Pitchfork's Best Electronic Music of 2019

Long-dawning long-player by Pacific Northwest producer Hunter P. Thompson aka Akasha System spins a suite of remote outpost rhythms and old-growth electronics variously inspired by “days and nights spent in the forests,” “long stretches of back road trails,” and “sitting alone under moss-covered trees.” It’s club music for misty mornings, towering redwood canopies, and overcast skies above uninhabited terrain: Echo Earth. Recorded across the fall of 2018 at Thompson’s lava-lit Portland home studio, the album’s eight tracks trace cyclical arcs and seasonal tides, churning and yearning, meditative motion patterns flickering like holograms projected in the rain. Following key appearances on Elestial Sound, Neo Violence, and New Information, Echo Earth embodies all Akasha’s most evocative and elusive sonic strategies in a nuanced naturalist landscape of rust and radar, information and isolation, wires woven like roots beneath ferns.

Inspired by cosmology and ancient mythology, the Anunaku project is a continuation of TSVI’s debut album 'Inner Worlds' and aims to explore the use of various drums from around the world combined with elements of UK underground club music. Sleeve Design: Artistic direction by Alex McCullough Design by Alex McCullough and Jacob Wise

Sam Barker is a resident DJ at Berghain, Berlin’s celebrated temple of techno, and as one half of the duo Barker & Baumecker, he has crafted plenty of hard-hitting tracks perfectly calibrated for the club’s cavernous post-industrial interior. On his debut solo album, though, Barker takes a different tack, excising the drums and other outward attributes of conventional techno until all that’s left is a billowing swirl of richly colored synths. Yet for all the music’s resemblance to the ambient techno of the mid-’90s, *Utility* isn’t really ambient music, save for the ethereal “Wireheading” and the downbeat closer “Die-Hards of the Darwinian Order.” Pulsing and flickering, filled up with pumping chords reminiscent of the Chain Reaction label’s dubby drift, the end result is a kind of techno by another means, where all the hard surfaces have melted away. Like rushing floodwaters, it carries real force beneath its fluid exterior.

“We all dance away our lives to the tune of the sovereign pleasure-pain axis.” – David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative Pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance as a rave metaphor fits the music of Sam Barker. The Berghain resident and Leisure System co-founder has spent the last few years exploring the euphoric potential of altering key variables in dance music formulas. This was especially true on his 2018 Ostgut Ton debut EP ‘Debiasing’, which was flush with unconventional rhythmic chord stabs, melody and percussion but devoid of kickdrums. Now, on his debut solo LP ‘Utility’, he turns his focus toward melding experimentation and dancefloor pragmatism with the psychology behind the musical decision making process. ‘Utility’ is a playful but non-ironic musical approach to a whole spectrum of utilitarian and transhumanist ideas: from models for quantifying pleasure and “gradients of bliss” to abolishing suffering for sentient beings (not just people) through the ethical use of drugs and nanotechnology. Over nine tracks his vision ebbs and flows through waves of deeply psychedelic musical vignettes; free-floating and futuristic melodies and rhythms as targeted brain stimulation. The sound draws heavily on modular synthesis, as well as self-built mechanical instruments and plate reverbs to create atmospheres that are at once alien and emotionally recognizable, functional and utopian.

The first album on Numbers from Complete Walkthru aka US producer Max McFerren, titled Scrolls, is out on 20th September 2019. Watch the video for 'NYC' on YouTube, directed by Hayden Martin, and listen to 'Scrolls' in full now. nmb.rs/cw-nyc-video Scrolls plays around with themes of privacy, disillusionment and personal development over eleven tracks, representing a transitional time in McFerren's life. During the creation of the album he moved from New York, where he was holding down a residency at Brooklyn’s Bossa Nova Civic Club and playing regularly in downtown Manhattan at the iconic China Chalet and the now much missed Santos Party House, to the open, rural setting of South Carolina. The album’s personality, and the thematic preoccupations underlying it, reflect the impact of this contrast. Its sound textures cast widely into what McFerren describes as “the ephemera of the saturated digital realm” while moving through arcane rhythms, chiming melodies and expansive, metallically tinged ambient passages. McFerren refers to his motivations with Scrolls as being “anti-nihilism”, as reacting against a dark emptiness he perceives in certain forms of techno. Ultimately with the record, he is seeking the potential of centring joy in the present moment, in a conscious awareness of now.

DJ Haram is a producer and DJ who distinctively ties her New Jersey musical history with more recent involvement in the Philadelphia DIY noise scene, whilst paying homage to her Middle Eastern roots. A close affiliate of New York's Discwoman collective, she is also one half of 700 Bliss, alongside rapper and poet Moor Mother, who feature on this EP, and will release an album on Hyperdub in the near future.

Enter a world of post-IDM, ambient and reggaeton, with a progression of deep synths, reverb, and percussion whose rhythms are born from the southern hemisphere. This is the world of DJ Python, a.k.a. New York based producer Brian Piñeyro, who also sometimes goes by Dj Wey, Deejay Xanax, and Luis. Making his Dekmantel debut with an extended EP of contemporary electronica, fashioned in his cult unique style, Python brings his deep-reggaeton style to the Dutch imprint. With his first LP Dulce Compañia released in 2017, Python extended his cult status in the electronic music sphere with motives of ambient, and tropicale, all the time keeping his music deeply rooted in classic underground dance music. Along with a Breaking Through feature on Resident Advisor, an almost legendary appearance on Boiler Room — in which he ignited the room in Santiago with bellowing reverbs —, extensive touring, and a residency at New York’s Nowadays (healthy programmed by the team behind Mister Saturday Night), Python has dutifully snaked his way in today’s cult artist category. Making his next step with this six-tracker on Dekmantel, Python aggrandises his prestigious drum sequencing, merging the world’s of drone-driven electronica, cerebral synths, and steely out-of-this-dimension-dancehall. The EP’s pening track 'Lampara' snakes and twists, like a rugged 90s London broken-beat, electronic exploration, evoking nostalgic feelings a la Boards de Canada. The retro aesthetic flows through with second track 'Tímbrame', where the tropical reggaeton percussion floats through wafty, deep synth melodies and chimes, like a vibey, emotive, come-down, get-down, post-party dancefloor filler. 'Cuando' steps up a gear, as the digital percussive rhythms go into overdrive, while 'Espero' goes all Gaussian, by offering a transportive, meditative expression. 'Be Si To' pulses into full Phython territory, chops-and-cuts-and-slices across a sleuth of Warping, proto-drones. The record’s final track 'pq cq' is a singular question mark about darkness, feeling, and trans-dimensional thinking, as the track shifts in-between kicks that feel one and the same between past, present, and the dub.

Whilst so far alot of the focus on the underground Singeli scene has centered on Sisso Studios, the nearby Pamoja Records has been another power house of hard Singeli sound. At the helm is DJ and Producer DJ DUKE and MC's like MCZO, Dogo Lizzi, Pirato MC and Kashiwashi. Duke's productions are perhaps the most punkish of all with a complete DIY agressive style, stretching the BPM's into the stratosphere and a completely unique sampling style borrowing from everything from popular Tanzanian advertising jingles to ambient sounds from around his studio. As a complete counterpoint to his breakneck speed productions, Duke has also over the last few years carved out a separate path with a new style he calls 'Hip Hop singeli'. Basically a slowed down version of its faster cousin it's a style that has gained popularity amongst other Singeli producers over the last year.

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date. The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain. Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album. Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating." His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says. Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider".

Jay Mitta is a core producer of Dar Es Salaam's Sisso Studios. His debut LP presents his own unique take on Singeli music and also presents a new rising force in the Singeli MC scene, 14 year old sensation Dogo Janja.

June 21st 2019 sees the release of Leif's 'Loom Dream’ LP. Made up of six tracks but presented as two ~17-minute pieces, the record meanders through warm chordscapes, glistening synths and loose live percussion, weaved together with field recordings and ambience. Loom Dream invites us to peacefully reconnect with the living world by placing us amongst lush sonic verdure. An interactive site created by Joseph Pleass and Alex McCullough accompanies the release, where users can navigate a virtual world, learning more about the plants referenced throughout the record (the site is best experienced on mobile via chrome) - whiti.es/020/ Artistic direction: Alex McCullough Design: Alex McCullough and Joseph Pleass Photography: Dexter Lander Web development: Joseph Pleass Video editing: Olivia Pringle

Daniel Fisher, AKA Physical Therapy, is an artist of many faces. Bouncing from techno to jungle, IDM to disco— often under the moniker Physical Therapy, elsewhere as house duo Fatherhood, and sometimes under a slew of untold aliases — his catalogue can be a confounding proposition to decode. But no longer. "It Takes A Village: The Sounds Of Physical Therapy" contains 11 unreleased tracks from 9 different aliases and collaborations, and is the definitive primer for the sly producer and DJ's enigmatic work. Across Village’s two discs, we see Fisher explore the seams and folds of electronic music's various sub-genres. On disc 1, we get jazz-inflected breakbeat science from Jungle Jerry and bass rumbling instrumental hip-hop from Green Buddha. The irascible pairing of Kirk the Flirt & Peter Pressure offer one of their signature disco-edits. "Ya Carrying" a collaboration with Michael Magnan as Fatherhood, imagines classic house through a digi-dub prism. On disc 2, Fisher flexes his techno muscles. Proto-hardstep by Physical Therapy, psychedelic bongo driven techno by Buckaroo!, pumping electro fusion by DJ Overnite, and deep warehouse soul by Stefan Proper. The compilation ends with an ambient cleanse by Fisher’s "no kick drums allowed" project, Car Culture. "It Takes A Village: The Sounds Of Physical Therapy" is available as a limited edition opaque colored 2xLP as well as digitally.

mixtape from RAP JD008

Boomkat Product Review: Nyege Nyege Tapes’ revelatory Singeli series culminates with a rush from scene bossman Mohamed Hamza Ally aka Sisso, whose studio in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania is the epicentre of the world’s most thrilling, punkish new dance style.Arriving after incendiary instalments in 2018 by Bamba Pana, Jay Mitta, and Duke, and the introductory ‘Sounds of Sisso’ compilation in 2017, the ‘Mateso’ album pulls focus back to the scene’s lynchpin with 8 none-more-compelling cuts of breakneck loops and helter skelter riffs on vinyl, supplemented by a tape with equally exhilarating bonus material awaiting quick clickers and dancers. The collected tracks chronicle Sisso’s work over the past four years, spanning a period after his informal studio in the sprawling ghettos of Dar-Es-Salaam grew from a small shack selling DVDs and MP3s, to come to catalyse countless new releases from local producers such as Bamba Pana, DJ Longo, and Balotelli, as well as a wave of new MC’s including Makavelli, Cad Reedah, Anti Virus, Dogo Muchi, Dogo Mjanja, Rehema Tajiri, and Yung Yuda. Sisso’s productions epitomise Singeli’s hyperlocal scenius, distilling the vitality and struggle of life of the fringes of the Swahili-speaking world’s most populous city, into a unique music which seems to reflect the idea of keeping a cool head in frenetic situations. Between his ratchet rhythms and pitched-up melodies there’s a sublime, unresolved tension at play, where the music feels to accelerate so fast that dancers are glyding, sustaining a breathlessly “up” effect that uncannily recalls mid ‘90s UK Happy Hardcore as much as Chicago Footwork, Caribbean Soca and Shangaan electro, yet with a psychotomimetic appeal all of its own. The tracks on ‘Mateso’ are no doubt some of Singeli’s most potently direct and crafty, circling from proper knees-up whirligigs to hyper, laser-riffing funk, ecstatic choral cut-ups and hard but super-sweet steppers that will spark off any up-for-it dance the world over.

REPRESS UPDATE: VINYL IS IN & WILL BE SHIPPED BY END OF YEAR Sophomore set of illusory software installations by undisclosed North American technologist Topdown Dialectic, sourced from the same vault as 2018’s celebrated self-titled LP. Like its predecessor, Vol. 2 is composed of eight identical-length tracks, each a system capture composite of fractured rhythm, granular texture, and elusive energy, blurring surface and depth into a fresh electronic dialect of hypermodern mirage. It’s a music both evasive and emotive, ephemeral but eternal, like fiber optic whispers from deep in some decaying mainframe, or the hauntological nostalgia of artificial intelligence yet to be invented. Vol. 2 ventures beyond techno abstraction or standard synthetic ambience into a depopulated soundworld of morphing corridors and flickering fluorescence, equal parts escape and unbecoming.

Thessa Torsing also known as upsammy returns to Die Orakel with her second EP entitled Branches On Ice – four tracks full of crystal clear, multi-layered textures.