. Additionally, Green has used a sampler (“but not in a big boomer, wearing a cagoule kind of way.”) and woven found sounds such as an elevator in Hong Kong airport, rain in Seattle, a tumble dryer in Atlanta and a fan boat engine in New Orleans into his intricate sonics. Bonobo’s DJ shows cannot be underestimated in importance to the overall feel of “Migration”, his much loved Output DJ residencies in New York and his global ‘Outlier’ club curated series were where he road-tested tracks. The landscape of his new home in California has provided the artwork of the record, designed by Neil Krug (Boards of Canada/Lana Del Ray). All the desert locations pictured “are close to where I now live,” Green explains. “Part of the writing process was to drive up to these places and live with the tracks as I was making them. This was a new part of the world to me, where the landscape is quite alien and Martian.” The album cover art has been gradually appearing in London and Los Angeles as giant murals, and have been fully unveiled today. A contemporary of artists such as Four Tet, Jon Hopkins and Caribou, Bonobo also counts among his famous fans the likes of Wiz Khalifa, Skrillex, Disclosure, Diplo and Warpaint. His 2013 album “The North Borders” went Top 30 in the UK and was number 1 in the electronic charts in both the US and UK. In support of that record, the 12-piece band Green runs played 175 shows worldwide, including a sold out show at Alexandra Palace. Bonobo has built a large, loyal and engaged global fanbase: over half a million album sales and over one hundred and fifty million streams on Spotify point to the levels of success achieved by this quiet, self-effacing man. It might be difficult to imagine it, but “Migration” will take his beautiful, emotive, intricate music to an even bigger audience. “My own personal idea of identity has played into this record and the theme of migration,” Green explains. “Is home where you are or where you are from, when you move around?” The personal, it seems, can also be universal.

In the body of work of Cologne artist Wolfgang Voigt – who, like few others, has informed, shaped and influenced the world of electronic music with countless different projects since the early 1990s -, GAS stands out in particular as a saturnine sound cosmos based on heavily condensed classic sequences. Even after nearly 20 years, the sound of GAS doesn’t seem to have lost any of its luster, as shown by the commanding success of Kompakt’s fall 2016 re-release of the essential back catalogue as a 10xLP/4xCD box set. The overwhelming feedback from a loyal international fan community and worldwide media outlets attests once again to the sheer timelessness of GAS. Which is why it will feel like hardly a day has passed since the release of the last official album “Pop” nearly two decades ago, when Wolfgang Voigt resumes this specific creative path with the upcoming new full-length NARKOPOP. Even in the here and now, the unmistakable vibe of GAS immediately hits home, taking the listener on an otherworldly journey with the very first sounds, drawing him or her into an impervious sonic thicket, down to the depths of rapture and reverie. From wafts of dense symphonic mist emerges a floating and whirling feeling of weightlessness, before the listener steps into an eerily beautiful forest of fantasy, pulled in by the allure of a narcotic bass drum. While earlier GAS tracks were often based on the hypnotic effects of looping techniques, the 10 new pieces on NARKOPOP unfold their magic in a more entwined manner, sometimes with the sonic might of an entire philharmonic orchestra, sometimes as subtle and fragile as the most delicate branch of a tree with many. A main characteristic of Voigt’s oeuvre, the coalescence of seemingly contradictory stylistic aspects such as harmonious and atonal, concrete and abstract, light and heavy, near and far is also a decisive feature of NARKOPOP. In accordance with the transgressive spirit of his collective work, Voigt carries the aesthetic conceptions of his music over to the realm of the visual. Based on his abstract forest pictures, the GAS artwork addresses Voigt’s artistic affinity to romanticism and the forest as a place of yearning. For the first time, a closer look at the cover of NARKOPOP reveals signs of architectural fragments which hint at another, maybe parallel world behind Voigt’s forest. Truth is the prettiest illusion.

On 29th September 2017, Iglooghost will release his debut album “Neō Wax Bloom”, almost two years to the day since he made his debut as a teenager on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder imprint with the “Chinese Nü Year” EP - four tracks documenting the time-traveling adventures of a gelatinous worm-shaped creature called Xiangjiao. Expanding on this story, “Neō Wax Bloom” follows the events surrounding two giant eyeballs crashing into the mysterious world of Mamu. Across its 11 tracks, Iglooghost builds a typically intense, hysterical, borderline batshit crazy soundtrack, introducing new characters to his fantastical world and inviting back old friends Mr. Yote and Cuushe for the ride. In the words of Iglooghost: “When a pair of giant eyeballs crash into the strange, misty world of Mamu, the mysterious forces that govern nature itself are disrupted. A life cycle of transforming creatures is thrown off balance, and the odd looking inhabitants of Mamu are forced to adapt to this calamity. These inhabitants include Yomi - a multicoloured pom-pom monk; Lummo - a wise blind witch training a band of melon coloured babies; and Uso - a sneaky bug thief hidden in a green cloak - as well as many others. As their respective stories begin to interlock, the mysteries surrounding the giant eyeballs are slowly revealed.” Featuring artwork by Iglooghost, the vinyl format includes a large format 12-page Riso printed comic booklet and “Neō Wax Bloom” character sticker sheet.

↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓ VINYL STOCK AVAILABLE AT: forestswords.ochre.store Forest Swords, aka acclaimed Merseyside-based producer Matthew Barnes, returns with his eagerly anticipated new full-length record. “Compassion" is the follow-up to 2013's critically lauded debut “Engravings” and released via Ninja Tune. The album will be followed by a set of projects across multiple mediums by Forest Swords’ own Dense Truth, a new experimental studio and record label, including a series of music videos. “Compassion" engages with an uncertain world we’re experiencing, distilling it into a unique sound territory: Barnes' exploration of the mid-point between ecstasy and frustration, artificial and human feels timely and affecting. The result is an assured, compelling body of work, tying together the ancient and future: weaving swathes of buzzing digital textures, field recordings, clattering beats and distorted jazz sax with fizzing orchestral arrangements. "Like many, with all that's been going on since I started making the record, I've struggled to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel," says Barnes, "so I realised there's some sort of power in trying to create our own instead. I'm inspired by the ways we're communicating now, for better or worse, and thinking about new channels we can distribute ideas. The idea of looking for flexible future ways of expression and language, that bends to our needs quicker, really excites me”. Barnes launched the record with a unique experiment in new ways to disseminate music, personally sending album tracks through messaging app WhatsApp to anyone who asked. The album shifts from 'The Highest Flood's skeletal bounce to 'Panic's claustrophobic paranoia; the rapturous hyperballad 'Arms Out' to the windswept and cinematic ‘Knife Edge’, navigating through the orchestral glitch of 'War It' to decaying jazz thump of ‘Raw Language’. The album is equal parts disorienting and immersive, balancing bold sweeping gestures and crumbling textures; tracks seemingly disintegrating and reassembling at points across the album. Blending both digital and specially recorded brass, strings and vocals, Barnes's processing never truly makes it clear what's new or old, sampled or unique, constantly blurring and toying with the line between digital and acoustic. There will also be a variety of multidisciplinary projects set to run through his Dense Truth umbrella over the coming year: collaborations across dance, performance, film and music. Previous Forest Swords projects include devising and scoring contemporary dance piece ‘Shrine’, composing for the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ video game, collaborating with Massive Attack on their new music, and scoring the first movie made entirely with drones – 'In The Robot Skies’ – which debuted at the BFI London Film Festival. Central to this enthralling world is “Compassion", an album that's as weighty as it is vulnerable, sculpting the most striking parts of his previous work into something that feels urgent and necessary, and cementing Barnes as one of the UK's most significant electronic artists and composers.