Reggae with a different ear and different sort of hand on the controls

Forest Swords, the project of English electronic producer Matthew Barnes, suggests a series of answers to a riddle that may have never been posed but proves worth pondering nonetheless: What would reggae sound like if, in terms of overall vibe and tone, it sounded nothing like reggae at all? Forest Swords is aligned with dub, in all its ethereal, abstracted, echo-effected glory, but on Engravings, the first Forest Swords album after an auspicious EP in 2010, the genre’s tenets are treated with a different ear and a different sort of hand on the controls.

“Ljoss” opens with a mix of grainy, ambient electronic textures smeared over eerie electric guitar and drums that crack and ricochet, with a sense of mystery moving in from a distance. “Thor’s Stone” bristles with suggestions of spectral slide whistles and samples of choral vocals made to sound inhuman. All of it sounds like a contemporary reimagining of Goblin’s storied score for the classic 1970s horror movie Suspiria, or else — especially on highlights like “Onward,” “Anneka’s Battle” and “The Plumes” — a uniquely inspired variation on the ghostly, desiccated style of Holy Other, Haxan Cloak and many more.

Stately and restrained orchestrated reworkings

On her 2011 album Conatus, Zola Jesus’s goth-pop proclivities suggested a liking for the new-wave moods of Kate Bush. It’s a short distance from there to classical ornamentation, and she traverses it on Versions, a collection of orchestrated reworkings of songs made in the service of a performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. With arrangements written by JG Thirlwell, a veteran polymath with roots in the industrial band Foetus who has recently done pan-stylistic work for TV’s Adult Swim, Jesus bellows and swoons through material (five songs from Conatus, three from 2010′s Stridulum II, and one new song, “Fall Back”) made especially dramatic and grand by this backing. “Avalanche (Slow)” opens with a mix of drawn-out drones and intercutting strings that summon a cinematic sense of anticipation. “Fall Back” is more eerie, discordant, and strange, with extra oomph introduced by drums. “Run Me Out” seethes with pent-up energy that threatens to break out into industrial, but for the most part, Versions tacks toward the stately and the restrained.

The work of an exploratory electronic artist increasingly in control of his gear

As he does in his role as a guiding light of Black Dice, the mercurial Eric Copeland, on his sixth solo release, summons a strange sort of collage music that is both ramshackle and sleek, with seams exposed to show the myriad ways in which electronics can be manhandled, reassembled, and smoothed out to a shine. “Rokzi” opens with a staggering drum-machine beat and what sounds like a human voice stuck in a tight, confined loop, before the gates open and allow entry to an angelic sample graced with melody and a sense of space. “Grapes” follows suit with an even more prominent drum loop paired with a comparatively easy, luscious, bass-laden groove.

Taken together, the dizzying one-two punch lays out the sound that defines Joke in the Hole, which shows Copeland as an exploratory electronic artist increasingly in control of his gear. Parts of the album are danceable in a would-be techno fashion (“Kash Donation”; “Babes in the Woods,” after an extremely weird opening minute or so), and it hides lots of surprises as tracks zig and zag between passages that sound barely related to each other but are conjoined in ways that make sense. There’s a fascinating suggestion of logic to these pieces, even if that logic won’t do anything so logical as to give itself up.

Indie rock brushed with jazzy complexity

Brazos mastermind Martin Crane uses conventional tools — guitar, bass, drums, every now and then some keyboard or tambourine — to build intricate songs that lean hard on idiosyncrasy. On Saltwater, the second Brazos album (and first for the fine label Dead Oceans), Crane orchestrates a mad indie-rock clatter that sounds effortless, easy, always on the brink of breaking but never really at risk of falling apart. “Always On” strikes a telling opening note with feverishly strummed acoustic guitar, a funky bass line, streaks of synths, and drums that tumble as if played inside a dryer. Over top is Crane’s expressive voice, oddly adenoidal but agile and expressive. “How the Ranks Was Won” works all the same elements into a sweeping drama, with a casual shift of styles subtly and impressively prevalent on the rest of the record. The result is indie rock brushed with jazzy complexity and delivered with all the nonchalance of old Brazilian record spinning on a beach in the sun.

Vintage Romanian sounds that are out there and then some

During their heyday, Rodion G.A. conjured the vintage sounds of Romania in the 1980s, using reel-to-reel tape machines and gear that included guitar and a slew of synthesizers and sound-processors. The results, most of which haven’t been released before now, are out there and then some, as you might guess from an opening track that boasts the portentous title “Alpha Centauri.” That star, among the brightest in the universe and certainly the most mythologized, is rarely paid tribute in understated fashion and, indeed, there’s a lot of spaciness in Rodion G.A.’s ode: robotic rhythms, strange phasing, imitations of lasers, lots of eerie-toned synths. (There’s also an insane break around 2:05 just waiting to be sampled by the likes of Death Grips.) After that rousing instrumental intro, The Lost Tapes runs off in wildly different directions. “Cantec Fulger” introduces vocals with a cadence and a sense of melody suggestive of their Eastern European roots. Tracks like “Disco Mania” drum up a sense of propulsion and weight directed toward the dance floor — though a comparatively rinky-dink ’80s version, to be sure. “Imagini Din Vis” leans hard on guitars in a way that lands closer to garage rock than anything expressly electronic. At the center of every digression is an endearing rawness and an entrancing sense of sound that makes for music more alive than mere history.

A new kind of electronic mood music

Mount Kimbie rose up in the UK in the wake of dubstep, though a different kind of dubstep than the big, shuddering, concussive kind that’s now lacing megalithic dance clubs and multiday festivals in the name of EDM. Theirs was a haunted, refined variety that homed in on details and favored negative space, and the logic of it leant to the practice of writing songs (as opposed to just dance tracks), which Mount Kimbie undertook around the same time as fellow post-dubstep compatriot James Blake. Similarities with Blake figured into Mount Kimbie’s 2010 full-length debut Crooks & Lovers, but on their sophomore album (and first for the big electronic label Warp), the duo — Dominic Maker and Kai Campos — arrive upon a Mount Kimbie sound wholly their own. Displaying a remarkable range, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth wanders between atmospheric song forms and pumped-up club tracks, each one unique and ready to blur around its boundaries. “Home Recording” opens on a mellow, melodic note with bits of guitar and horns laid over easygoing vocals and synthesizer chords, supplemented by warm washes of bass. “Break Well” plays a neat trick by switching from ambient drama to a funky fit of jangling-guitar instrumental pop about two-thirds of the way through, and other tracks toggle between smart dance-floor fodder (“Made to Stray”) and delicate forays into slower but still scintillating tempos (“So Many Times, So Many Ways,” “Sullen Ground”). All together, it’s a new kind of electronic mood music with signals of more moods to move through still.

The frequent indie collaborator proves most formidable and impressive on his own

Avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson’s credits as a collaborator include a slew of indie friends — Arcade Fire, Feist, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and TV on the Radio among them — but he’s most formidable and impressive on his own, with just a metal horn and a pair of heaving lungs to help push air through its twisty, peculiar channels. Stetson’s expansive style finds fine form in “Hunted,” an unusual instrumental track that matches ghostly, wordless cries to a sax treatise in which Stetson taps on keys percussively while blowing out sounds as if summoning some strange prehistoric beast. “High Above a Grey Green Sea” follows in a comparatively subtle mode, abstracting the sax until it’s mostly a tool for texture and extrapolations on timbre and tone. Stetson is credited for playing alto, tenor and bass saxophones (the latter a burly monster of an instrument), but the presence of each, in all cases, conforms to the whole of his unique sound-world. Another habitué of that world is Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, who contributes vocals on four songs in a very Bon Iver-ian way (see, especially, “Who the Waves are Roaring For”). His nuanced presence is never unwelcome but it is also ultimately unnecessary — a testament to the powers that Stetson wields on his own.

Vertiginous dance music that takes cues from the Chicago-borne "footwork" sound

In its serious, almost spiritual commitment to repetition, Slava’s vertiginous dance music takes cues from the Chicago-borne “footwork” sound. Many of the tracks on Raw Solutions, the Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based DJ/producer’s debut album, take a snippet of a vocal sample and circle around it until it’s been spied from every conceivable angle. “Girl Like Me” offers an early example, with an R&B-tipped diva voice singing, “No, you never had a girl quite like me” once and, then ad infinitum. It happens to more delirious effect in “Heartbroken,” which revisits the titular word dozens of times, with ethereal electronic processing, until the result turns hallucinatory. The effect is similar to the disassociation you feel when speaking a single word repeatedly (think or say the word “king” 50 times and see if you’re still having visions of royalty after). Apart from his love for spin-cycle sampling, Slava showcases a nimble production style that favors house music-derived rhythmic syncopation and infusions of pan-electronic elements like rave sirens (“Heartbroken”) and quasi-jungle “rinse-outs” (“Girls on Dick”). It’s all clenched and economical and tight, and it never lets up.

More recently, after a stint as a professor in Berlin, Bartos revisited archival sounds he made during his Kraftwerk years and refashioned them in the form of Off the Record, an album full of taut, allusive synth-pop songs that signal back to the past while peering toward the future. Over Skype from Berlin, Bartos talked about both with a mix of objective dispassion and palpable excitement — characteristics that play into the music he favors more than 60 years after he was born.

Looking back at your years in Kraftwerk, with so much accomplished and such profound influence put into play, what makes you most proud?

We had so much rejection at the time that there was really no time to be proud. We struggled really. I remember for the first concerts in England, for instance, we had this huge centerfold in the paper New Musical Express, and they made a collage with us sitting in the center of the Nuremberg Trials. We had to face a lot of rejection. Finally, in the end of the ’80s with MTV and especially in the ’90s, it was getting better all the time. But I was not really very proud of it. It was just daily work.

Did you not think the music significant, personally? Did it feel powerful and new to you, or not necessarily?

We felt we were always some sort of pioneers in terms of production. Before the computer arrived in the studio we had good analog machinery working, with sequencers and electronic drum devices. They were custom-made, and we always thought, “When will the black guys from America discover that a drum box can have a really groovy beat?” Finally, they did! I remember, when I visited, going down the streets of Manhattan and seeing a guy with a boombox, or ghetto blaster, and doing some weird dancing. Now I would call it “breakdancing,” but I didn’t know it at the time. They were listening to loops of Trans-Europe Express, a segment from “Metal on Metal,” and they were head-spinning and stuff like that. That made me really happy.

Did you breakdance yourself?

I tried it, once. [Laughs.] When I first came to America, it was 1975, and I remember being in Memphis, Tennessee. After a concert, all four of us — there was a cover band playing some rock ‘n’ roll tunes, and all four of us were dancing. It was a very happy time. It was one of the Elton John hit singles. The covers band played the pop charts, and they were really good players. This was pre-hip-hop, pre-club music, pre-Detroit techno, pre-all that stuff.

In reference to the cover band as good players and musicians, do you think of yourself, as an electronic-musician, as a good player, or is it something else, something different? Do you think of your work more in the language of programming and organizing, or is it all musicianship to you?

If I had to come up with one occupation, I would say “musician.” That’s true. But for the last 10 years or so, I stepped more into the convergence of image and sound. When I was a professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, I was free to come up with my own curriculum, so I had a closer look at the history of filmmaking and what role sound played in film. All the theoretical stuff, people like [storied sound-editor] Walter Murch, came up. In terms of music culture, to me at least, it’s much more important how the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s new movie is than the latest Lady Gaga record. I think all the intelligence, since the business model is no longer of any interest for a huge industry, the interest of music culture is in filmmaking: music in films and with films. And music is only one part of sound in movies. We have dialogue, we have the sound of the environment, we have the ambience, we have music. So there’s much more to talk about.

What is the earliest interesting use of sound in cinema that you teach?

I look at sound in a broader picture. Beginning of the 19th century, painting was getting abstract. Kandinsky was very jealous of what musicians and composers could do. He was drawing and it was very hard for him to get emotion in a picture. So he thought, “What can I do to bring music into my pictures?” He was desperate with this idea. He called his paintings like “Movement in Blue,” “Composition in Yellow” and so on. At the same time, there was this new medium of film coming up. People who read Kandinsky’s [journal] The Blue Rider had the idea of bringing abstract painting onto a timeline. So suddenly you have on this timeline rectangles, circles and so on, and those geometric pieces started to dance. Doing so, they thought, “OK, we have now what we’ll call Gesamtkunstwerk (translation: “a total work of art”). It’s really interesting how these media are talking to each other and how they complement each other. This tradition brought me into the kind of performance I do nowadays. During the ’90s, we had this movement of VJs — in any club they had VJ putting on the walls of the clubs visual candy, or whatever you want to call it. So I wanted to take early movements, from Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttman — these very early ideas of abstraction on a timeline — and treat them visually like music together with the VJ movement. This brought me to the kind of performance I do nowadays.

There was a fantastic exhibition of films by Oscar Fischinger at the Whitney Museum in New York recently.

Fischinger went to Disney and he took part in Fantasia. But he was never happy really in Hollywood.

Your new album draws inspiration from sounds sourced from your past. What motivated you to revisit them?

It was very simple. A guy from the label kept asking me, again and again and again, if I had any old tapes from the ’70s or ’80s when I was in Kraftwerk. I kept saying no, but after I stopped teaching I wanted to do a new record, and he brought me back to this time. Finally I decided to do this marathon effort — it’s nothing you want to do: to clean up your attic. It was all in boxes, huge amounts of material. I always thought, “Oh, maybe later, maybe next year…” But then, being German, I ended up transferring it all into the computer. When I was there in the computer, I only saw the dates — 77-8-2, 76-7-4, and so on. It looked like an auditory diary, and that’s when I thought I could make it concept and make it real. I delved really deep into all this material. I brought together pieces that didn’t belong together and stuck them together and worked them into a collage. Remakes [new simulations of pre-existing sounds] were done with old instruments: an old Moog, an Arp, all this old stuff. I recontextualized. I replayed the instruments, old synthesizers from the ’70s, with their pitch and so on.

The sounds go back to your years in Kraftwerk. Are you in touch with any members of the group still?

I just had a telephone conversation with Wolfgang [Flür]. My other colleague Florian [Schneider] is very happy not to be a robot for the rest of his life. So there is just one person left [Ralf Hütter]. But Florian, Wolfgang, and I are in contact.

Have you talked to Ralf?

[Makes shrugging gesture with his shoulders, beneath a suggestively sly smile.]

A press-release for your new album says “Forget about nostalgia in 3-D.” Have you seen any of the recent Kraftwerk shows?

I got invited by The Guardian to attend the Tate Modern shows [in London] and to write a review, but I turned it down. I don’t have the time. I have so much to do now. This record took me two and half years now, and I’m still working on it, because I’ve made six videos. I’m going to London to do screenings, and I’m going to big cities in Europe. I know all the material of the Kraftwerk concerts, so I’ve been there already, sonically.

In the history of Kraftwerk, you’re credited for making big contributions in terms of melody and in terms of rhythm. Often those are regarded as separate and distinct musical properties. Do they work that way for you, or are melody and rhythm one and the same?

Music is a time-based art, and there are a lot of ways to articulate time. In life, we came up with this concept of dividing time into years, months, weeks, days and so on. In music, we came up with this dimension of meter. We invented bars and can say this bar is 4/4 or 3/4 or 7/4, and within these metric devices we put our rhythms. But the question if I make a distinction between rhythms and melodies or not…Well, first of all, what we think of as rhythm is a formula, because we are used to a drummer playing a rhythmic formula and repeating it. So the “Numbers” beat is a formula. But if I compose a song or a piece of music, rhythm for me is how all the instruments complement each other. It’s very important that the bass line and the melodic line and the chords each all have a rhythmic quality. But in the end, it’s all a line that you can see in a score. The drum beat is just one part of it.

Do you keep up with contemporary electronic music? Do you go to clubs in Berlin?

I had the privilege for about five years to talk to young musicians in Berlin. They had a lot of respect because of my biography, so the first thing I did with them was take them to see the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to attend a rehearsal. Afterward, we talked about scores what [conductor] Simon Rattle does in front of the orchestra. We discovered all the similarities between a score and the timeframe used by a computer. In the end, all these young DJs and musicians got the idea that it’s all the same, and it really doesn’t matter where it comes from. If it’s from someone in front of a computer or 80 people onstage in an orchestra, they have the same blood in their veins. We are all musicians, and we are all doing the same thing. It really doesn’t matter. It’s all about how the recipient receives it.

When you speak of the audio-diary aspect of your new album, do you mean a diary in a soul-baring kind of way or was it more a store of archives?

The intention was not to write a diary — it was just a scrapbook to evaluate ideas. I had no emotional thing going on where I wanted to write down what was going on in my life or how I felt. Years later, when I put it into a computer, I decided to call it a diary because in the end, that is what it is, if I look at it as a whole. It was sort of like meeting myself as a young guy, innocent and naïve, and now, with my experience as a producer, I could speak with myself. I was not trying to patronize that young guy, but it was OK — I think he would have liked it!

In your song “Without a Trace of Emotion, “you sing “I wish I could remix my life to another beat.” What did you mean?

Everybody keeps referring to my former band because it got so important over 40 years of existence. But I’m quite ambivalent about it. Sometimes it’s nice, because people are interested in my work still and I have contributed to some famous songs that became evergreens. But sometimes it’s really annoying that I always have to work so hard to get even close to the same reception for my music now. It’s not that good — a song like “The Model” cannot be that good because “The Model” was written more than 30 years ago, and it has gone through so many filters of time. Maybe in 30 years from now people won’t want to be so picky with my solo stuff. With that song in particular ["Without a Trace of Emotion"], I was trying to work this out. I came up with a story where I meet Herr Karl, which was the name of Kraftwerk showroom dummy, and I start a conversation with him. I talk to him and he talks to me. “I won’t let go, I won’t let go,” he says. And I tell him, “Red shirt, black tie, you’re history, you’re history.” I made a video for it, and it shows Herr Karl in all of his costumes: a red shirt, a Tour de France outfit, acting like a model. It became really funny without being comic. You can see me walking on this famous street in Hamburg where the Beatles used to play — I live very close by. Then suddenly I am passing this Panopticon and see Herr Karl. I had to do it just once in my life, to make it subject of an album and especially one song. “Without a Trace of Emotion” sums it up for me very well.

A pointedly eclectic double album

One way for a long-running electronic-music act to ensure their listeners stay freaked out and confounded — two emotional qualities that have been Autechre’s specialties since their dawning IDM days — is to release a double-album that clocks in at a little over two hours. Another is to make a hectic opening track that falls apart so drastically that listeners might wonder if their playback systems have entered their death throes. So it goes about halfway through “Fleure,” the first of 17 pointedly eclectic tracks on Autechre’s superabundant Exai. The album begins its dissertation on variety with the English duo’s patented mix of abstract haphazardness and meticulous organization, and they expand outward exponentially from there. The 10-minute “irlite (Get 0)” opens with a grotty mix of refracted beats and noise before drifting into a spell of (comparatively) sumptuous groove science, almost like an Autechre version of house music. Melodies snake and swerve through almost every track otherwise, taking their time to develop and resolve, when they resolve at all. And the beats — well, they bristle, bray, lean back, zoom forward, break up, and beam out toward the outer edges of the cosmos, where music so serious and austere might provide a suitable soundtrack.

Sleek, spacious electronic music

Maxmillion Dunbar, a DJ/producer from Washington, D.C., makes sleek, spacious electronic music pitched between the current vogues for the rhythmic action of vintage Chicago house and the heady contemplation of cosmic synthesizer jams. About half of House of Woo plays as certifiable dance music, with upright rhythms that assert themselves with force, while the other half has nary a beat to speak for. Representing the former, “Slave to the Vibe” opens with unbound ’80s keyboard sounds, patiently arrayed in floating fashion, that snap into a formalist grid when the beat kicks in a little more than two minutes in. The way the hi-hat hangs in what sounds like a sweaty expanse of the stratosphere evokes old Chicago house anthems by the likes of Larry Heard (Mr. Fingers, Fingers Inc.), but “Woo” pulls back, quiets down, and drifts into comparatively ambient territory. A few beats still clack and clang, but the background textures creep the fore, and a wandering, thinking-out-loud synth-riff establishes itself in a way that remains present in tracks like “Coins for the Canopy” and “The Figurine (Nod Mix).” The funky dancefloor-filler “Ice Cream Graffiti” goes big and beat-intensive again, but it’s never long before the sound spaces out and spreads in a manner befitting the title of “Loving the Drift.”

An infectious sense of Matmos being as weird as they want to be

For those who thought the endearingly eggheaded conceptualists in Matmos could not get more cerebral — this is a duo, after all, whose music has been sourced from the sounds of surgery, digitally deconstructed 19th-century battlefield hymns and readings of the serpentine philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein — consider The Marriage of True Minds. The concept intriguing: Willing test subjects submitted to sensory-deprivation techniques, then “listened” as Matmos member Drew Daniel tried to telepathically communicate the concept for the new Matmos album to them. Recordings of the resulting interactions (the spoken ones, of course, but who knows if that’s all?) figure into each of the songs on The Marriage of True Minds, which covers all kinds of strange ground.

How exactly the idea for the album figures into the actual tracks is hard to tell, but it’s clear from the way that “You” wanders mysteriously before bursting open into a full-bodied dance track that Matmos have an increasingly real command over what they’re doing musically. The fidgets and tricks employed in their production work sound looser, more natural and free, and that gives a real sense of play to sounds that have sometimes in the past proven to be otherwise stiff and sterile. On top of all that is an infectious sense of Matmos — in bizarre tracks like “Ross Transcript” (like a trip down a demented radio dial) and “Teen Paranormal” (a surprisingly accomplished and cool night-drive electro vamp) — being as weird as they want to be. And better at it too.

Bursting with life and a superabundance of soul

Jamie Lidell has made a career-long habit of swerving, with periods devoted to out-there electronic futurism and then, by surprise, vintage throwback soul. His self-titled album makes good on the prospects of both, with an expansive, prismatic sound and a heartrending voice that proves decidedly human. More digital than recent Lidell albums, which paid explicit tribute to ’60s soul, it sounds more in line with the ’80s, when the influence of New Wave brought swelling psychodrama into R&B. “Big Love” could score a scene in any number of good/bad ’80s movies (the party scene in Back to School, say), but it’s also remarkable for the way it subtly builds to a fever pitch without seeming to have changed much at all. “Do Yourself a Favor” struts and preens over a space-funk groove that would make Justified-era Justin Timberlake proud, while “why_ya_why” slows down and goes slurry over a sci-fi Mardi Gras march. All of it bursts with life and a superabundance of soul, however real or imagined the time and place for the minting of that soul might be.

A homespun feel with an accomplished sense of songcraft

Buke and Gase certainly don’t lack novelty, but they also don’t sit back and let that novelty do their work for them. The New York duo’s instruments are self-styled and handmade — the “buke,” a modified and electrified baritone ukulele, and the “gase,” a hybrid of guitar and bass — but their shared approach to sound and song are unusual enough to make a lasting impression on its own. “Houdini Crush” introduces a lurching, leering attack informed by punk agitation and math-rock complexity, with the searching voice of Arone Dyer careening strangely, yet always melodically, over top.

Aron Sanchez supplies heavy layers of texture with the gase, while the two share percussive duties with an arsenal of foot-actived drums and tambourine-like shakers (the “toe-bourine,” for example). It all has a homespun feel to it, like something sourced from an art-school workshop by two friends taking a break from a big sculpture project and just playing around. But there’s an accomplished sense of songcraft at work too, with highlights (“In the Company of Fish,” “Twisting the Lasso of Truth”) that navigate strange paths to new, unimagined forms.

An impressive mix of moods pulling from the past and present

Julia Holter makes music for an ever-changing carnival of the mind. One moment she’s cooing dreamily, like a woman lost in the clouds of her own imagining, and the next she’s thinking her way through incisive lyrics about the cerebral ’60s art-film Last Year at Marienbad. Some of her sounds come across as childlike and lost, others are clearly and thoroughly composed. She demonstrates incredible range, often in the space of a single time-defying song. It makes for an impressive mix of moods, one that Holter first revealed on Tragedy, her striking debut from late 2010 that wowed most of those who heard it. Just a few months later comes Ekstasis, another album made up of its own distinctive charms. “Marienbad” opens in a stately fashion, striking out into in an expectant expanse between the Beach Boys at their most elegant and the smeary psychedelic surplus of bands like Broadcast. Somehow, even as it invokes allusions to styles from distant pasts, Ekstasis sounds contemporary and new. Parts played on what sounds like lutes and harpsichords mingle with ethereal electronics, and Holter’s affecting voice – small but resourceful in the way it wanders – makes for a sense of immediacy that rewards full attention in the here and now.

File under: Sensuous, slithery electronic pop with post-punk underpinnings and pre-studio dance-music sheen

For fans of: Peaking Lights, Laurel Halo, The Flying Lizards, Ital

From: Estonia

Personae: Maria Minerva

Maria Minerva, a somewhat mysterious artist from Estonia, first emerged with a cassette release that was both strangely good and intriguingly in-step with the trend toward moody music pitched somewhere between the dance floor and the bedroom. That album, Tallinn at Dawn, came out in 2011 on the Los Angeles indie label Not Not Fun, and the short time since, Minerva has released a 12-inch single, a full-length, and an EP on the slightly dancier Not Not Fun sub-label, 100% Silk. Charting the differences between them is less illuminating than finding the commonality: a playfulness that’s alternately cerebral and coy, and a lightness of touch at the controls. She sings too, with a voice that stretches out and rises up from deep pools of echo.

On Minerva’s latest effort, Will Happiness Find Me? , she plays with different sounds and different tempos, with a mind toward both vintage club music and futuristic pop at once. In New York from London, where she has lived for the last few years while working toward a master’s degree, Minerva spoke with eMusic’s Andy Battaglia about getting soused with a feminist legend, reconciling the study of Marxism with a need to work, and getting down as a young girl to Basement Jaxx.

On playing a show at Urban Outfitters for Fashion Week in New York:

I felt out in the cold, because when you’re performing a show for people who come and go, it’s scary. It was a good experience, because I’ve never done anything like that. I’ve always been in safe environments where people know me – or, at least, know what they’re getting. Except a few times, like last week in Australia, when I did a weird panel talk that was like a Saturday Night Live-style talk show where everybody was like 45-plus. They had [noted feminist author and academic] Germaine Greer on the panel! There was no theme – it was just, like, a fun panel. The reward was that I got to hang out with Germaine Greer. She’s 73 and I’m 24, and we were drinking. I had a bottle of Jameson on my rider. [Laughs.]

On recently completing her thesis:

I turned in my thesis and [my coursework] should be over by January, hopefully. My thesis is on “nonsensical voice and glossolalia,” basically on vocalisms. It could have been fun, but I was so stressed out. I was here in New York in April and my mind was already fixed on getting back. I was waiting on a visa and couldn’t really count on it, so when I finally got it, everything else just seemed like something I needed to do before I could go and fuck off. [Laughs.]

On learning to like dance music:

I remember very precisely. I was 13, and I got really into French house. Around the same time [I also got into] electroclash, like Miss Kitten, Felix da Housecat, Fischerspooner. And everything that came after Daft Punk. When Remedy by Basement Jaxx came out in 1999, I didn’t have a CD player yet, so my dad recorded it on tape for me. So I was listening to Remedy on a Walkman at 11. It was such a fascinating collage of sounds, and it still is. I can still listen to Remedy and it’s awesome. Also Cassius and some more mainstream things helped me discover the house formula, or disco-inspired dance music. Then I went in deeper and started listening to, like, Marshall Jefferson.

On deciding to make dance music of her own:

It was all like two years ago. My first releases are all weirdo music. It wasn’t even a question: dance music just seemed the most normal thing to me. I went out dancing every Friday night for years. That was the only interesting thing going on in terms of night life for me. I hate the idea of “gigs.” It’s boring. I’m not interested in it. When I go out, I just want somebody to DJ from about 10 to 6.

On the notoriously arty, progressive, theory-strewn Goldsmiths college at University of London:

It was wonderful. It’s a very nice place if you want to study the type of stuff that I studied. There are loads of like-minded people there, but I feel like I didn’t meet many of them, because I was always working. When you work and try to do music 24 hours a day, to make the most of [the college experience] I guess you need to have a trust fund or something, so you can go to every talk by every Marxist. Instead of going to Marxist talks, I went to work. [Laughs.] It’s hard to describe what it’s like there. I don’t think the majority of people would say it even qualifies as “higher education,” but it was cool.

On her favorite music writer, Simon Reynolds:

He incorporates a lot of theory, but he’s also just a very good essayist and a good writer, very precise and intelligent, but at the same time very easy to read. He never exhausts you or puts you off from what he’s trying to say. He also gives an amazing historical overview of different genres of music in ways that people don’t often talk about. He’s extremely encyclopedic and goes over everything, and mentions bands that people don’t remember anymore. He’s an archivist in addition to being a theorist. You know it’s good music writing when you read about other music and it makes you want to make your own music. My main [favorite] book of his was always The Sex Revolts, which he wrote with his wife [Joy Press]. But his post-punk history [Rip It Up and Start Again] changed the course of my taste for a year. I was only listening to music from like 1978-84. He led me to so many things. I was all about going back in time and going through everything, and he had something to do with that.

On other music writing she likes:

I’ve read a lot of music writing in general. Often musicians say they are not interested or they don’t want to know, but I can’t say the same. I was reading Paul Morley or Greil Marcus, mainly from the UK and the U.S. But then there are some books that I’ve never managed to read about music, like the Thomas Mann book based on Schoenberg, Doctor Faustus. This is my goal for life – they say it can be handy when you think about music or being a person who makes music. The Thomas Mann was the only one I couldn’t read yet so far. It’s translated into Estonian though.

On her stature back home in Estonia:

It’s so small. But I’ve been away for two years, and I don’t think they care. Why should they care? I don’t want to let this thought into my head, but sometimes it does: wanting to show people at home what you can do without their help and without their support. There is a lot of help and support there, but sometimes I go on a website there and the comments are the most horrible things that I’ve ever seen. People are just mean. Sometimes also funny but usually just mean. Also my dad is kind of known there, so some people have come up with weird conspiracies of why I’m in the newspaper in the first place. My dad is in the media – he has a TV show and a radio show, and he writes for a newspaper, but it’s all comedy and satire, so it doesn’t have anything to do with him being able to decide who ends up in the music pages. I’m used to people always associating me with my dad back home. Sometimes I try to avoid being interviewed there, but every once and a while I do something. The name of his TV show…it doesn’t translate. I don’t have any idea…kind of like “to put somebody in their place”? The worst things I’ve ever read about myself have come from Estonia. But it’s also such a new country still and everybody is just starting to travel a lot, young people at least. Everybody who’s 35-plus has always been there.

The results of his evolution find fine form on Beams, a collection of bewitching songs that rub up against dance music and art-rock while taking up a new sort of station in between. Sometimes it sounds like futuristic David Bowie in a sullen mood; other times it evokes notions of vintage disco dressed up in sleek and ecstatic new clothes. Through it all, Dear creeps out of various corners to present himself as a genuine talent still curious about where he yet stands to go. Dear talked to eMusic’s Andy Battaglia about connecting different kinds of dots, watching electronic music blow up big all around him, and a past-time he retains from growing up in Texas.

The portrait cover-art for Beams is really striking. Who painted it?

That’s by Michael Cina, who’s a longtime Ghostly contributor. He’s done a lot of covers and one-off art pieces, but it’s the first time he’s ever done anything for my music. We tried to come up with a cool concept and talked over ideas about colors and themes and overall direction. But then, at the end of our conversation, I said, “After this is done, I’d like you to do a portrait of me that I could have for my own personal enjoyment.” He said, “Well, I think you just changed everything — that needs to be the album cover!” The idea kind of ballooned and we did a video piece around it. I said, “You have to come out to New York and I’ll sit for a real portrait painting — it has to be a real thing. And if we do that, we have to film it.” Then I started thinking we should have a musician play around us, and a poet read between us. Then we decided to get a dancer. We turned the whole painting process into an installation of sorts. He tried to paint me while he was being affected by the dancer’s movement, the poet’s words, and the musician’s music. It took a 10-hour day to paint and shoot everything. It turned out to be a whole project in and of itself. It was definitely the most elaborate album-cover I’ve ever done. I love bringing other artists in. Creating art like that is great, because you’re doing something just for the sake of creation. It made for the album cover in the end, but, really, it was a way to let four other people get a shot at what they do. I love being able to connect dots that wouldn’t have connected before.

You’ve been recording with a more song-oriented approach and playing live with a band and for a solid several years now. Looking back, what was your main motivation for that change?

The band is constantly evolving, and the performance is constantly evolving. There’s no final golden key to make it all work the right way, so I approach it all very open-ended and I’m always tweaking things. It’s way more open-ended than DJing or playing a live techno set, which is a lot more linear. But it’s changed over the past six or seven years, when I first started playing with a band, as everyone gets better with repetition and gets more comfortable on stage. That only comes with time. I hope it’s just as different six or seven years from now, when I’m looking back at this time. I like things to happen by accident.

Have your performances with a live band changed the way you record?

The band only exists in the live element. All the stuff I make is just myself at home, playing around in the studio. I play guitar and stuff. There’s never really any live drums — I can’t play drums, or at least not that well. When the songs are done, the rest of the guys come on board and are given this template of a song as it stands on the album. Then I say, “I’m going to take out this part and that part, and you guys tell me what you want to play there to fill it in.” You get this sort of hybridization that makes for a far more interesting experience.

Going from the DJ booth to center stage with a microphone, how do you feel you have evolved and progressed as a “frontman”?

I’ve definitely grown into some sort of stature on stage that I did not have in the beginning. I was always very careful not to force anything and act like somebody I wasn’t. I didn’t want to come up with a persona and tell myself, “Okay, this is what you’re supposed to be like on-stage.” In that sense, I think I was a little lost at the beginning. I was figuring it out as I went along. Toward the end of my first band lineup, I started getting my footing and was starting to feel like, “Okay, this is what I do, and I am meant to be here.” With my band now, it’s all cool. Thinking about what I’m doing up there has gone away. I really just try to disconnect entirely. I’m not trying to be myself on stage; I’m not trying to be a caricature of myself. I’m just trying to be the music, to let it come through the instruments and myself and my voice. That’s the goal, and I feel like I’ve kind of reached it finally.

As you’ve ventured farther away from dance tracks and into the art of songcraft in the past few years, club-oriented electronic dance music has exploded in popularity in the U.S. Do you feel like you’re going against the current?

I guess you could say I pretty much chose the wrong path. [Laughs.] I just do what I’m drawn to do. I’ve always made weirder music and vocal music¬, non-electronic music. For me, song-building has always been fun. But I got sucked into Detroit warehouse parties and techno and records and DJing. I got completely obsessed and fell in love with it. That was in my mid to late 20s, I had so much fun in this roaring whirlwind of techno and house music. Then I started shifting back toward songcraft, and of course electronic music is a lot bigger now in the States. I definitely have a desire to return to Audion, my techno alias — it’s just a matter of time and how much energy I can put into it. It’s not like I’m never going to go back to techno. It’s totally different and totally fun.

As a veteran of the scene, what do you make of the meteoric rise of scalable acts like Skrillex, Deadmau5, and others in the realm of “EDM”?

There are a lot of similarities to a time before that got all of us into techno, the mid- to late-’90s surge of Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers, and all this other stuff that was huge in the U.S. during the first rave explosion. Even then you had purists and people who had been around for 10 years prior saying, “This is crap — this is just a crass commercialization of the music.” But it got me into it, and it strengthened my love for electronic music and sound. I may not listen to a lot of the big festival stuff now, but I think it’s amazing for the fact that it’s reaching so many people. In a social sense, you have hundreds of thousands of people repeatedly getting together and experiencing electronic music in some form. They’re getting sucked up into it, and they’re going to get bit with the bug that I was bit with. If they in turn dig deeper two or three years from now and start finding out about the lineage — Aphex Twin or Autechre, all this obscure old music — to me that’s awesome. That’s what the whole cycle is about.

It’s been said you’re a fan of fishing. True?

I’m in upstate New York now, a little town called Barryville on the Delaware River. I grew up fishing. My father just sent me a fly rod and a fly reel. I haven’t used it up here yet, but there’s a lot of work being done on the house I bought and our plumber’s son was just here yesterday giving us the whole skinny on which flies would work in the area and where we need to go. I can’t get a clear answer from anybody here about the pollution factor. Some people say the farther north you go, it’s totally fine. But other people say there are certain areas where the government has ratings that say you can eat one fish a year. That just makes you think, “Okay, if I’m limited to one fish a year, do I really want to eat that kind of fish?” [Laughs.]

What was your best fishing trip ever?

The most fun I ever had was when I went bonefishing in the Riviera Maya south of Tulum in Mexico, in the Yucatan peninsula. Bonefish are silver, about the size of a big trout. When they’re eating, they “tail” — their tails and fins stick out of the water. So you’re wading in the shallows and you see all these little breaks in the water. You have to get as close as you can without spooking it, and you have to cast your fly right over the nose. It’s really fun and high-energy: you’re freaked out and everybody’s really quiet because you don’t want to scare the fish, and as soon as you hook one it’s amazing because they run so quickly. Your line starts to rooster-tail and water is spraying up everywhere. It’s intense. When I go fishing, I go out to escape from thought. I go to zone out and not think about work, or anything really.

An impressive mix of moods pulling from the past and present

Julia Holter makes music for an ever-changing carnival of the mind. One moment she’s cooing dreamily, like a woman lost in the clouds of her own imagining, and the next she’s thinking her way through incisive lyrics about the cerebral ’60s art-film Last Year at Marienbad. Some of her sounds come across as childlike and lost, others are clearly and thoroughly composed. She demonstrates incredible range, often in the space of a single time-defying song. It makes for an impressive mix of moods, one that Holter first revealed on Tragedy, her striking debut from late 2010 that wowed most of those who heard it. Just a few months later comes Ekstasis, another album made up of its own distinctive charms. “Marienbad” opens in a stately fashion, striking out into in an expectant expanse between the Beach Boys at their most elegant and the smeary psychedelic surplus of bands like Broadcast. Somehow, even as it invokes allusions to styles from distant pasts, Ekstasis sounds contemporary and new. Parts played on what sounds like lutes and harpsichords mingle with ethereal electronics, and Holter’s affecting voice – small but resourceful in the way it wanders – makes for a sense of immediacy that rewards full attention in the here and now.

But AraabMuzik is dark, too, especially as the album soldiers on and details of its tweaking begin to accrue. “Free Spirit” features a creeping, martial beat that insinuates its way through most of Electronic Dream with a dry, rustling insistence that is hard to shake. “Underground Stream” forgoes subtlety and turns into a soundtrack for a bleak rave, full of dripping faces and menacing stares (sampled sounds include chilling screams and an eerie invocation of “death and putrefaction.”) That it all holds together is testament to an aesthetic that is more agile and active than it initially seems. AraabMuzik’s drums sound good and distinctive, scratchy and textural and somehow seemingly impatient in places. And his command of all that goes on over-top adds to a sound more complex than simple pleasures could summon on their own.

Hip-Hop that sounds nothing like hip-hop.

AraabMuzik makes hip-hop that, heard from any other vantage point, sounds nothing like hip-hop. He made his name as a producer for the credentialed likes of Cam’ron and Jim Jones, but the tracks on his own debut album sound more like…trance? Phantasmagoric pop? Accidental overlays resulting from different YouTube-playing browser windows fighting to be heard, at once? It’s a strange sound. But it’s also immensely appealing and approachable, as evidenced by an opening track, that sounds like something wafting in from a celestial radio station that you happened upon while fantasizing about warm turquoise beaches and expensive moisturizer. That song is a good example of the trance element that figure into much of Electronic Dream and its suggestively reworked samples of tracks crafted for glitzy dance clubs. “Streetz Tonight” sounds like an anthem longing for vocals by Kylie Minogue, and a host of widescreen ambient washes and strobed sound-effects abound.

But AraabMuzik is dark, too, especially as the album soldiers on and details of its tweaking begin to accrue. “Free Spirit” features a creeping, martial beat that insinuates its way through most of Electronic Dream with a dry, rustling insistence that is hard to shake. “Underground Stream” forgoes subtlety and turns into a soundtrack for a bleak rave, full of dripping faces and menacing stares (sampled sounds include chilling screams and an eerie invocation of “death and putrefaction.”) That it all holds together is testament to an aesthetic that is more agile and active than it initially seems. AraabMuzik’s drums sound good and distinctive, scratchy and textural and somehow seemingly impatient in places. And his command of all that goes on over-top adds to a sound more complex than simple pleasures could summon on their own.

Zoning out and tuning in at the same time

Oneohtrix Point Never has assumed an important place in the sound and theory obsessed underground with music that consumes as it compels and a unique ability to articulate his vision as something more than just a simple accumulation of “vibes.” So it goes with Replica, a mindful album that zones out and tunes in at the same time. Though he made his name with drifting, drafting synthesizer meditations reminiscent of ’70s kosmiche acts like Tangerine Dream, Oneohtrix Point Never shifts into more cut-up forms on Replica. Part of the style started to coalesce on his 2010 breakthrough Returnal, but the material here pushes harder and farther into a realm where abstraction and clarity mesh. “Andro” starts off more or less recognizably, with seething synth tones and a portentous sense of atmosphere, but a signal gets sent when the track swerves, all of the sudden, into an unexpected fit of rhythm near the end. “Power of Persuasion” takes the next step by introducing as an aural plaything the sound of a traditional piano, which proves surprisingly prevalent on the album throughout. The rest of the template sets when sampled bits of voice — or, more accurately, weird incidental sounds made by a mouth on its way to speaking — wander in during “Sleep Dealer.” It’s a strange mix of subject matter, to be sure. But it gathers into shapes that manage to approximate actual songs, with memorable parts and melodies that linger, while doubling down as experimental ambient soundscapes.

File under: Gleaming electronic minimalism, melancholic ecstasy, mope rock

For fans of: Basic Channel, Suicide, JJ

From: London by way of Berlin by way of Melbourne

Personae: Jonnine Standish (vocals, etc.), Nigel Yang (guitar, etc.)

And then there were two — namely, after the suicide of bassist Sean Stewart last year, a pair of compatriot makers of moodily constrained electronic music known as Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang. The two of them had been members of HTRK since the group first got together in Melbourne, Australia, in 2003, but the band would be a different one with part of its heart removed. Nonetheless, they marshaled on and completed work already started on Work (work, work), an impressive collection of songs squeezed into shape by meticulous electronic means and made sticky by whatever it is that makes haunting music haunted. The sound of HTRK’s second full-length album tips back to the likes of synth-punk godfathers Suicide and numerous neo-post-punk operators, but there’s a personal, lived-in tinge to it that plants markers of its own.

Standish and Yang spoke with eMusic about David Lynch, making a virtue of control, and coping with the death of their bandmate.

On early intra-band bonding over David Lynch:

Jonnine Standish: The three of us were very big David Lynch fans. But being a David Lynch fan these days is almost like breathing, isn’t it? The main movies we’ve been inspired by are Fire Walk with Me (and all of Twin Peaks) and especially for myself Blue Velvet and the character of Isabella Rossellini. The tragic aspects in her character I’ve related to myself.

Nigel Yang: [Lynch's] use of archetypes and his surrealism tap into really simple things and imagery that are part of the collective unconscious. Even between us, as characters in the band, there were clearly defined roles that we inhabited. Sean was a dark, handsome bass player, like Bobby from Twin Peaks. Jonnine was like Laurie Palmer or Isabella Rossellini. But I don’t know who I am, really. [Laughs]

Standish: There’s a scene in Fire Walk with Me with a woman walking into a room full of men and there’s a sense of doom in the atmosphere. I remember Sean mentioning that he wanted his bass lines to sound like what she would hear while walking into that room.

On moving to Berlin for a spell:

Standish: We moved from Melbourne to Berlin to try to find a more interesting, wider audience for our music, which is quite a niche sound in Australia. Berlin seemed like a great choice because it’s an interesting city art — and architecture-wise — plus it’s really cheap.

Yang: As a rock band living there, the scene is pretty small.

Standish: Sean got really interested in the techno scene. He was fascinated by it because it was all new. I think it lent to the new album having more of an electronic sound and maybe unconscious ways of thinking about the idea of “other rooms,” like when we’re walking around and through a club.

Yang: Also there’s the influence of ambient music. It’s very much related to techno but is sort of the flipside of it.

On achieving meticulous degrees of minimalism in sound:

Yang: Some of the influence is more from the techniques of film, like Robert Bresson and his writings on the construction of films. He wrote a book called Notes on the Cinematographer about his sense of minimalism and achieving maximum emotional effects by the driest and cleanest means possible. That was a huge inspiration for editing the music, and our whole production aesthetic. We tried to think of the songs [on Work (work, work)] as 10 scenes that all make sense if you experience them together, with the sum being better than the parts. We tried to make each song, or each scene, as flat as possible, and with its own internal logic in relation to each of the other tracks. There’s a slightness to the album that we’ve gotten some criticism for, but we hope that in its flatness the songs can attain a kind of longevity, or a certain truth. We want to be really true to a sound overall and try to strip back some of our present emotions for the sake of the music, in an abstract-ish kind of way.

Standish: And within all the flat-line atmosphere there’s a lot of emotion. To me it feels like if you let the floodgates open it could pour emotion all over you, but by keeping it tight there’s a kind of tension there.

On the limits of speaking of darkness:

Yang: We’re always getting called dark, but darkness is not what we’re thinking about. We don’t want to take that away from people, but darkness is kind of boring to us. We’re after a rich truth, not some stylistic stance.

Standish: We’re far more interested in surrealism and wit and humor and sadness and mystery. Darkness is too easy. It’s a little see-through, like teenagers rebelling against their parents rather than the experience of living through real pain.

On reacting to the loss of their bandmate:

Standish: We both had very different responses to Sean’s death. I took it on a more emotional level and became quite antisocial and really stayed within the bubble of the studio. I wasn’t able to listen to any other music because music made me feel nauseous. I grieved the whole time, but I think making this album saved my life in a way.

Yang: I don’t know what to say, really. In the wake of Sean’s death, we became kind of obsessed by Sean’s interests, like all the books he listed on MySpace and Fassbinder films and comic books and graphic novels. There was a lot of mystery to Sean that we were trying to unravel while making the album. I had never lost anyone before, so one strange reaction I had was that I couldn’t believe the outpouring of sentimental emotion around me when I myself couldn’t really feel anything. I don’t know if I even have properly yet.

On when they decided to continue on as HTRK and to finish the album as a tribute:

Standish: We still haven’t had that conversation. I remember Nigel said “Let’s finish the album” and I said “Okay.” That was it, and then we just got to work. We were around two-thirds of the way into finishing demos when Sean died, and we were all loving it. There were just so many ideas on this record that we couldn’t let fade away. We just got an email from Sean’s dad yesterday, after he heard the record for the first time. He loved it and that’s meant more to us than anything else. He was very glowing.

Yang: Sean’s dad has really good taste in music. He considered it a greater album than Teenage Snuff Film by Rowland S. Howard, which is a high compliment because that’s one of our favorite albums. He was relating it to other Australian albums, I guess. It was funny because when we were mixing, I said that I didn’t want the album to be co-opted by Urban Outfitters or be able to be enjoyed by parents. We don’t know what’s going on. [Laughs]