Pitchfork's Best Electronic Music of 2018

Beta Librae is Bailey Hoffman, a producer from Kansas City, living in New York City, who co-operates the extremely vital Technofeminism residency with Umfang at Bossa Nova Civic Club, and has previously released tapes on 1080p and Lillerne Tape Club, as well as a single on Physical Therapy’s Allergy Season. Incienso is extremely hyped to release “Sanguine Bond”, the debut LP from Beta Librae. An extremely singular ambi-tech-no-house album, encompassing all the deepest vibes of the rave - warm and fuzzy afterglow dub mixes, emo-ambient ‘ludes, yogic, tribal downtempo vibes and all, mixed with love by the one and only!

German electronic producer DJ Koze has always been a self-selecting outsider, the kind of artist who sits blissfully on the sidelines of the big picture while the world passes him by. His third proper studio album unfolds like a daydream: breezy, sunny, and strangely beautiful, filled with ideas that don’t make sense until they suddenly—thrillingly—do. As with 2013’s *Amygdala* (as well as his endlessly inventive DJ sets and remixes), the style here is curiously out of time, touching on house (“Pick Up”), hip-hop (“Colors of Autum”), and downtempo soul (“Scratch That”), all with a slightly psychedelic twist that keeps everything hovering an inch or two off the floor. Fashion is fine, but it’s no match for a muse.

Building on his background as a classical pianist and composer, British producer Jon Hopkins uses vast electronic soundscapes to explore other worlds. Here, on his fifth album, he contemplates our own. Inspired by adventures with meditation and psychedelics, *Singularity* aims to evoke the magical awe of heightened consciousness. It’s a theme that could easily feel affected or clichéd, but Hopkins does it phenomenal justice with imaginative, mind-bending songs that feel both spontaneous and rigorously structured. Floating from industrial, polyrhythmic techno (“Emerald Rush\") to celestial, ambient atmospheres (“Feel First Life”), it’s a transcendent headphone vision quest you’ll want to go on again.

Please note: Digital files are 16bit. Singularity marks the fifth album from the UK electronic producer and composer and the follow up to 2013’s Mercury Prize nominated Immunity. Where Immunity charted the dark alternative reality of an epic night out, Singularity explores the dissonance between dystopian urbanity and the green forest. It is a journey that returns to where it began – from the opening note of foreboding to the final sound of acceptance. Shaped by his experiences with meditation and trance states, the album flows seamlessly from rugged techno to transcendent choral music, from solo acoustic piano to psychedelic ambient.

Objekt, the British-born, Berlin-based producer TJ Hertz, reinforces his reputation as one of bass music’s most creative minds with his second album. Like his debut, 2014’s *Flatland*, *Cocoon Crush* employs bracingly broken grooves and startlingly vivid textures, sounding like techno that’s been exploded into 11 dimensions. His former career as a developer of audio software pays off in jaw-dropping sound design, like the ratcheting rhythms of “Dazzle Anew” or the depth-charge bass of “Nervous Silk,” a psychedelic approximation of a diving bell’s descent. Despite glimmers of dance-floor energy here and there, this is first and foremost a listening album, head music of the highest order—but “Deadlock,” a slow, menacing hip-hop cut lacerated by speaker-shredding bass, is one of the heaviest things he’s ever done.

PAN welcomes back Objekt for Cocoon Crush, his first LP since 2014’s Flatland. Over the past four years Objekt has continued to challenge conventions with his club output (the Objekt #4 single release and the Kern Vol. 3 mix CD for Tresor), while maintaining his reputation as a DJ who deploys impeccable technical finesse in crafting elaborate narratives from a diverse and challenging palette of electronic music. Written between 2014 and 2018 in Berlin and on the road, Cocoon Crush once again sees the producer jettisoning the functional requirements of the dancefloor. Marking a further evolution from the youthful exuberance of Flatland, Cocoon Crush explores a more introspective side, with themes of human interaction resonating throughout the record as it ruminates on a spectrum of complex moods rooted in 4 years of sometimes turbulent personal experience. Cocoon Crush represents an aesthetic departure from Flatland’s largely synthetic tonality, drawing from organic source material and natural textures to illustrate perplexing and unfamiliar sceneries in photorealistic detail. In Cocoon Crush, Objekt diverges further still from his musical influences to craft the purest manifestation of his own musical personality to date: an intriguing and enigmatic album whose reference points are hard to pin down, in which ghostly synth passages weave through mind-bending, weighty drums, and ASMR-triggering foley collages scrape and sparkle. Through meticulous sculpting, Objekt traces a rich and impressionistic journey through claustrophobia, hope, guilt, anxiety and joy, nested in layers of sonic detail which reward with every listen. The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring photography by Kasia Zacharko, and layout by Bill Kouligas.

We've been big fans of all Overmono's work to date, so its a pleasure to present our final release of 2018 from the duo made up of real-life brothers Tessela and Truss. Whities 019 is a three-track 12" of varying styles, all showcasing an impressive dexterity with melody, texture and emotion. The record comes in a sticker-fastened sleeve, featuring notes that nod to Overmono's early introduction to rave in the Welsh countryside. Mastered and cut by Beau Thomas Art direction by Alex McCullough Sleeve design by Alex McCullough and Kia Tasbihgou

Pavel Milyakov continues Rassvet Records imprint with second release representing a soundtrack for Gosha Rubchinskiy a/w 18 show which took place in St Petersburg in an old Soviet Palace of Culture, one of the first spots for 90s Russia illegal raves. This soundscapes explore and reflect atmosphere of Russian rave revolution, using trance loops and chords, deconstructed and arranged the same fresh way as Rubchinskiy's collection does. B-side is featured with dancefloor banger and a bonus locked-groove.

w&p by Skee Mask

Five rough and ready club explorations from young Kenyan producer Slikback to kick off Hakuna Kulala's upcoming series exploring new producers from the East African and Congolese Electronic Underground.

There had always been a burning sense of resistance baked into SOPHIE’s experimental soundscapes, which simultaneously honored and rejected the tropes and rules of mainstream pop. But the Scottish producer’s visionary debut album is an exhilarating escalation—a work that not only exploded expectations around song structure and form but conventional notions of gender, identity, and self, as well. *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides* is sweeping and defiant, pinballing from glitchy rave cuts (“Ponyboy”) to ethereal pop elegies (“It’s Okay to Cry”) to ambient passages that feel practically spiritual (“Pretending”). Each left turn is an invitation to slip further into SOPHIE’S neon universe. In the hands of any other artist, such dizzying digital distortions would appear to warp reality. Here, though, they clarify it. Every synthetic vocal, slithering synth, zigzagging beat, and gleefully warped sample brings us closer to SOPHIE\'S truth. Some of the project’s headiest questions—those about body, being, and soul—seem to rest on a distant horizon the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet. “Immaterial,” a fizzing, maximalist hat-tip to Madonna, moves the goalposts even further, proposing a version of consciousness in which the material world is, in fact, only the beginning.