Pitchfork's Best Electronic Music of 2022

Where *KICK ii* delves into the lurching, snapping grooves of reggaetón, *KicK iii* applies an even more forceful touch to experimental beats that zigzag between futuristic club rhythms and vintage IDM. The strutting “Bruja” fires merciless ballroom salvos over car-crash drums and apocalyptic synth squeal; “Incendio” twists Arca’s perpetually morphing vocals over drums that punch like Brazilian funk carioca or Portuguese batida; and “Morbo” dissolves into a gooey morass of slow-motion techno. From there, things just get more unpredictable: The shuddering beats of “Fiera” and “Ripples” feel like they’re coming apart at the seams, while the shimmering melody of “Skullqueen” channels mid-’90s Aphex Twin, long a latent influence on Arca’s fractured syncopations. But the storm clouds part for the closing “Joya”: Over soft, feathery chimes, she sings sweetly, “I want to tell you/You are a jewel among men/I feel so much love.” After so much violent turmoil, to let us down so gently feels like an act of kindness.

As house and underground dance music goes, what makes Axel Boman interesting isn’t just his sense of rhythm or sound design, but his emotional range. Like its companion, *Quest for Fire*, *Luz* is a quietly psychedelic journey that shifts between seductive (“Nowhere Good”) and playful (“Atra”), earnest techno (“Edgeware Rd”) and musical banana peels (“Grape”) with a nimbleness that catches you off guard. Do you laugh at the chintzy poetry of “Out Sailing” (“My love is out sailing…all over the world”), or does it catch your heart? Does your heart catch at the inspirational thrust of “Hold On” (“When the going gets tough, it sucks”), or does it make you laugh? You sense Boman wants both.

Like its companion, *Luz*, *Quest for Fire* casts house and underground dance music as a kind of modern psychedelia, shifting emotional registers with a fluency that makes obvious feelings seem a little less familiar. Listen to how the tropical vibe of “Stone Age Jazz” warps into the ominous “Cacti Is Plural,” for example, or the mellow disco of “Regret Lasagna” (that title!) ramps up to the almost comically intense “Jeremy Irons.” The appeal isn’t just that Boman can sell the transitions, but that his music feels equally defined by each mood—a range that sets him apart, house or otherwise.

Alain and Stéphane Quême, or Alan Braxe and DJ Falcon, are indisputable architects of the French Touch - the emotive house music conjured from looped samples with an inimitable Gallic flare that emerged from Paris in the mid 90s. In 2022 these two originals will present their first ever collaboration as Braxe & Falcon in the form of the Step By Step EP, released on Smugglers Way. The release represents a sublime distillation of their shared musical essence, a revelatory realization and a compelling expansion only conceivable for them at this point in time. It opens with “Step By Step,” an ecstatic vocal drone with a pleading chord progression of syrupy synthesizer, as if Braxe’s “In Love With You” had been baking on the dashboard for a quarter of a century. The production alone is hypnotic, with the addition of a vocal from noted French touch fan Panda Bear the track transcends anything in the catalogues of all three artists to something completely majestic, resplendent in its glowing, lush simplicity.

Coby Sey steps out with his remarkable debut album 'Conduit', set for release via AD 93 on September 9th 2022. "'Conduit' is a statement of intent, reaffirming my dedication to transcend the tangible through music – it’s my way to continue and contribute to the musical lineage laid by those before me, locally and worldwide." - Coby Sey Written, performed, instrumentation (various), produced, arranged, mixed and engineered (all tracks) by Coby Sey. Electronic percussion (tracks, 1, 2) by Raisa Mariam Khan. Tenor saxophone (tracks 1, 2, 7) and loops (7) by Ben Vince. Alto saxophone (tracks 1, 2, 7), recorder (track 7) and loops (7) by CJ Calderwood. Electric guitar (track 7) by Biu Rainey. Mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer. Photography direction by Ksenia Burnasheva and Coby Sey. Art direction by Coby Sey, Nicola Tirabasso and Tasker. Created in Lewisham, London and Hackney, London.

“Often, for me,” Dan Snaith tells Apple Music, “the worst enemy of making music is thinking too much about it. I just *do* it, and what it is and why it is comes into focus later.” Doing, and making people dance, were the drivers for the Toronto producer’s first Daphni album since 2017’s *Joli Mai*. *Cherry* is a dazzlingly diverse set—there are bold expressions of house, techno, and disco here—with Snaith (who also releases music as Caribou and Manitoba) admitting it reflects the roller coaster of the early 2020s. “There are tracks on here that were made in the depths of the pandemic, when I was yearning for clubs to return and experiencing music collectively,” he says. “And there were tracks made as things started to reopen. I wanted something to play at my first DJ gigs and wondered what would connect people after so long away.” One of the record’s most striking characteristics is its directness. Tracks are relatively short—and cut deliciously to the chase. “They’re mostly without intros or outros,” Snaith says. “The music just careens between ideas and moods—as if under the control of a particularly mercurial DJ. I like that style of DJing anyway. Alternating between hypnosis—the same loop for a long time—and surprise. This album captures that, I hope.” Read on for Snaith’s track-by-track guide. **“Arrow”** “The loop that makes up this album is so simple but somehow alluring. It doesn’t need to do much of anything—it just needs you to keep staring at it. One of my favorite things about dance music is that, with the aid of repetition, small variations can seem momentous. I also like the idea that the album starts with no messing around—straight in at full speed—and then stands pretty much still throughout this track.” **“Cherry”** “This is one of the last tracks I made and, somehow, filled in a puzzle piece that I didn’t know was missing. As soon as I’d finished it, I knew that it was going to be a central track on the album. That twisting, turning synth line that’s both disorienting and compelling is like a musical ouroboros—the snake eating its own tail.” **“Always There”** “This is one of my favorite tracks to play out in my DJ sets, probably because it works when it shouldn’t. The textures in this track—the fast guitar lines, snaking reed instrument, and shakers—stand out immediately in a club, where people are used to dancing to drum machines and synthesizers. The arrangement makes you wait for things to drop a couple times, and often, when I play it in a club, I tease it out for much longer, so that the riff has been weaving in and out for a long time before it drops.” **“Crimson”** “I’m not much of a ‘gear’ person, but every so often, I come across a piece of equipment that sounds so fantastic and has so much character that it feels like it writes the music for you. The synthesizer playing the main blippy pattern here is an ARP 2600, and you can almost hear me moving the sliders on it as I try to lure the track to a climax.” **“Arp Blocks”** “The title here refers to the ARP 2600 that is the only instrument in this track. I don’t think I’ve ever released any music that is one live take of one instrument playing solo before. The ‘Blocks’ of the title refers to a piece of software that allowed me to control the 50-plus-year-old ARP synthesizer in a completely new way and get sounds out of it that would not have been previously possible, allowing the synth pattern to twist and turn and jump up and down to different harmonic registers.” **“Falling”** “People who know my music probably know that I have a hard time resisting a repeated hook—a mantra that takes on more meaning the more it’s repeated. This one could have stayed longer and been built out into a larger track, but to keep the pace fast, it sticks around for only a little over a minute before we’re on to something else.” **“Mania”** “A lot of the tracks on this album have a loose, playful feeling, and that really reflects how it was making them. Even though it’s just me in the studio, it’s still possible to capture that sense of jamming—putting one loop or sound together and then rushing to another piece of equipment and playing the first thing that comes to mind on it. This track came together pretty much in the order that you hear the elements being introduced into the track. There’s a point, halfway through, where the harmony changes and the track feels like it’s floating—that’s always a really nice moment when I play this out in a club.” **“Take Two”** “So much of my favorite dance music is about the search for a perfect loop—often a loop that harkens back to house music’s antecedent: disco. This track weaves a few different loops together. In fact, it started out as two different tracks that I realized, at some point, were in the same key, the same world—but hopefully sound like they could almost be the parts from a forgotten disco record. Music that almost sounds like a live band, but not quite.” **“Mona”** “I love techno that’s based around one repeated stab sound. The best of those tracks tend to last a long time and do very little other than roll along, using repetition as their central premise. This track sets up that way but is an example of how I decided to shift the focus of some of these tracks away from making arrangements that would be most effective in a club and stick to what’s most exciting on the album, where the shorter tracks mean that different sounds and vibes are flying by rapidly. Digital DJing means that it’s not hard to rearrange and extend the tracks you’re playing on the fly—when I play this track in a DJ set, it usually ends up being about twice the length it is here.” **“Clavicle”** “This track almost didn’t end up on the album. I’d put a version of it on my *Essential Mix* in 2020 and then mostly forgot about it. But just as I was assembling this album, a couple people asked me about it and if I was ever going to release it. I had finished all the other tracks on the album and was about to send the album off to have it mastered and just added this track in at the last minute. I’m glad I did!“ **“Cloudy”** “I grew up playing the piano as my main instrument. There was a time when I thought that I was going to try and make a living as a jazz pianist. I must have spent thousands and thousands of hours playing the piano when I was a kid—so much time that that familiarity will always be with me. The piano you hear on this track isn’t a real one—it’s a software emulation played on a controller keyboard—which is why I can warp it and give it the character that you hear, but feeling so at home with the sound of a piano is why I’ll always return to look for ideas there. There have been a bunch of people online asking what the piano sample is for this track, but it’s not a sample—it’s a loop that I played while noodling around in the studio.” **“Karplus”** “The word ‘Karplus’ refers to a delay effect named after Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong, where a short, pitched delay on a sound creates a note similar to the sound of a plucked string. I’m not sure whether what I’m doing with this track is really the Karplus-Strong effect though—it’s mostly just a drum loop through a phaser!” **“Amber”** “I love the big, chunky, awkward swing of this track. It’s a loop that always feels like it’s just about to topple over and collapse. When I first started going to clubs when I lived in Toronto, DJs from New York would come through town all the time, and when people like Masters at Work would play, people who could really dance would show up—not just people shuffling their feet and pumping their fists in the air like I, and most of us, do when we’re at a club. In my mind, this is the kind of loop that I can imagine getting the kind of reaction that I remember seeing from the dancers at those nights.” **“Fly Away”** “I’m always looking for those tracks that are like a breath of fresh air in a club—that, after hours of playing music with relentless, heavy kick drums, are melodic and euphoric. I made this track with that kind of feeling in mind, and it always has that kind of effect on the room when I’ve played it. People stop dancing and look around; they start whistling and shouting. It’s a great one to play at the end of the night, so why not at the end of an album?”

Bellos y oscuros, los cinco temas de su nuevo EP siguen esa ruta que ya había abierto en su álbum debut, publicado el año pasado en el sello ecuatoriano También: un ambient que explora la magia y la tragedia latinoamericana. “Niños flotando en el cielo”, el tema que abre, contrapone el testimonio psicodélico de un gamín (como se les llamaba a los niños que hace décadas habitaban las calles de las ciudades Colombia) a la melodía de un carrito de helados que se acerca a la distancia, pero que parece nunca llegar; “Nochear” evoca un baile corralero de fantasmas borrachos; “Flores en el río” describe la caída de pétalos violeta sobre las aguas de un río; “Duelo”, en su triste cámara lenta, se oye como el lamento colonial de una tambora; mientras que “Summer of Sacol” evoca una noche de éxtasis hace 20 años en el centro de su natal Bogotá. El nombre del trabajo viene de un fragmento del himno nacional de Colombia que narra la gesta de un patriota que, en medio de la batalla, se inmoló para acabar con un pelotón completo de españoles. “El disco en general se nutre de esa atmósfera”, explica Ezmeralda. “Una imagen bella para una realidad aterradora”. __ Beautiful, lush and also dark, the five tracks of his new EP follow the route already opened by him in his debut album, released last year on the Ecuadorian latinx ambient label También: a soundtrack that explores Latin American magic and tragedy. "Niños flotando en el cielo", the opening track, contrasts the psychedelic testimony of a ‘gamín’ (as the children who inhabited the streets of Colombia at the end of the last century were called) with the melody of an ice cream cart that approaches in the distance, but never seems to arrive; "Nochear" evokes a ‘corralero’ dance of drunken ghosts; "Flores en el río" describes the fall of violet petals on the waters of a river; "Duelo", in its sad slow motion, is heard as the colonial lament of a ‘tambora’; while in "Summer of Sacol" Vallejo recalls a night of ecstasy 20 years ago with his friends, in downtown Bogotá, where he’s from. The name of the work comes from a fragment taken from a verse of the Colombian national anthem that narrates the feats of a hero who, in the midst of battle, immolated himself to wipe out an entire platoon of Spaniards. "The album in general is nourished by that atmosphere," he explains. "A beautiful image for a terrifying reality."

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has shared a new single, 'Someone Close' which is out now via Ninja Tune. Shepherd has also today announced that 'Someone Close' will be released on vinyl alongside the three other new tracks he's shared this year: 'Grammar', 'Vocoder' and 'Problems'. All four will be available on limited vinyl for the first time on 16 December. 'Grammar', 'Vocoder' and 'Problems' were met with widespread praise including a Best New Track from Pitchfork and a glowing review from Resident Advisor describing Shepherd as "one of electronic music's undisputed MVPs". 'Someone Close' changes track completely, something Shepherd has done effortlessly across his career, capping off a run of releases that have showcased the many strings to his bow yet still holds together seamlessly. Following a summer of festival sets at Glastonbury, Coachella and Field Day, this Autumn/Winter Shepherd will take things back indoors. With an upcoming show on an incredible bill from The Warehouse Project he'll follow up with a marathon open-to- close set at London’s brand new 25,000 square-foot club HERE on New Year’s Day 2023.

London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.

When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.

naafi.bandcamp.com/album/desire-path Master: Imaabs Arte: Asma - 'Alas, this flat image wins my love, as I behold it. But I cannot press my arms around the form I see' (2021) cortesía de Deli Gallery N.A.A.F.I ® 2022

It's hot, summer is here, latin tribal techno is as well, and papi Nick León knows it. 'Xtasis' is the title of the EP and it's also the banger that contains impure euphoria, one that is detonated in complicity with the raptor house maestro, Venezuela's finest, DJ Babatr. Meanwhile, 'Grito' is a scandal. It's the call that demands for a rhythm that was looked down upon, but now is his time and this rhythm is driven into the future. The collision of guaracha with edgy sound design is here to stay by the hand of the Miami-based producer. And well, as if that wasn't enough, the Hessle Audio Mainstay, Pearson Sound, arrives to deliver even more Xtasis, to enhance a track that has been creating a burst of joy at festivals and dance-floors around the world, with the astuteness, precision and elegance that only David can do. Finally, NY virtuoso Doctor Jeep reinterprets 'Grito' with a hyper-active, sizzling and delicious approach that blends perreo and d&b with his sharp trademark. blablabla whatever… XTC para todxs, XTC for all.

Atlanta resident Nikki Nair invites you to join his new 4 track EP on Astrophonica - ‘Renormalization Support Group’. It’s a place where we can share our experiences via the help of Nikki’s special ‘not quite sure what you call it’ bass lead Electro Breakbeat programme. Track one is ‘Plug’ - An uptempo low slung booty shaker which will have sound engineers scrambling at cables and faders trying to work out wtf is going on. We’ve all been there so let’s talk about it. Track two is ‘Where Are U’ and encourages us to ask ourselves that question through the exploration of full speed Breakbeat Electro. If we know where we are, we can begin to look into where we are going. Probably the dance floor. Track three is ‘it's NP-Complicated’ which sets out an uncomplicated blend of bubbling bass and simple sympathetic drums, providing us with a network to feel more empowered and to build a sense of community. Track four is ‘Donut Time’ - Well done for finishing the course! You can congratulate yourself with a donut full of squelchy acid jam, glazed with frosted pads and hi hat sprinkles. “Together we can help ourselves be alone together.” - Nikki Nair

Heaven Come Crashing, the sophomore electronic full-length from Brooklyn-based composer and producer Rachika Nayar, finds the protean guitarist and producer pivoting from the ghostly netherworlds of her debut into vivid, fluorescent, cinematic maximalism. On Our Hands Against the Dusk, Nayar used her guitar as the primary source for sound design, mutating the instrument beyond recognition through layers of digital processing. Soon after, the album’s companion EP, fragments, demonstrated the types of raw guitar-playing that would be transfigured into those grander compositions—miniature genre sketches that touched upon everything from post-rock to Midwestern emo. With these two 2021 releases, Rachika resculpted the limits of both guitar and electronic music, placing her at the forefront of various contemporary music scenes in her current home of New York City and more broadly amongst the likes of Fennesz, Julianna Barwick, and Tim Hecker. Heaven Come Crashing retains Nayar’s mangled guitar stylings but expands the color palette by looking not so much to the fretboard, as to the dance floor and the silver screen. Influences enter into the frame ranging from ’90s trance, to early M83, to Yoko Kanno anime soundtracks. With its M1 piano stabs, supersaws, and glimpses of Amen breaks, the album charts a luminescent space between 5 a.m. warehouse raves and the urban freeways of its cover image—romantic, nocturnal, and reckless in its velocity and emotional abandon. On the topic, Nayar says: “I both love and feel so wary of melodrama, because its entire premise is to be uncritical. Taking your most massive emotions at face-value feels so fraught when they partly originate with structures you can’t control, with structures you maybe even feel at war with.” Within this conflicted relationship to its own theatrics, the album wages a battle between surrendering to desire and incinerating it. Heaven Come Crashing invites the listener to revel within fantasy, before helping light the match to burn it down—one final embrace in the dream world before it shatters to pieces ~~~ “Fantasy is scenario, but a scenario in bits and pieces—always very brief, just a glimmer of the narrative of desire. What’s glimpsed is very sharply contoured, very brightly lit, but all of a sudden it’s gone: a body I catch sight of in a car as it goes round a bend, before it plunges into the shadows“ — Barthes, How To Live Together

The caveat with mentioning the 30 years of history John McEntire and Sam Prekop shared before making *Sons Of* is that the album doesn’t exactly sound like anything they’ve done before. McEntire is the drummer of the adventurous, anything-but-rock band Tortoise and the Prekop-fronted Sea and Cake; Prekop is a singer-songwriter who rebutted the harshness of ’90s indie rock with music influenced by lounge jazz and bossa nova. *Sons Of*, by contrast, is made up of four lengthy synth improvisations combining early house, indie pop, and the spacey, ruminative side of IDM. The connective tissue is in the approach, which is somehow adventurous but gentle, experimental but restrained. And while everything here has narrative momentum, their shared language is thick enough that they sound better the longer they go (the sunglasses-indoors sci-fi of “Ascending by Night” and the 24-minute “A Yellow Robe”).

Thrill Jockey is pleased to announce the return of The Soft Pink Truth, the solo electronic project of Drew Daniel, one half of Baltimore-found sound duo Matmos. Asked to explain his new album’s gauntlet-throwing title, Drew Daniel says: “Years ago a friend was DJing in a club and a woman came into the DJ booth and asked ‘is it going to get any deeper than this?’ and the phrase became a kind of mantra for us. What did she really want? This album was created as an attempt to imagine possible musical responses to her question.” Throughout the ten songs of the album, the provocation to go “deeper” prompts promiscuous moves across the genres of disco, minimalism, ambient, and jazz, sliding onto and off of the dancefloor, sweeping higher and lower on the scale of frequencies, engaging both philosophical texts re-set as pop lyrics and wordless glossolalia. Rather than a dryly pursued thesis, the music flows across emotional terrain from upfront peaks to melancholic valleys, often within the same song. This is the case on opening track “Deeper,” which morphs from Brainticket-Esque keyboard loops to a Chic disco groove to a Stars Of The Lid style heavy drone over eleven minutes. Evenly divided between opening lift-off, rhythmic peaks, and extended, spaced-out decrescendos, this is music that flickers and pulses and melts. Though the goal is depth, it also goes sonically wider than any other Soft Pink Truth record in terms of sound source. To craft the album during COVID and social isolation, Daniel assembled a fourteen-piece virtual disco band from friends and allies across the genre spectrum and across the world: Daniel’s romantic and musical partner M.C. Schmidt and friend Koye Berry play piano, Mark Lightcap (Acetone, Dick Slessig Combo) plays acoustic and electric guitar, Jason Willett (Half Japanese) plays bass, Nate Wooley plays trumpet, Brooks Kossover (Drugdealer) plays flute, John Berndt and Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) play saxophone, and shakers, shekere, tumba, triangle, and cajon parts are played by Cuban percussionist Ayoze de Alejandro Lopez. There are chamber instruments as well: harpsichord by Tom Boram, harp by Obadias Guerra, Irish harp by Una Monaghan, and on many tracks, lush string arrangements by Turkish arranger Ulas Kurugullu for violin, viola, and cello that recall the Love Unlimited Orchestra found on classic Barry White albums. From Caracas to Istanbul to Dublin, everyone recorded themselves at home playing along to skeletal demos, and then their contributions were assembled in Daniel’s home studio in Baltimore. This virtual experience of action at a distance, and of community coming together and then returning to solitude might explain the song “Moodswing” (which starts with a popping champagne cork and turns to broken glass halfway through); but that dynamic also explains the mood swings of the album as a whole, as joyful collective playing dissolves into tranquil, reflective atmospheres suitable to music made in response to a moment of doubt, complaint and mixed emotions. There are some perverse pop moments. One side, one, “La Joie Devant La Mort” takes a sentence in French by philosopher and erotica author Georges Bataille (“once more our steps lead us / into the forest and into the night / in search / of joy / before death”) and turns it into the lyrics of a gothic disco anthem with vocals courtesy of Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu). Intoned over scything disco strings and quantized insect noises, Bataille’s cryptic remarks skips the seminar room for a late-night queer cruising ground. On “Wanna Know”, the album title becomes an airy vocal hook as Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes) harmonizes with herself singing “I just really wanna know/is it gonna get any deeper than this?” on top of rubbery bass guitar riffs and shimmering harpsichords that dissolve into a wall of stretched vocal manipulations and low sub-bass. Throughout, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? aims for a kind of psychedelic poolside take on disco, using the steady 120 bpm rhythmic chassis of the music as a launchpad for reverie rather than big room EDM bluster. With its coos and whispers and field recordings layered on top of crisp hi-hats and handclaps, “Trocadero” pays homage to the San Francisco discotheque whose DJs pioneered the slow and sensual afterhours Disco subgenre known as “sleaze.” While there are clubby moments, much of the mood is pastoral, more suited to mushroom trips in a forest than a basement rave. With its endless staircases of arpeggiating oscillators, the thirteen-minute “Sunwash” is the most overtly psychedelic piece and evokes the long-form synth-and-guitar workouts of ‘Rubycon’-era Tangerine Dream. The title can also operate as a dirty joke, and there’s a thread of pansexual eroticism that glides across the album, most notably in “Joybreath”, in which Brooklyn techno artist Rose E Kross intones Bataille’s text in French over throbbing low-end sub-bass, processed moans and vapor trails of synthesizer and saxophone. The record is not afraid to just throw down. “Deeper Than This?” delivers an upfront deep house track with a moody bassline that braids three different vocalists together: Angel Deradoorian sings the album title as a provocative question, Daniel Clark coos wordless soulful responses, and improvisational vocalist Id M Theft Able asks the album title question in a deep male voice over tight drum breaks and ghostly dub drop-outs. The album concludes with a cover of Willie Hutch’s “Now That It’s All Over” (which originally appeared on his soundtrack to “The Mack”); simplifying the chords and speeding up the tempo, Hutch’s funereal soul classic accelerates into an ecstatic peak before melting into whispers, harps, strings and a final acoustic guitar coda from Mark Lightcap. It’s a suitably soft landing for an album that reflects decades spent thinking back upon a moment in a DJ booth that passed in seconds. Sidestepping retro kitsch but paying homage to highly personal interpretations of disco such as Arthur Russell, Don Ray, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and Mandré, or the jazz-funk of Creed Taylor and CTI records, its emphasis upon slowly morphing deep house grooves will also appeal to fans of DJ Sprinkles, Moodymann and Theo Parrish. At once catchy and spacey, poppy and perverse, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? shows a restless musician trying to square the circle of dance music, meditation, repetition, and change. The album was mastered by Heba Kadry and features cover design by Robert Beatty.

Growing up in Chicago, later Detroit-based music producer, Theo Parrish is internationally well known for his own inimitable downtempo house music style. The approach Parrish took to compiling DJ-Kicks was very ambitious, inviting his Detroit peers to produce a collection of brand new material, and in turn creating the first ever all exclusive entry to the esteemed series. "Detroit creates. But rarely imitates. Why? We hear and see many from other places do that with what we originate. No need to follow. Get it straight. In the Great Lakes there are always more under the surface than those that appear to penetrate the top layer of attention and recognition. What about them that defy tradition? Those that side step the inaccurate definitions often given from outside positions? This is that evidence. Enjoy."

On the one hand, you could hear the big beats and blacklight-ready synths of *Icons* as an exercise in ’90s nostalgia—the soundtrack to historically accurate raves made by modern hermits who watched them on YouTube. On the other, it’s a canny next step in the evolution of UK club and bass music, whose bright, propulsive sound served as a rejoinder to the grim majesty of dubstep. Like hyperpop, it’s both stylish and playful: Just follow the mournful robot guides of “Dust” and “Mainframe,” or the rhythm track of “Ghosts,” which simulates the squirming, slightly out-of-control feeling of a strong tickle. They’re weird. But they come in peace.