Exclaim!'s Top 10 Electronic Albums of 2015

A wondrous debut from the house producer of indie-pop romantics The xx, *In Colour* is the sound of dance music heard at helicopter height: beautiful, distant, and surprising at every turn. Whether summoning old-school drum ’n’ bass (“Gosh”) or dancehall-inflected pop (the Young Thug and Popcaan double feature “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)”), the mood here is consummately relaxed, more like a spring morning than a busy night. Laced throughout the thump and sparkle are fragments of recorded conversation and the ambience of city streets—details that make the music feel as though it has a life of its own.

Holly Herndon's second album Platform proposes new fantasies and rejuvenates old optimism. Herndon has become a leading light in contemporary music by experimenting within the outer reaches of dance music and pop songwriting possibilities. A galvanising statement, Platform signals Herndon's transformation as an electronic musician to a singular voice. For More Info: shop.igetrvng.com/collections/all/products/rvngnl29

The London experimental producer crafts ethereal dancefloor sounds for any time of day.

Elaenia is a dazzling score which puts Shepherd in the spotlight as a composer who has produced an album that bridges the gap between his rapturous dance music and formative classical roots that draws upon everything Shepherd has done to date. Growing up in Manchester - he started out as a chorister at an early age - Shepherd eventually arrived in London for university, where he spent the next five years engineering Elaenia, all the while DJing in cities across the globe and working towards his PhD in neuroscience. An album that draws inspiration from classical, jazz, electronic music, soul and even Brazilian popular music, Elaenia - named after the bird of the same name - is the epitome of the forward-thinking Floating Points vision in 2015. Musically, the mesmerising ebbs and flows of Elaenia span moments of light and dark; rigidity and freedom; elegance and chaos. The lush, euphoric enlightenment of ‘Silhouettes (I, II & III)’ - a three-part composition that acts as a testament to those early days Shepherd spent playing in various ensembles, complete with an immensely tight rhythm section that ends up providing a cathartic, blissful release. Elsewhere, Shepherd’s knack for masterful late night sets bare fruition to the hypnotic, electronic pulse of ‘Argenté’, which leads into final track 'Peroration Six' - a track with one of the biggest tension-and-release moments in music this year. Shepherd - the ensemblist, the producer and scientist - even built a harmonograph from scratch to create the artwork for Elaenia, the end result created by using it and 2 fibre optic cables of 0.5 and 1.5mm diameters, which were connected to light sources responding to bass drum and white noise percussive sounds from the album track ‘For Marmish’. Like his contemporaries Caribou and Four Tet, Shepherd has nurtured the Floating Points name into one renowned for ambitious and forward-thinking DJ sets, having performed all over the world at events and clubs such as Output NYC, Trouw, Sonar, Unit in Tokyo, Panorama Bar and, of course, Nuits Sonores (which lent its name to his seminal track from summer 2014) as well as the much missed Plastic People, where he held a residency for five years. Elaenia also features a huge variety of contributors, including drums from Tom Skinner and Leo Taylor plus vocals from Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne, Layla Rutherford and Shepherd himself. Elsewhere there's Susumu Mukai taking up bass, Qian Wu and Edward Benton sporting violins, Matthew Kettle on the viola, Alex Reeve on guitar and Joe Zeitlin on the cello.

The in-demand producer lets his beats and textures light the way.

Though they’ve always boasted a winning sense of humor, Hot Chip are nothing if not sincere. The British outfit’s beautifully rendered sixth full-length—*Why Make Sense?*—is alive with the sort of emotional brilliance and meditative songwriting that has made them one of modern pop’s most rewarding listens. While the house-driven single “Need You Now” makes expert use of a 1983 Sinnamon sample to make its impassioned central plea, the sumptuous slow jam “White Wine and Fried Chicken” finds frontman Alexis Taylor giving thanks—for a meal and “a new place to stay/where my heart has permission, to sing all the day.”

Foremost a guitarist, growing up listening to rock rather than club music, West continues to strive towards finding a more personal balance between music for home listening and larger spaces. The title track was inspired by the howl-like tones he developed by running synths through guitar pedals. "By slowly drifting the pitch through distortion and delays, the result sounded like vocal cries – something which was perfect for the song and this inspired me to take on a darker set of tones across the whole album. It was made over the past few years, inspired by capturing small performances on synths, touring with some of my musical heroes, playing with feedback when I should have been catching a train, sampling my voice in unexpected conditions and recording textures in different countries.” The album explores a wide range of emotions; from the dissonance eruptions and primal rhythms in 'Howl', to the mournful improvisations of '3 Laments', which features a sample of his own voice. Alongside his performances on Moog, Prophet, tape delay and guitar, West enlisted the help of drummer Fabian Prynn for ‘Low’ and cellist Peter Gregson for ‘Walls’, both long-time collaborators of Erased Tapes peers Douglas Dare and Michael Price