The eMusic Dozen: Electronic

A krautrock classic by a band that orbited around Kraftwerk, Neu! 2 shifts between seminal "motorik" chuggers and more atmospheric soundscapes mindful of repetition and texture. The 10-minute opener offers a rush of droning rhythm guitar and steady drums that pick up power as a simple beat builds through small increments; though they're effectively static the whole way through, none of the components sound the same once the trance takes effect. Elsewhere, tracks slow down and speed up — some of them jack up the tape-speed to make straightforward rock sound fitful and strange. It's raw, synthetic, fleeting, monolithic — and hard to slot within standard conceptions of what went on in the '70s.

Integrating electronics with rock was a brave and outlandish gesture in the '70s — especially in the world of punk, where rock & roll primitivism reigned. Suicide could be said to have gone against the grain if requisite connotations of naturalism weren't so laughably off-base. All of the songs on the New York duo's debut were played on keyboards and drum-machines, which quiver and hiss without shame. That doesn't mean it's not punk: Songs like "Ghost Rider" stomp with insistent aggression, and Alan Vega's vocals — like a '50s pop crooner on amphetamines — ooze the kind of attitude that left crowds at CBGB puzzled in all the right ways.

This is techno… or at least some of it is. Originally released in 1983 as Enter, Cybotron's first album features a few of the genre's formative singles straight from Detroit, the devastated urban dystopia where a bunch of restless black kids dreamt up a world governed by weird Euro sounds and lots of science-fiction. Techno forefather Juan Atkins teamed with Rick Davis on seminal tracks like "Clear," a gleaming spell of robot funk with steely beats driving into the ground. Other tracks with dark pop vocals (and more guitar than you might expect) lace tales of industrialized paranoia with eerie echoes of humanism howling into a void.

A relic from the heyday of rave, Experience throws something like 9,000 ideas against a wall and giggles as they fall into a pile. The still-startling breakbeats twitch and turn through uncharted rhythmic byways, kicking through epileptic fits with a surprising amount of refinement. Anyone who thinks she doesn't like rave pianos should be forced to listen to "Your Love" (especially around the 4:00 mark). And samples don't come more disorienting than the mewling cat-in-heat in "Charly." This is the music that made countless kids go baggy, and it still sounds like nothing else.

Greeted as a genius when he started tooling with the more "musical" aspects of rave and ambient, Aphex Twin wields a sonic stamp as distinctive as any before or since. This EP is often regarded as minor among his many works, but that goes to show how major a talent Aphex Twin actually is. The title track is gentle and haunting, with gorgeous ambient melodies falling over delicate drums run at mid-tempo. From there, chaos reigns through spells of demented techno, laser-war stomps and, in "Entrance to Exit," classical music made itchy and poisonous.

The evolution of techno has alternated through spells of fattening up and slimming down — two processes carried on simultaneously by the German duo Basic Channel. First comes the slimming, signaled by clicks, pops and hisses that stand in for beats scaled down for study. Then comes the fat, which owes almost everything to the tenets of Jamaican dub reggae. The hectic pulse of techno is lowered to a gentle throb, and seemingly endless trails of echo spread what's left into a horizontal smear. It's somehow both dense and empty — and disorienting enough to make such mixed signals sound natural.

Techno's simmering fascination with minimalism — ever notice how even the splashiest dance beat is clipped and foreshortened? — reached a sort of diminuendo on Clicks + Cuts, a collection of tracks that barely exist. Spread over two discs, artists like Farben, SND, Pole, Pansonic and Ester Brinkmann marked a movement by taking up a project aimed at elegance as much as erasure. Severely shrunken sounds shine a refined light upon the sounds themselves, while vast gaps in between emphasize the simple placement of those sounds in space. Some of it is dry and theoretical, but most of Clicks + Cuts is disquieting, like the soft whir of a laptop humming itself to sleep.

He's better known for the dub he tweaks as Vladislav Delay and the house he rubs down as Luomo, but the Finnish producer who triples as Uusitalo made an equally appealing move toward meaty techno with Vapaa Muurari Live. The "live" designation is important because it captures the real-time activity at play in all of Sasu Ripatti's various projects. He eschews tidy loops for something much more antic and organic, interrupting pristine patterns with pauses and digressions that evoke a wired mind thinking out loud. While most techno concerns itself with grammar, Uusitalo focuses on the stutters that lurk within.