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Blood on the Dancefloor: 12 Essential Avant-Dance Albums

By Andrew Parks, eMusic Contributor

"I don't think of music as cathartic or a release," Dominick Fernow once told me in a cover story about his former band Cold Cave. "A release implies that something is leaving you. It's not that so much as a transformation." Whether he's whipping up whirlpools of noise as Prurient or delving into the darkest corners of dance music as Vatican Shadow, Fernow has always followed that path — music as a purification process, only instead… more »

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Interview: Karl Bartos

By Andy Battaglia, eMusic Contributor

Karl Bartos was a member of Kraftwerk, which makes for legendary status and then some. His tenure in the gob-smackingly influential German group ran from 1975 to 1990, and his contributions include melodies and rhythms in the midst of such classic albums as The Man-Machine and Computer World. It's hard to imagine music sounding the way it does now without such canonical accomplishments, even if Bartos himself holds a certain ambivalence about Kraftwerk after the… more »

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Interview: Sally Shapiro

By Laura Studarus, eMusic Contributor

Sally Shapiro is genuinely happy to be a part-time diva. Having eschewed the trappings of a full-time music career (no late-night performances or tireless promo appearances, and all but a handful of interviews), what we know about her is largely derived from her three albums of unapologetically romantic Italo disco. While Shapiro will admit that she prefers not to sing anything she can't identify with, the details of Shapiro's personal life — and even her… more »

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Slava, Raw Solutions

2013 | Label: Software

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… more »

The Haxan Cloak, Excavation

2013 | Label: Tri Angle Records / SC Distribution

It may be glib to assume that London-based producer Bobby Krlic dwells exclusively on the dark side, but given the evidence it’s hardly unreasonable. His alias references a 1922 Scandinavian docudrama about witchcraft and inquisition, and his 2011 self-titled debut album aligned him with avant-black-metal/doom acts like Mayhem and Sunn O))). And the sleeve of his gloomily titled follow-up depicts a single length of rope coiled into a noose.

However, The Haxan Cloak’s thrillingly dark and chilly aesthetic goes far deeper than the kind of parent-bothering occult primer these details might… more »

Major Lazer, Free The Universe

2013 | Label: Secretly Canadian / SC Distribution

On their debut album, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do, Diplo and Switch of Major Lazer took Jamaican dancehall as a starting point and had a blast messing with its DNA. On the party-starter “Pon De Floor,” they all but created a new genre, fusing dancehall, military drum tattoos and hip-hop into a crazed floorfiller that was sampled by everyone from Beyonce to Nicola Roberts. The big change with Free The Universe is the absence of Dave “Switch” Taylor, Diplo’s long-time collaborator. Diplo has said, “In terms of actually making… more »

James Blake, Overgrown

2013 | Label: Universal Records

After spending the tail end of 2011 pushing his idiosyncratic productions down two very different paths — the freakish experimental flourishes of Love What Happened Here and the manic emoting (complete with a Bonny Bear collab!) of Enough Thunder — James Blake revisits the profoundly weird stomping grounds of his self-titled debut on Overgrown. Free of Feist or Joni Mitchell covers, the only creative voice that’s tortured or tweaked this time around is Blake’s own, whether that means something as live and direct as “DLM”… more »

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Freshly Ripped Radio

By J. Edward Keyes, Editor-in-Chief

Looking for the newest and best on eMusic? Look no further than Freshly Ripped Radio. Every week, our editorial team combs through the crates and pulls out the best of the best, all the better to help you spend your money wisely. more »

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