eMusic’s Tobi Vail caught up with Maricich over the phone to discuss the New York City art mafia, hugging the audience and squeezing her heart into a meat grinder.

What has changed for The Blow since you put out Paper Television in 2006?

[In 2006] I lived in Portland and worked with Jona Bechtolt [of Yacht] and then I moved [to NYC] with Melissa Dyne. Working with Melissa is super different because we’re girlfriends — also because we’re girls, and girls communicate differently on creative projects. We talk about everything. My experience with boys is like, “I’m just gonna do it and it’ll be cool.” At least with us, we like exploring, philosophically and theoretically, all the options of how things could be —we’re as interested in the process as we are in the outcome. [Melissa] hasn’t done albums before. She’s a sound artist and works with physics and sound waves in her installation work, and she used to play cello. We treat it as a total experiment, and sometimes we make one version of a song and go, “Huh, what if we try it completely New Wave this time?” and redo it. So it’s a process of building models. Sometimes we build one model and then we look at it and say, “Let’s completely renovate it and try it in a different way,” as opposed to being like, “OK, we’re gonna make an album and we’re gonna go about it the most direct and businesslike manner.” Our endurance for working with the process and playing around with it is vast.

Can you talk about the technical process of arranging the songs electronically?

We didn’t feel committed to a particular identity as music makers. IYou’re starting with the void. We both really tripped out on that, the fact that you can put any sound from any source anywhere. We knew we didn’t want to take the sounds out of a computer program, so we sampled different live instruments and perfected the samples so they sounded really clean. We would use generic computer sounds to make a beat and then find sounds to replace so that it [sounded] three-dimensional and rich. We inherited a couple of really weird synthesizers and Melissa just played around with them and tried to find the weirdest things she could.

How has your approach to performance changed over the years?

Music audiences can be so unruly, like a mob. We are learning how to sculpt the mob — make connections and take [the audience] to interesting places. During the live show, [Melissa] performs on a riser that’s at the back of the room in front of the sound engineer and I perform on the main stage and we have the crowd in between us. On my stage, there’s generally nothing besides myself and maybe some lights. The live show is us just hugging the audience in between us. We use that as a platform to see what cool stuff we can make happen. Melissa has a really strong role, but doesn’t want to be the one everyone is looking at all the time. We’re both working the room. She is making the room super high-fidelity intimate; she sets it up so it sounds really good. Little modules of sound are penetrating as deep into people’s ears as they can and opening people up a lot — and then she’s playing the electronic instruments — like manipulating samples and fucking with delays.

How would you describe your music to your cool aunt?

I come from a history of being super influenced by Kimya Dawson, but over the years, and in the process of making this record, we’ve both leaned more toward the experimentation of the ’70s — Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Brian Eno are big influences on this album. Also Bjork — she kind of led the way for talking about emotions in abstract and really intimate ways in her lyrics, not even rhyming sometimes, just straight-up describing. But the impetus from where I started from was definitely Kimya Dawson — the idea that you just pick up your guitar and you don’t have any resources and you don’t need any because your emotional honesty is enough to form a bond with the listener. She’s a really awesome songwriter, she can play guitar and she’s really perceptive.

But the swashbuckling adventure story of what it was like for us to make this record is that we basically just decided to squeeze our hearts into a meat grinder and see what came out. It’s still hard for us to describe the music. We didn’t think of about a genre or a style until after we were done. We were [essentially] jumping out of a plane or, like, taking pictures of ourselves falling and then seeing what they looked like. Style-wise we have no idea what this is, but it is emotionally resonant and honest so we feel like we are on track.

Are you still involved in a DIY or any kind of community in New York?

Community is hard to come by in New York. Everybody doesn’t live in the same neighborhood, so you have to unite along events, and the events we found ourselves uniting around are mostly within the queer art scene — what I call the “lesbian mafia of New York,” or I guess the “lesbian-trans-queer art mafia.” They don’t call themselves that, but that’s how I’ve thought about them. It’s a scene where they were like, “We need to make space for ourselves,” and really went about doing it and were successful and smart. To me, that is DIY: They didn’t see themselves represented in the world they were a part of — the art world — and were like, “OK, we’re gonna make ourselves be the people you wanna know.” That is super inspiring.

So what’s next?

The process of how we’ve been able to make sounds has arched through the sky and we’re watching it morph and change and grow. It’s like we wanted to create a planet but then it took massive time and energy and force just to get the materials and raw elements. And then they develop to a certain point and then you stop it and box it up and send it out to people. But that planet is still developing and growing and new things are evolving, because as we play the samples, looping and combining them with sounds from other songs and putting them all together — it’s all still changing. It’s super fertile. After the album was done, we got way better at it. It’s a growing living thing, it’s not a product. Now that things are all greased up and moving, we’re just gonna keep recording and capture more of it.

Ambitiously detailed tendrils of sound

Daniel Lopatin’s work as Oneohtrix Point Never has been evolving in recent years to a fine point. R Plus Seven, his ninth Oneohtrix album overall, is ambitiously detailed, each tendril of sound — whatever its source, human voice or digital static — seemingly painted onto the aural canvas with a fine brush. Maybe he was inspired by his December 2012 participation, with visual artist Nate Boyce, in a multimedia evening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; there’s a fine-art quality to R Plus Seven‘s gradations. But there’s a public-spiritedness that it shares, along with a few compositional qualities, with the ’70s downtown New York minimalism in whose steps it proudly follows.

On the 94-second “He She,” Lopatin cuts and arranges a litany of vocal sounds into a tune that evokes both Todd Edwards (who cut up the vocals on Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and “Face to Face”) and Meredith Monk. Sometimes it can get abstruse — “Inside World” stops and starts so much it can grow wearying, despite some lovely embellishments — but more often the trickery opens the music up wide rather than making it hermetic. “Chrome Country,” the closer, is an uplifting organ and choir chamber number. It’s a lift, and so is the album.

Moby first broke through in 1991 as a New York club DJ (he’d been a regular at the multi-level space Mars, in the Meatpacking District, where he’d play everything from hip-hop to dancehall reggae as well as house music and early techno) who’d scored a novelty hit: “Go,” which utilized Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme. Within two years of “Go” hitting the UK Top 10, the small, geeky multi-instrumentalist was signed to a major label (Elektra) and issuing critically-acclaimed titles (1993′s Move EP and 1995′s Everything Is Wrong) that bridged the rave underground and the pop mainstream. Dance purists blanched at first (and pop fans shrugged, at least in the States), but by 1999 — after a detour into loud rock with 1997′s divisive Animal Rights — Moby had perfected the amalgam with Play, a warm recasting of downtempo beats, sampled blues vocals, and inviting instrumentation that sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Since Play, Moby has settled into a comfortable niche as both a dance-music forefather (he frequently DJs at festivals around the world) and singer-songwriter whose songs are often sung by others. That’s particularly the case on the songful new Innocents, which pairs Moby not only with his first outside producer — Mark “Spike” Stent, who worked on Massive Attack’s early records as well as, in more recent years, Lady Gaga, Usher and No Doubt — but a half-dozen vocal guests of note: Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, Mark Lanegan, Damien Jurado, Cold Specks, Skylar Grey and Imyang Bassey, Moby’s longtime touring vocalist. eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos spoke with Moby about the new album, the shrinking of New York studio space, and L.A.’s confusing topography.

Innocents is the first album you’ve made with an outside producer. Did that change how you wrote?

I’ve been working on music the same way for the past 30 years. I go into my studio and I play guitar or play keyboards or play around with different equipment and I just keep writing until I end up with something that I like. Sometimes I’ll read interviews with musicians who will talk about an erratically different way in which they approach making one record different from the next. I wish I had those interesting stories, because it’s really just me alone in my studio with a bunch of weird equipment, and it has been for quite a long time.

Because you were recording with someone else, did you treat your initial recordings as demos?

Yeah. I would go into my studio and spend about six months coming up with a bunch of ideas. When I first started meeting with Spike I had around 200 ideas, but clearly they weren’t 200 good ideas. We focused on probably 30-40 of those ideas and then we started reaching out to people who we thought might be interesting to have on the record. I got really lucky, because only a couple of people didn’t get back to us.

When did you begin to meet with Mark “Spike” Stent?

I think a year ago. To be honest with you, my grasp of time is kind of not that great. Like, the other day I was signing something and I had to put the date in there and I felt like the Absent-Minded Professor because I couldn’t remember what year it was.

[Stent] afforded me a degree of objectivity and perspective that I normally don’t have. Your perspective on what you’ve written really changes qualitatively the moment you share it with someone else. That for me was the main benefit of working with the producer is having this regained objectivity.

What led you to work together? Did you meet socially before this?

I’ve been signed to Mute Records for a while. Daniel Miller [the owner of] Mute Records, kept working with Spike and Alan Moulder, who did a lot of records. I really liked the records that Spike had worked on, some of the early stuff like the KLF and Massive Attack and Björk, which is ironic because a lot of people who want to work with him are interested in more of his pop productions [including Beyoncé and Madonna]. In turn, I think the reason he wanted to work with me is because I wasn’t interested in making a big pop record. I wanted to make something more lo-fi and weird.

You take a couple of guys in their 40s who spent most of their lives in studios, and the first thing they start talking about is their favorite weird old equipment. I have a slightly compulsive collection of tape delays — about eight of them. None of them work particularly well. You end up almost having an orchestra of tape delays. At one point the record was sounding very, very clean. So we ended up spending a couple of days putting the record through some sort of processing that would make these clean recordings sound more grimy and characterly.

The odd thing about…I would almost call it the new way of making records, because in the old days things were more compartmentalized. There was a writing period, followed by a recording period, followed by a tracking period: You’d have the drummer come in and spend a week doing drums, and then the bass, and then the vocals. Now you keep writing and recording and adding things to songs and playing around with stuff until things are done. The mixing process, rather than being a separate, added process, is almost a continuation of the creative process.

What changed the most from your initial idea of what the album might be and what it became?

When I first started thinking about this album I wanted it to be an underground, lo-fi dance record. Spike got me to change the focus to a more lo-fi melodic album. He said that when he listens to my records, what resonates with him is the more melodic music. He is the one who pushed it to become more like a singer-songwriter album. “Don’t Love Me” and “A Long Time” originally were very grimy, minimal dance tracks. He pushed me to give them more an emotional quality and more interesting chord structures. Those are the two holdovers from what the album was originally meant to be.

What lo-fi dance records inspired that initial idea?

Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English; a lot of early electronic music like Silver Apples and Suicide; Manu DiBango; a lot of Jamaican dance music and African dance music; and especially things that Wally Badarou played on. He’s one of my favorite musicians of all time. He’s the unsung hero of so many dance records. And a lot of New York records made in the early ’80s: Liquid Liquid, ESG, the Bush Tetras, Medium Medium, Konk. Just the records I grew up on. I’ve rediscovered them.

It’s funny — one of the people who helped me rediscover them was my old assistant Alex [Frankel]. He’s now in the band the Holy Ghost!, on DFA. When he was working with me, I would hang out with him and his friends, and they were all in their early 20s, and their favorite records were my favorite records when I was in my teens in the early ’80s. They kind of reintroduced me to the kind of music I loved. He was my assistant at the time [of 2008's Last Night]. I was playing the tracks I was working on to him. Every now and then he would get excited about something, and that was when I knew it was probably worth pursuing.

You moved to L.A. three years ago. Do you approach music differently there than you did in New York?

I think so. I have a sort of poetic-philosophical understanding of how living in L.A. has affected how I make music, and also a very practical, direct way. The direct way is college radio. Living in New York, I mainly listened to music that I owned. New York has good college radio, but terrible broadcast signal strength. Whereas in L.A., there’s KCRW and KXLU — really great college radio — and I think that’s affected how this album sounds.

On a more poetic level, L.A. is so vast, so byzantine, so weird and so un-cohesive, so in a way, when you move you have to make this huge effort to try and understand Los Angeles and make sense of it. Most cities are very cohesive: New York, Paris, Frankfurt, San Francisco, D.C., amazing, wonderful cities that are quite small and quite cohesive. Then you come to L.A. and it’s just [got] absolutely no cohesion. It almost makes people who live here search out a degree of smallness and comfort, because the city is so huge and confusing. I feel like this album has a smallness and comfort to it that might, oddly enough, [come from] living in L.A.

I thought I’d live in New York forever. Then I stopped drinking five years ago, and when I got sober I suddenly realized that New York is the single best place to be a drunk and unfortunately not the best place to be sober. The culture in New York revolves around going out and drinking and doing drugs and being degenerate, which is amazing when you can do that, but then you get sober and you feel kind of left out. Everyone in New York is out having the best time of their lives, and I’m at home watching 30 Rock DVDs. Also, I realized I wanted to be warm in the winter, and I wanted to be around nature.

New York, because it’s so affluent, most of the writers and musicians have been pushed out, so I wanted to live in a place that’s got more creative community. At some point I guess four or five years ago I realized that I actually had more friends [in L.A.] than I did in New York, especially when it comes to music. The real estate in New York is too expensive for anyone to have studios anymore. A couple of years ago, some friends of mine in L.A. were looking to record an orchestra in New York. There wasn’t a single recording studio in New York where they could record an orchestra. They ended up having to rent an empty space in a theater — and while they were recording, there was a huge Korean birthday party happening next door. They actually had to cancel [the session], because the Korean dance party music kept coming through the walls. Now, I actually don’t know too many professional musicians who don’t live in L.A.

You’ve been putting out records frequently these past few years. What kind of clock do you work on? Do you write music every day you can?

I don’t know how to do anything else, and it’s what I love to do. When I was 13 or 14, I spent a lot of time reading books, and some of my heroes from back then were Flannery O’Connor and Woody Allen and Picasso. I was always impressed by their work ethic, that idea of: When you’re inspired, go into the studio and work. When you’re not inspired, go into the studio and work. If you have success that means you should work more. If you have failure that means you should work more. No matter what’s going on an artist or writer or musician’s life, the only appropriate response is to keep working.

You’ve worked with vocalist Inyang Basey for a while now. How did you meet her?

When I was going on tour with the album Wait For Me I had a singer I was working with in the UK who couldn’t get a work visa to tour in the States, so at the last minute I had to hire a new singer. The very last person I auditioned was Inyang. The moment she started singing I knew she was the one. It turns out she’d never really sung professionally; her day job at the time was working at Carnegie Hall in their 20th Century classical music division. Her background when she was growing up was listening to the Dead Kennedys and the Sex Pistols. It’s funny that this skinny white kid was introducing her to older gospel and soul music.

Did Spike suggest any singers for the album?

Yeah. I basically started asking friends of mine whom they would recommend. My criteria were quite specific: I was looking for people who had really interesting emotional voices but who could also write really interesting lyrics. Spike’s one recommendation was Skylar Grey. She’s known more for being a pop person, but her background is more singer-songwriter based and a little more experimental. I asked Daniel Miller, and his one recommendation was Cold Specks. The way it works with all the collaborators is, I sent them about five instrumentals to see if anything resonated with them. Each of them picked one or two that they liked. Once the vocals have been recorded and sent to me I then rewrote the song around the vocals.

Did you resend a track to multiple vocalists before you got a yes?

Oh yeah. I had 10 instrumentals I really loved and really wanted vocals on. I’m kind of mercenary when it comes to trying to get the right vocals on the right track. It’s almost like a weird form of musical promiscuity, where I would sometimes send the same instrumental to three different people to try to see if it resonates with anyone.

Where was the third time the charm?

The song that Mark Lanegan co-wrote, ["The Lonely Night"] — that had been instrumental for a few years. I had never quite felt comfortable with what people had sent back. Then I gave it to him, and all of a sudden it felt like the vocals and the music made sense together. I made the final mix around his vocals. The music is mixed very quietly; the whole intention was to draw attention to his vocals.

Do you end up editing lyrics a lot?

Sometimes. The only person [I did that with] on this record was Skylar Grey. She’d written a line in the song: “Shades of grey.” This was right at the height of the Fifty Shades of Grey popularity. Skylar, because she lives up in the mountains, hadn’t heard about the book. I had to get her to make some suggestions for things that didn’t sound like they were referencing Fifty Shades of Grey. She thought it was funny.

I want to ask you about “Saints”: It’s obviously your instrumental style, but it seems looser and grander than usual — a big sweep with a lot of moving parts. Did it take a long time to put together?

It was supposed to be an instrumental that someone was going to write lyrics to, and I couldn’t find the right person. At some point Spike and I realized it was pretty good as an instrumental, so the focus was to try and finish it. I hired an arranger at the very end — I’d written orchestral parts, and I wanted to know what it would be like if someone came in and wrote orchestral parts. There’s a lot of big, bombastic brass parts. I think there are 300 different string players on it. It’s mixed in a way that the orchestral stuff doesn’t overwhelm the track. It almost makes me want to do a weird orchestral mix of it that strips out the drums.

Were you thinking of how some of these songs might be interpreted live?

No [laughs]. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to go on tour with this record. I’ve had that frustration in the past of recording music, putting it on a record, and then realizing that it’s impossible to play it live in any interesting way.

What led to the decision not to tour?

A lot of it involves aging. As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to realize that life is short, and as much as I like standing on stage and playing music, I love being at home working on music. Of course, it drives my manager crazy, because in 2013 very few people buy records and the only way musicians make money is by touring. Basically, I’m focusing on the one aspect of the music business that’s not at all lucrative, while turning my back on the only lucrative side of the music business.

Well, you’ve always had a contrary streak.

Yeah, I guess so. I appreciate that we all need to eat and need to pay the rent. But if you have a finite amount of time, shouldn’t it be spent on things that you really love and find important? Even if that means making less money and making my business manager and manager very unhappy, I’d still rather be in my studio working on music.

The reflective electro-auteur is back on sublimely sure-footed form

Since the release of 1999′s multi-platinum, zeitgeist-defining Play, Moby has largely been on a trajectory of diminishing commercial returns. Innocents, his 11th studio album, may be the one to reverse that trend. Recorded entirely in his home studio, it shows the reflective electro-auteur is back on sublimely sure-footed form, balancing the euphoric glow of headphones techno at its most acute with the melancholic ache that has undercut all of his finest work. Where Play famously utilized samples of long-lost Delta blues and gospel alumni and Alan Lomax’s field recordings, this time Moby turns to contemporary leftfield figures for his nap hand of evocative other voices. Cult Canadian singer and songwriter Al Spx of Cold Specks lends simultaneously spectral and powerhouse vocals to lead-off single “A Case for Shame,” which could be Adele fronting Mazzy Star, and to “Tell Me.” The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne slyly insinuates himself among the choir-led cosmic gospel of “The Perfect Life,” a love pledge punctuated with the day-in-the-life confessions of a junkie peering from the blur of an opiate daze, while the ever-more guttural Mark Lanegan drawls like Lee Marvin enduring a long, dark night of the soul on “The Lonely Night.” Moby’s supreme achievement is to do to them what he did with the ancient, dust-laden voices on Play: weave them into his pulsing techno tapestry, vaporize them into ghosts in the machine of his sublime, atmospheric electro-reverie.

House music for the ears, not the body

Now on his fourth album, Sweden’s Axel Willner, aka The Field, occupies a unique niche in electronic music. He’s signed to techno label Kompakt, but his sound is informed as much by rock — the ear-bending, sensual feedback of My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain, for instance — as electronic music; the only thing missing are lyrics, though his songs are full of carefully textured vocal samples.

Cupid’s Head continues Willner’s exploration of the fertile common ground between shoegaze and the wide-open spaces of Manuel Göttsching, or the post-acid house Wild Pitch mixes from Chicago’s DJ Pierre. Pierre, in a way, provides Willner’s template, with his layers of subtle keyboard sounds, treated vocals and percussion, the overall effect being an ever-ascending aural illusion of spiralling sounds. Willner’s samples, however, are microcosmic, sometimes less than a bar in length, and they stack up to provoke a sense of dizzying abandon and release.

On “Black Sea,” Willner creates an unrelenting pulse out of a wheezing latticework keyboards, glued together by kick drum and a jagged bassline. The harshly-affected female vocal sounds simultaneously angelic, triumphant and pleading on “No. No…,” with the visceral church organ — hellish rather than heavenly — adding to the assembly-line percussion to create music that is truly unsettling.

While remaining anchored to the traditional house tropes — kick-drum, hi-hats, snare drum, bass — Willner has built a baroque, 21st-century aesthetic. This is house music, alright, but for the ears, not the body.

A far more cohesive and dynamic style of post-everything hip-pop

With his debut album as Ghostpoet, London MC and producer Obaro Ejimiwe declared his love of not only hip-hop, electronica and trip-hop, but also of blues, jazz, electro and straight-up indie pop. Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam heralded the arrival of a fresh, young voice that chimed well with then current enthusiasm for Jamie Woon and James Blake, but spread itself rather too thinly, its rampant diversity signaling a fuzziness of intent as much as broadmindedness. Nonetheless, it bagged a Mercury nomination. Now, the follow-up.

Some Say I So I Say Light is not only a more focused and purposeful record, but also a braver one, yet t sacrifices none of the strangely sun-dappled anxiety or quotidian, small-hours doubt that is Ghostpoet’s trademark. Leaving his bedroom for a studio has seen his production talents mature, too and he strikes a smart balance between vocal intimacy and textured electronic cool. His voice — equal parts Gil Scott-Heron and Tricky – is the album’s heart. Warmly cracked and with an oddly alluring, catarrhal thickness, his sprechgesang deals with everything from the gradual growing apart in a relationship to spending too much money on Amazon. It’s offset to fine effect on “Dialtones” by Lucy Rose’s distanced cooing and on “Meltdown” by alt.folk singer Woodpecker Wooliams.

Gone are the Beck-ish blues, electro and indie elements of Ghostpoet’s debut; he’s now opted for a far more cohesive and dynamic style of post-everything hip-pop. It’s one that allows for chip-tune freneticism with strings and heavily treated vocal loops (“Comatose”), surging and euphoric Afro-beat (“Plastic Bag Brain,” which features drumming don Tony Allen, and guitarist Dave Okumu of The Invisible) and an adventure in pulsing synth house (“Dorsal Morsel”). All represent the confident and considered pushing of his parameters by a distinctive talent who’s in it for the long haul.

Staying admirably true to its title

Leeds lad and Warp veteran George Evelyn is possibly best known for the sumptuous Balearic favorite “Nights Interlude”/”Les Nuits.” This well-loved cosmic jam began as the Quincy Jones-sampling opener to his 1991 debut A Word of Science and, rerecorded and reworked, then developed over the next two albums into a chill-compilation regular and a hardy perennial of the discerning beach-bar DJ’s set. The tune’s evolution neatly encapsulates Evelyn’s own musical journey from bedroom scratch-and-sampler to fêted trip hop DJ to — with collaborator since 1995 Robin Taylor-Firth — maestro of his own live band, and beyond.

Nightmares On Wax have long outlasted the trip-hop boom and with contemporaries like the Herbaliser, Quantic and DJ Food now sit at the intersection of funk, electronics, jazz and the bass-driven values of the sound system. For this eighth album they’re in an even more reflective mood than usual. Recorded in Ibiza — Evelyn’s new home — the record stays admirably true to its title with intimations of early morning sun, gentle waves on secluded beaches, good company, the odd herbal pick-me-up and general zoned-outness.

But it’s also hugely varied. While there’s a pleasingly ramshackle funk to tracks like “Eye (Can’t See)” and “Be, I Do” which summon up Evelyn’s old rough-and-ready sampling days, the more urgent “Tapestry” has the pace of house music and the drama of Lalo Schifrin or David Axelrod. One highlight is the elastic “Now is the Time,” which borrows an infectious low-end skank from Evelyn’s days as a teenage rude boy to connect Ibiza to urban Britain. Another is the following track, “Give Thx,” where testifying soul is refracted through NoW’s drum-machine-plus-real-instruments set-up. Overall it’s a thoroughly gorgeous antidote to conscious thought.

The sound of an airborne band returning to earth

When Lindsay Zoladz interviewed Keep Shelly in Athens for us in January of last year, frontwoman Sarah P talked briefly about her background as an actress. “That’s how I learned to be on stage,” she explained. “I can’t say to Actor Sarah, ‘Don’t come up on stage with me.’ No, she’s always with me. She’s an actor, she wants to be on stage.” She apparently wants to be on records, too: The group’s ice-cold, palace-of-glaciers debut — arriving three years after their misty, cryptogrammic early EPs — is defined by its deliberate grandeur. Its opening track — titled, naturally, “Time Exists Only to Betray Us” — thunders into existence: a big boom of bass, a rain of glass-shard synths and Sarah’s Stevie-Nicks-as-Lady-Macbeth wail arriving in one shattering cataclysm of sound and light. From there, the album maintains its ether-clawing aerialism, stirring Sarah’s liquid sugar voice into milky-blue synths and serving it in a frosted champagne flute. It’s called At Home, but that’s only if you’ve got a sweet deal on a lake view somewhere in the mesosphere.

Lyrically, the group traffics in riddles, but Sarah sells it like it’s Noel Coward. In the jittery drum-n-bass paraphrase “Madmen Love,” she heaves herself into lines like “Beautiful lies/ Smiles under conscious minds,” her Greek accent twisting the syllables inside out and rendering the words even more obtuse. The plan — deliberate or otherwise — works: You stop trying to decipher what she’s saying and instead just enjoy hearing her say it. She pouts the titular lyric of “Stay Away” like a young Robert Smith — himself a master of making meaningless lyrics profound by sheer force of performance. The album eventually eases into a gentle glide — the warm-blanket wraparound “Sails” mimics the similarly inscrutable beauty of Cocteau Twins. The album ends with “Back to Kresnans Street,” an avenue located in the band’s hometown of Kypseli in Athens (the mispronunciation of which gave the group its name). It flares up and fizzles out in just 90 seconds, like a bit of flash paper or a Fourth of July sparkler — the last remnants of a peaceful dream that stick around just long enough to mix with the morning sun.

File under: Bewitching, minimalist R&B that's part Kraftwerk, part coldwave

For fans of: Ikonika, Cooly G, Junior Boys, Kraftwerk

From: Hamilton, Ontario

Personae: Jessy Lanza, Jeremy Greenspan

Jessy Lanza’s debut album, Pull My Hair Back, strikes a careful balance of hot and cold. On the one hand, there are songs like “Fuck Diamond,” “Against the Wall” and the title track, not to mention a general air of R&B at its most suggestive: heavy lids and bated breath and scraps of discarded clothing paving the way to the feather bed. But someone must have left the window open, because an icy chill hangs over everything. Lanza and co-producer Jeremy Greenspan, of Junior Boys, favor cool analog synthesizers and crisp vintage drum machines, overlaying jittery R&B grooves with an eerie sheen that’s part Kraftwerk, part coldwave. In the midst of it all, channeled through delicate electronic processing, Lanza’s breathy voice fills the room like so many tendrils of dry ice.

That such a slinky, ethereal sound should find a home on Kode 9′s Hyperdub label might seem odd, given the imprint’s emphasis on twisted, hard-charging club music. But, taken alongside Cooly G’s 2012 album Playin’ Me and Ikonika’s recent Aerotropolis, Pull My Hair Back confirms Hyperdub’s standing as a conduit for unusual new mutations in R&B.

eMusic’s Philip Sherburne spoke with Lanza over Skype from her home in Hamilton, Ontario; she talked about vintage synths, the perils of a musical upbringing and Jed the Dancing Guy.

On Hamilton, Ontario:

It’s a weird city, for sure. At one point it used to be thriving. There was a lot of steel here; it’s kind of like Pittsburgh. But now the steel industry does maybe 20 percent of what it used to. There are a lot of really impoverished parts of Hamilton, but in the past five years there’s been a sort of revival. A lot of people from Toronto move here because it’s less expensive. Musically, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on, because usually people in Hamilton don’t really care what’s going on outside Hamilton. There’s a great music scene, which is what I really like about it. And it’s not expensive to live, which is great.

On the vintage synthesizers bequeathed to her by her late father:

You can play jazz chords on the piano and they sound pretty cheesy, but put them on a PolyMoog, and they sound awesome. It was only when I met Jeremy and we started working on tracks that it started to come together. He’s like, “I want to hang out with you and use the stuff in your studio!”

On her musical training:

I did classical stuff when I was a teenager. I did Royal Conservatory piano and I took classical singing lessons, but I don’t really think of myself as being a trained singer. There are soul singers that I really idolize, like Evelyn Champagne King or Candi Staton — they just have crazy perfect voices. I can’t sing like them. I just try to do what I can, you know?

On trying to forget her musical training:

I have to turn off the part of my brain that’s like, “If you do this seventh chord and it resolves to this one…” All those techniques. Jazz music’s kind of the first pop music — all the structures are there. And I have to work hard not to make things fucking cheesy and terrible. That’s the one thing I have to try to avoid: using too many of the chord progressions I learned in school. Fighting not to make it too obvious is the thing I’m always trying to do. Jeremy’s big into chords, though. He likes a good chord.

On her use of melisma:

I think that’s just from listening to, like, one Aaliyah song for 10 years. It kind of sinks into your brain and it’s just there to fall back on. When I was growing up, I listened to mainstream R&B. I really like old R&B, 2000s R&B, all different kinds of R&B. All the varieties of R&B!

On lyrics and meaning:

I find writing lyrics really hard. I really hate the sound of lyrics that I’ve written. If I think about them too much, it sounds so labored and really unnatural. A lot of times I do a whole bunch of vocal takes, and then I listen back to them the next day, and I’m like, “Fuck, I have no idea what I’m saying, but I really like the way it sounds, so I’m just going to keep it.” I try not to think too much about having something that was really cohesive or that I had thought about deeply for days on end, or pontificating on some subject…I try not to think too much about it, and just use what sounds right in that musical moment. That sounds fuckin’ cheesy, but whatever.

On the album’s sexual slant:

It all just stacked up that way. You see all these song titles in front of you, and you’re like, “Yeah, this seems like it’s all about fucking, for sure.” It turned out that way, but that wasn’t the intention for all of them. For some of them, yeah. I guess it’s because I listen to so much R&B, or pop music in general, it’s all about sex or love, and that was in my brain and it’s what came out.

On teaching piano:

It’s great, because kids are hilarious. They’re totally weird. I book my own clients, and usually it’s family friends and their friends. I’m well acquainted with all the families I work with. All the kids are really nice and they want to do it. It’s only if you have a kid that hates it that [it] sucks. But I try to keep the two spheres far removed. I had this show I played in Hamilton, down at this bayfront, family-friendly festival thing. A couple of the moms found out about it and were like, “We’re going to come! We’re going to bring our kids.” And I was like, fuck, now I can’t play a lot of stuff.

On Jed the Dancing Guy, the star of her “Kathy Lee” video:

He’s just this guy who has just been dancing around Hamilton for years. We thought that he might be schizophrenic, or have serious mental issues, but I found him on Facebook and wrote him a message and we met up and talked. It’s not like he’s a totally normal guy, but he’s not mentally disturbed. I think he had some life experience where his mother was going to die, and then she recovered, and he had prayed to God that if she got better he would dance and sing for the rest of his life; it’s some story like that. I think he’s very religious. He just goes for it every day. You’ll see him on the shittiest day in February, like the worst fucking day you can imagine, where you don’t even want to go outside, and he’ll just be shossing down Main Street, singing to his MP3 player. We were always like, “What the fuck is he listening to?” We had no idea. Then he put his ear bud up, and he listens to, like, Serbian folk songs. Which is not what you would think. He really gets going a lot of the time. It’s amazing that he’s listening to this male a cappella chanting.

He was really professional about the whole video shoot, though. He was a really good sport. He hung out with us for like eight hours.

There’s still no compromise in their unrelenting sound, but the harsher noise has been hammered out in favor of taut funk – the steel of Cabaret Voltaire given a radical modernization in “How You Say” or “Breathe In” and a pop militancy in the dugga-dugga of “Fall Back”. Interspersed throughout the album — which also features a new version of former 12″ “Two Different Ways” — are short sound sketches made by each member of the band. It’s claustrophobic music that, perhaps, gets its power from its extended gestation, and doesn’t sound like anything else released in 2013.

Luke Turner talked with Factory Floor about performance, perfectionism and why the album took two and a half years to make.

Why the decision to record in your own studio in Seven Sisters? Was self-sufficiency important to you?

Gabriel Gurnsey: We made a conscious decision that the album should be written, recorded and produced by us purely because of the fact that we knew how we wanted it to sound, and it saves a lot of hassle laying it on to someone else.

Nik Colk Void: That was partly to do with what the EPs and singles were about, to explore different ways of recording. We actually enjoy that part of the process of playing with our own factions of Factory Floor. You wouldn’t get that if you had someone else doing it for you.

So all the singles and EPs are a document of you learning?

Gurnsey: Yeah definitely, and the album is to a certain extent as well. It’s a document of us learning how to write and record an album. Which turned out to be over quite a lengthy amount of time.

Why did you even bother doing an album? You could have just continued releasing 12″s.

Dominic Butler: There was a point where we discussed that, but I think people want an album, it’s still a way that you can have a piece of a band and get to know it in a certain way. You can build a relationship with an album, look back at it. I’ve got 12″s that I love, but an album is a narrative.

Void: There won’t even be albums soon, it’s nice to have one before they cease to exist.

Are Factory Floor perfectionists?

Void: There are still bits on the record where I think, “That’s not what I was trying to do.” I’ve not been trained, so I get there in my own way. Sometimes I’ve got something in my head and it comes out sounding completely different. But it still works, so I just go with it.

Gurnsey: It’s not going, “Oh I recorded this through a bin in the middle of a field.” We don’t work like that. We just turn to each other and say, “That sounds good.”

Why did it take so long to complete the album? Was perfectionism to blame there?

Gurnsey: It was more about finding what kind of route we were happy with, and developing the sound by playing live — it was a good thing that we played so many shows, [because it helped us] to grow the music. We were essentially getting to know each other during those gigs.

What might have happened if you’d tried to work with a producer?

Void: It wouldn’t have sounded anything like this. I think if we’d gone to a studio and recorded 10 tracks, we’d have taken them away, been really unhappy and butchered them.

Were the collaborations a learning experience, too?

Void: It was treading ground that was a bit risky to us. It keeps your attention on trying to better yourselves as musicians, especially when you’ve got someone coming along who’s established themselves, like Peter Gordon. He occupied a space that was already there, sonically, so that was great. We’ve always invited musicians along who we know there’s a space for. I think the great thing about collaboration is that there’s no room for ego, you have to listen to each other to come up with your own way of replying to what they’re putting into it.

Some cross-generational collaborations can come off a bit back-slappy. Is there a sense that your collaborations are more about sharing ideals, rather than stealing ideas?

Gurnsey: That’s what it was. It wasn’t “Let’s get them in because we want to sound like them” or they wanted to sound like us, it was just sharing a common goal of making music and enjoying it, and not having a fear of a spontaneous, improvisational way of working. Although I was shitting my pants before we played at the ICA.

Void: That was the great thing about those shows, we were knocking ourselves out of our comfort zone, and that’s what Factory Floor always does. If you don’t go down that road, you don’t learn, and you just end up standing still. We’re not in it for love, or money, it’s the learning. [Laughs.]

Do you want to push your audience out of their comfort zones too? Not just in the sonic assault of your earlier gigs, but how this record is quite steely. It’s not what people might expect from a DFA record.

Gurnsey: That’s why I’m excited to see what people are going to say. They’re going to make so many assumptions, based on the Factory Floor name, based on DFA, based on what we’ve done in the past. I’m just happy knowing that it’s not going to be anything like what people think.

Void: I don’t think it sounds different from what I’d expect of a Factory Floor record.

Butler: I think it’s enquiring, and that’s what we wanted to do with it. We wanted to make our way into our practice as a band and unravel something, and I think that’s what we did. If we hadn’t, I’d have been a bit disappointed.

Was there anything you didn’t want it to be?

Gurnsey: I don’t think we’ve had any influences from what’s going on [in electronic music] at the moment. What’s great about being up here [in Seven Sisters] is you’re outside of what’s going on musically, a “scene,” all that kind of shit.

Now that Nik has moved to Norfolk and Dom lives in the middle of nowhere in Hampshire, will it have an impact on where you go from here?

Void: We’ve all set up our own studios in our new places. I think it’ll be really interesting to see what happens from being separated from each other and then coming together and working on stuff in a bit more concentrated manner, and in a shorter amount of time.

Gurnsey: I think it’ll be a lot less intense next time. It was fucking hell at some points. It was fucking hard work, a lot of frustration, because we took everything on ourselves. It’s been a bit of a mad journey, these past couple of years.

The electro enthusiasts amplify their pop tendencies and diversify their sound

NYC electro enthusiasts Holy Ghost! picked up Chromeo’s slack on their urbane, synthfunk-driven 2011 self-titled debut. On their second full-length, Dynamics, the duo — comprised of two life-long friends and musical collaborators, Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser — amplify their pop tendencies and diversify their sound. Although tunes such as “Bridge and Tunnel” and “It Must Be the Weather” conjure the first album’s smoldering nightlife vibe, Dynamics expands to encompass sugary new wave (the Yaz-like “Okay”), chugging synthpop (the sparkling “Changing Of The Guard”), New Order-style electropop (the uplifting “Don’t Look Down”) and ’80s R&B slow jams (“In The Red”). The dancefloor igniter “Dumb Disco Ideas,” which features backing vocals from LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang, is their most ambitious yet: Over eight minutes, the tune boogies through corrugated funk grooves, cosmic keyboard programming, cowbell-aided rhythms and heavenly falsetto. Holy Ghost! has always created dance music with aspirations to be taken seriously outside of clubs or parties. Thanks to finely sculpted hooks, straightforward melodies and Frankel’s increasingly confident vocals, Dynamics reaches — and exceeds—this goal.

African and Western, traditional and modern, mashed together in a way that defies separation

When in the 1980s African artists began to make their way to world music circuit, the biggest acts — Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Ali Farka Touré — were also the most unadulterated, their music with clear lineages back to their highlife, juju and griot roots. But in the 21st century, the African acts most likely to break through are instead a messy and bright jumble of genres. The Very Best, the acts on the Shangaan Electro comp and Cape Town’s John Wizards offer a panoply of sounds both African and Western, traditional and modern, mashed together in a way that defies separation.

As the music project of John Withers — in conjunction with Rwandan vocalist Emmanuel Nzaramba — John Wizards dials back the cacophonous density, aggressive BPMs and neon-bright synths of their contemporaries. On their debut, they instead meld together the languid, leisurely sounds of everything from reggae to R&B slow jams. Chameleonic opener “Tet Lek Schrempf” feels dreamy but soon picks up the pace, with shimmering synths and pygmy song at its core. “Limpop” percolates in neon bubbles much like Shangaan Electro would, but cuts the latter’s 160 BPM rate with some chillwave. “I’m Still a Serious Guy” evokes the synthetic tropical sound of Level 42 and I-Level, but the vocal melody of Withers here most resembles Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, who was once criticized for aping African music. John Wizards suggests that the heartiest musical sound might be a mutant strain.

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.

On her new album, Loud City Song, Holter also worked in professional studios, and occasionally with a full complement of session musicians on hand to play her own arrangements. While on a ginger-beer break from a recent sound-check, she spoke with eMusic’s Seth Colter Walls about blending home and studio recording practices, as well as her influences, which range from Joni Mitchell to the post-minimalist opera composer Robert Ashley.

How did recording in a “proper” studio setting, with a full backing ensemble, challenge you or change the process?

Recording was actually really great; it wasn’t uncomfortable. A lot of the vocals I recorded in Cole’s [the producer's] studio at home — which was a more comfortable space than like a professional studio. We recorded the instruments in the studio but also recorded a bunch of stuff at home. Also, I spent a year and a half before that writing and recording demos of all the songs. I could try things out. I didn’t have to worry about the demos being perfect, like in the past where the demos were the final recording. So it was really liberating and fun — it was so much more playful, actually. So I guess the best of both worlds!

Previous projects of yours have had literary inspirations, including Greek tragedy. The influence this time is derived from the Colette novella Gigi.

Well, Collette’s text was an influence, for sure, but it was maybe even more the film that came out of the text — the musical that a lot of people know. I grew up watching that musical, and I’m not normally much of a “musicals” person. I just grew up with that particular one. It didn’t occur to me at first to make a record inspired by Gigi. It’s one of those things that you grow up with that you don’t think of making art out of — because it’s just something personal, really. I guess in the end the only things I really can use are the things that I really love or the things that I respond to the most — and I just have to be honest with myself.

You’ve also mentioned Joni Mitchell as an influence on the record. I was thinking of The Hissing of Summer Lawns a bit on “In the Green Wild.”

Yeah, there’s this one song on The Hissing of Summer Lawns called “The Jungle Line” that musically inspired “In the Green Wild.” It’s amazing just for a simple reason: It’s very percussive and cool. She’s another one of those people that I listened to at a very formative age so much — and I don’t listen to as much now — but I have just in my bones or something.

I’ve also heard you mention affection for the American “maverick” composer Robert Ashley. What about him inspires you?

I don’t know how much I am influenced by him, but I’m definitely very inspired by him. I don’t know how much you can tell of that by listening to my music. But [someone else] told me the other day my music reminded them of Robert Ashley, which I thought was interesting.

I really love his “Automatic Writing” piece. I think it’s one of my favorite things ever: just hearing these utterances and not being sure what they mean or what they’re saying — they’re mysterious, they create a mood. You don’t often see music or art dealing with the psychology of utterances that you can’t understand, and that piece just lives in the world, explores it for like twelve minutes. That’s a cinema of sound.

Do you feel like people have a good grip on “your sound” or your project? And does that change as you move from venue to venue — or even from country to country?

I don’t feel like anyone has a good idea of how to describe what I’m doing — which is good news, I think. Because I definitely change what I do a lot. For me, my records are all very different. It’s probably clearer to other people what makes my songs similar than it is to me actually.

So I’ve chosen to keep just my regular my normal name, my birth name, and not make a project name because of this — to maintain independence form some kind of a project that has a specific goal. I started off making music as a composer in school and in a way I still think of myself as a composer who is behind the scenes, building things. As opposed to, like, a performer, or someone who is doing a specific thing and they have this name that people know them as.

Listening to the instrumental passages on Loud City Song made me wonder if you could ever see yourself returning to those conservatory roots, and making an instrumental album of compositions.

Well I have in the past, but for some reason recently I’ve just wanted to make music with singing. But I don’t necessarily know that I always will!

Chillwave blur meets '70s art-rock chops

Like all recent acts still working the chillwave formula, DIANA brings the blur. The quartet’s vocalist, Carmen Elle, sings softly, often smothered by wooly keyboard blankets; the sustain settings are often high, and there’s little here that’s fast or jarring. But significant variations on the familiar formula flow throughout this Toronto band’s debut album. The guitar solo on opening cut “Foreign Installation”, for one, is in no way “indie” — it burns showily in the prog-rock style of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Elsewhere there is sax by band co-founder Joseph Shabason, whose Roxy Music-y woodwinds helped define Destroyer’s Kaputt, and prominent basslines from former Hidden Cameras contributor Paul Mathew that swing from ’80s funk (“That Feeling”) to ’70s jazz fusion: Check his mournful Jaco Pastorius-esque solo that opens the title track. No chillwave there, bro!

There are, of course, some of the genre’s defining elements at play here, and for the most part we’re not complaining: Kieran Adams’s snappy drums that reverberate through “Strange Attraction” and “Anna” could’ve been lifted from just about anything from the ’80s Factory Records catalogue (New Order, Section 25, etc.). But even “Born Again,” the band’s first synth-washed and squishy track, sports roaring guitar eruptions in its climactic final moments that are far more Adrian Belew than Bernard Sumner. Much of the album could’ve been remixed to maximize distinctions between cuts, but Perpetual Surrender serves as beguiling introduction, and the band is already working on a sequel.

An immersive mix that invites, not overwhelms

On 2010′s Full Circle and 2012′s Lineage, composer-producer Zack Shigeto Saginaw, who records under his middle name, was a cool practitioner of twilit beatscapes: indie-crossover-friendly, tempo-variable, suggestive of hip-hop. No Better Time Than Now has a much heavier early-’70s astral-jazz feel than his prior work — if the title of the opener, “First Saturn Return,” isn’t enough of a clue to Shigeto’s orientation, the crinkly percussion and slow-rippling Fender Rhodes line and chimes ought to do it.

That sound echoes throughout No Better Time Than Now, which acts as a reminder, along with Theo Parrish’s Black Jazz Signature mix and Flying Lotus’s recent Apocalypse, of how deeply Detroit techno is grounded in the Alice Coltrane-Return to Forever-Weather Report axis. But No Better Time isn’t “techno” any more than it is “jazz.” These tracks are so drifty that they need to be played loudly if they’re to be apprehended much at all — and a gain in volume equals a gain in legibility as well as playfulness, which is best appreciated on the soft, Brazilian-tinged undertow of the groove on “Ringleader” and the curling videogame FX of the title cut. It’s an immersive mix that invites, not overwhelms — a pretty bitching brew.

File under: Electronic pop with a human heart

For fans of: MGMT, Missing Persons, Capital Cities, Niki & The Dove, Annie

Personae: Eric, Matt and Nikki

Thanks largely to their remixes of songs by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros and other indie bands that don’t ordinarily embrace dance beats, Brooklyn’s Little Daylight built a formidable internet buzz before they’d played their first show. Now longtime friends Eric, Matt and Nikki have an EP on Capitol Records featuring their blog-supported hits “Overdose,” “Name in Lights” and “Glitter and Gold.” Combining programmed elements with old-fashioned instruments, this well-educated trio is currently writing songs for their 2014 debut album, but will soon be touring in the fall. Don’t ask about their drug history: Their only overdose was on love.

On their name:

Nikki: It’s a fairytale story by George MacDonald about a princess who has a spell put on her — her moods are controlled by the moon. We responded to the idea of Little Daylight being something kinda cute and whimsical but can be kinda dark and serious.

On the band’s beginning:

Matt: We started because we had originals we wanted to record. The three of us felt like we had the same sensibility about what they should sound like. We took a studio up to a lake house that a friend of ours had lent us, and while we were there we decided to do some remixing to get some production ideas down without being too wedded to anything. We released the remixes first because the originals we were still working on; we’re somewhat perfectionists about that stuff.

On near-instant success:

Eric: The remixes — especially the Edward Sharpe and Passion Pit ones — probably got around partially because of the original artists and partially because of the remixes. And when we put out “Overdose,” it was good timing: The blogs were already paying attention to us. All we did was put it on Soundcloud.

Nikki: It got to No.1 on The Hype Machine, which was the work of the blogs, obviously, who helped put us on the map.

Matt: We’ve been lucky that a few of the blogs took an early liking to us because of the remixes. For anyone observing, it just looked like we were remix artists, and I think those people were all pleasantly surprised when we put out our originals.

Nikki: South By Southwest was our first and second live shows that we ever played, so it was a trial by fire. Luckily, because of “Overdose” there was enough word spread that people were coming to see us.

On how remixing shapes their own music:

Eric: When we do remixes, the song is already written, so it’s all about production — reinterpreting the song that another band. So in doing that as an exercise, we figured out where we all met in the middle with production, and after the course of three or four remixes, it started to have a signature sound, where we were able to approach our own songs in the same way. It gave us training wheels.

Matt: The song isn’t completely written when you approach a remix; you have the option to change things as you see fit. That ended up being a big part of how we write our songs, too. They go through an initial output phase, where we get it down and then usually take a break. Whether we mean to or not we almost end up remixing our own work.

On prior activities that also helps define Little Daylight:

Eric: One thing that’s important for both Matt and I is that there was a period when we were creating experimental electronic music without expectations. That got us some skills although they don’t come out in obvious ways. When we’re in the studio a lot, we go off on tangents that stem from that experience of doing experimental stuff that wasn’t trying to be pop songs.

Matt: I went to Brown [University] with a lot of people doing video and graphic art and installation art. [Eric went to UPenn and Nikki attended NYU.] That kinda stuff has informed Little Daylight in a filtered but very significant way. The three of us are thinking about not only the music, but how the music is going to look when it’s being performed, what our images say about us, the poster artwork down to the font; we’re very detail-oriented. Visuals are important to all three of us.

Nikki: We do our own artwork.

On their division of labor:

Matt: Everyone has an assumption of what we each do: Eric and I, because we’re guys, do the production; Nikki, because she’s the lead singer, is doing the top line, and then coming in at the end to sing when we’re done producing. But it couldn’t be more different than that. We each do everything. It’s been funny to see the stereotypes people hold and how universal they are.

Nikki: When we’re playing live, Eric plays bass, Matt plays guitar and synths, and I play synths and sing and we have a drummer.

Eric: But in the studio, it’s kind of free-range. We set everything up, lay all our instruments out, and when inspiration hits, you grab and go. Guitar, bass, keyboards and percussion — anyone could pick them up and perform. Even the vocals, up until the point where the song is getting to be finished, are open to any of us. And that’s very important to us, that we not limit any person to doing one thing or another and not doing other things.

Nikki: We’re an oligarchy.

On creating their “Overdose” video in the immediate wake of Hurricane Sandy on Manhattan’s electricity-challenged streets:

Nikki: We had the idea that it would be really cool to go out with a camera and see what happens. We invited couple of friends who are DPs and went driving around the West Village and Soho, where it was still pretty dark. We didn’t really have a plan. We just turned on the music on our iPhones, and started dancing to it. We were on a completely dark Bleecker Street, and there’s a really bright light in the background, an emergency light on this major thoroughfare. It would’ve cost millions of dollars to create a situation like that.

Eric: The police passed by us a number of times. Finally they pulled up next to us, and said in a very strong New York brogue, “You guys better watch out and not get hit by cars or something.”

Nikki: The other interaction we had that was really funny was that someone bicycled by while we were shooting and said, “Check your white balance!”

Eric: Only in New York or L.A. would somebody harass you by talking about video production techniques.

On their influences and relationship to pop:

Eric: A friend who doesn’t listen to that much pop music asked me if it’s a formula we’re trying to emulate. And I said that if you don’t love what you’re doing it’s going to be apparent immediately. We love pop music. We also love a lot of other stuff, and I think that love of music in general is what makes us make these tracks what they are.

Nikki: People listen to our stuff and compare us to Blondie. I sometimes hear echoes of Tom Petty in some of the songwriting, and I love both those artists.

Matt: We’re working on this thing for the album that’s heavily electronic, and for some reason it reminds me of Fleetwood Mac. It doesn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac, but we love Fleetwood Mac, and maybe it’s seeped in on some weird, left-turn way.

Eric: We’re working on something that reminds me of one of my favorite albums that has nothing to do with pop music, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. We listen to indie rock, classic rock, reggae, experimental electronic stuff, and we’re all big fans of straight-up club music. We all like to go out dancing sometimes and that’s the right music for that. We’ll come into the studio after having a late night and wanna turn the kick drum up a little bit.

Nikki: We’re really into classic songwriting. All of our songs, you could strip the production away, turn it into a different song and still retain a classic element to it.

Eric: Pop music these days is very much about bold choices. The bass is in the forefront more than it ever has before. We like loud things.

On their ultimate musical goals:

Eric: I think we’re trying to make good, classic-sounding songs where the verses, the choruses and bridges have an overall horizontal and vertical integrity to them. The same way Bob Marley relates to Aphex Twin is that their songs have a flow that is natural and beautiful and give you the chills when you get to the climax of them. We just wanna do that with every track we do.

Copeland’s new album, Joke in the Hole, is the fullest exploration of his aesthetic yet, a riot of screwed dance rhythms and cartoon outbursts; extended listening may require a dose of Dramamine on hand. Fittingly, strange background noises frequently cut through the interview — yelps and squeals that sound like either a horror movie or Ren & Stimpy is playing quietly in a corner of the room (or maybe both at once). “I live in front of a grade school that has a day camp,” Copeland explains, when asked just what the heck all that ruckus is. “It’s a heavy traffic street, and there’s kids on the playground. I’m surprised the ice-cream man hasn’t come by, like the final nail in the sound coffin.”

Philip Sherburne spoke with Copeland about seasick sounds, dance beats and making tape rips off YouTube.

I’ve been listening to your album on constant rotation for the past few hours, and I’m feeling slightly twisted. It’s a strange world to immerse yourself in so deeply — although I suppose maybe it’s not so strange for you.

Welcome, man, welcome.

Did you have a a specific intention going into this record?

I knew I wanted to spend a lot of time on it. I’ve been working really fast for a couple years, and I like that; it’s real satisfying, and a certain kind of result comes of it. But for some reason, the first couple songs I started, I was like, “I’m just going to spend some time with it, take time to get away from it.” And so I spent about a year, which is the longest I’ve ever spent by myself on anything. In one way, that was my intention, just to digest it a couple times over, so there that would be nothing I would want to change, or would feel that I hadn’t thought about a hundred times. Everything on there I feel like I can stand behind. But I finished it a while ago, so it’s strange to listen to it now, because I don’t hear a lot of the decisions I thought I made. In my mind, I thought I was making a bigger decision, and now I realize it was extremely subtle nuances that I probably don’t catch any more.

Did you make any big changes in terms of process on the new album?

This was the first one I recorded entirely on a computer. I don’t really compose on a computer, but it was the first time I had the chance to take it the next step further. Going to the studio and requiring time there kind of puts the pressure on, because you have to plot out those decisions beforehand, and if they don’t work, you’re kind of stuck. But I also was able to take it to a studio that Black Dice had worked in where I really liked the way the guy treated low-end sound. It was nice to take it somewhere and have a kind of dialogue with someone, like, “Make this sound beefy,” and he understood. Where I have holes in my frequencies, he could fill them in for me, which was nice. It felt like the first time I’ve taken something from beginning to end as properly as I know how. Other times I’ve enjoyed it, and I wouldn’t change any of it. But, again, I was working really fast, and that was part of the idea, part of the method at the time.

Did you enjoy working on a computer?

Yeah, totally. I never shied away from it, and as far as I can remember, every recording session I’ve done used the computer at some point. There are things I don’t like about it, but it does make a lot of things easier. Not having to press “rewind” a lot — that sounds stupid, but it takes up a lot of time. Being able to work on multiple things at the same time and change between them really quickly, it felt like a helpful tool for me. I can sort of get, not lost, but stuck if I’m just focusing on one thing. So it was nice to be able to go through and work on multiple songs at the same time. I enjoyed the computer.

The album sounds very spontaneous; I had an idea of you in the studio, just jamming on samplers and loop boxes. So it’s interesting to hear that it’s constructed differently than I imagined.

The computer was really just used for recording and some editing. For the relationships between the parts and how they fit, it’s a very slow process for me, and the tools I use are not sampler-based. The samples, even the drum machines, somehow need to be played into place. It takes a long time to find the sweet spot that can just last a minute or something. The slightest variation starts throwing off the rhythm, the groove of the relationship. In some ways, I think the way you hear it is probably pretty appropriate. There’s things being played at different times, but they have to be played at the right moment, and there’s definitely some, like, jammy spontaneity or some chance in how everything’s going to fit at the end. The computer doesn’t line things up for me or do anything like that, it just takes the sound and puts it with the rest of the sounds.

Are you doing much sampling?

Not as much as I have in the past. There’s some, but it’s scary to admit that you’re doing that, because I feel like it implies you’re taking somebody’s thing and using it in this very direct way. When I’m comfortable with a sample, it’s usually because I’ve taken something that’s really small, like one guitar hit and a drum, and changed the speed, changed the pitch, added something else to it. To me, I’m just taking two sounds, and I try to take it as far away from its origins so I don’t feel like I’m using somebody else’s idea.

The reason I ask is that so many of the rhythms feel to me like African rhythms that have been manipulated and slowed down and layered with something else.

Oh, no. That’s real far from my source. [Chuckles] I have such a stupid process. I work in the Black Dice practice space. We only have a cassette player there, so I have to tape from YouTube onto the tape, and that’s what I use as my source sound. So it’s kind of degraded in a way. I’m trying to think of something that…I don’t know, like that Ting Tings song or something. That’s the type of stuff I’d be into sampling, because it’s so well-recorded that on a cassette it still sounds pretty good, whereas an African record on a cassette just sounds like a bunch of fuckin’ hiss.

How much were you thinking about dance music or hip-hop when you were making this record? Many of the record’s rhythms and tropes seem informed by those genres, albeit loosely. “Grapes,” for instance, sounds a little like the Bomb Squad. How much are those references on your mind, and how much is accidental?

Maybe as much as you hear. I think those styles do things I’m trying to do, like maintain one thing for a long time. I think they both succeed in throwing a beat unchanged for two and a half minutes, but they also have a location that they exist [in], or someone singing or rapping or something over the top. I don’t do either of those things. I think of those styles as successfully doing what I want to do, but I know that my ingredients are really different. I think sometimes there’s a reference to them, really just like a drumbeat that goes on a long time, but I definitely don’t feel like I’m contributing to those conversations directly. I feel like they’re kind of like a tangent, where they both meet. I feel like I’m from a live music mentality.

You’ve talked about the way that Black Dice is a touring band, which means you need to be able to play your songs live. Does your solo work give you the freedom to experiment in the studio without having to worry about being able to reproduce it on stage?

Yeah, for sure. I grew up with a four-track, which Bjorn from Black Dice didn’t, and it’s always kind of been a point of departure for us. I enjoy spending my days doing what I’ve done since I was 13 or 14, just sitting with whatever crap you have around and making something you like. Sometimes it goes nowhere, and sometimes you’re able to share it, and sometimes you figure out how to play it live. Black Dice, we jam it out, and that’s how we write. But by myself, I like making records. It’s kind of how I think of my ideas, you know. And for a live representation I try to add something different, make it a little bit more than the changes in the recording. Just take a little part and play around with it in a different way.

When did you start working with a four-track, and what attracted you to being able to do audio collage?

I didn’t start doing stuff like that until I was in my 20s, I bet. I think my mom got me [a four-track] for my birthday when I was 13 or 14. It was a two-input, Fostex cassette one. It was real basic, I don’t even know if there was an EQ on it. I had used one at a friend’s house. I’d spent the night there, and we’d spent most of the night playing around. I didn’t know anything about them before that. So I started doing that, and I had one until I was maybe 21, and then I didn’t really record anything for five or six years, for whatever reason. I came back to it maybe five or six years ago, when I was like, “Aw, I miss this.” And then I started doing more.

A lot of your music has a very tape-heavy aesthetic — lots of fuzzy, warped sounds, like a cassette that’s been melting in the sun. What attracts you to that effect?

Maybe it came about just trying to figure out how to make things last a long time. I think Daft Punk’s an easy example where they’ll have this one sound going, but do these filter sweeps so that it feels like it builds for a minute. It’s really just one sound going, but they’re turning this knob, and dropping this beat at the end of it, and it’s really satisfying. I think that’s sort of their tool for making repetition have some movement. There are a lot of ways to do it. The drum machine, you don’t just put on a certain BPM, you sort of have to play between two BPMs. So that, for a second, you’re a tiny bit ahead of the beat, and for a second you’re a tiny bit behind the beat, and you also kind of have that moment where everything hits at the same time. Also a lot of samples are detuned in a way, so it sounds sort of sickly to a lot of people. I don’t think I do it any more, but I know what you mean. It’s sort of like playing a detuned guitar.

There also seems to be a kind of cartoon sensibility in your music — bright colors and bold, exaggerated lines.

I definitely try to have a sense of humor with it. I see a lot of one-person electronic bands, and it’s very sample-based and everything locked in this one way, and I think the presentation comes off really slick. I don’t really meditate on these ideas, but coming from a punk rock culture: that’s the straight world and this is the fuckin’ cool world. I think it’s cool that people are doing what they do, but sometimes the result feels really straight to me. I want to have some seriousness, and demonstrate some things I think are really important and maybe hidden in it, but then I want it to be attractive in a stupid way. I don’t think there’s something bad about having something be dumb or idiotic or really basic. I don’t know if that’s cartoony, but I think it share a cultural space with it.

Is it kind of a trash-culture thing? Finding redemption in cultural castoffs?

I think that’s definitely part of it. Not the entire thing, but part of my intention. I think there’s a lot of everything right now. There’s a lot of music and movies and people and horrible stories, and it sounds really basic, but this is what I do with it all. I’m not political, but this is my way of dealing with that stuff, in some ways. It’s not my entire M.O., but I like to think that what I don’t like, I try to work with instead of being a bummer about it. If I don’t like something, I feel like I can add something to it to bring it back to a place where I like it.

That kind of trash-culture utopianism played a big part in a lot of the underground music from Providence, where Black Dice got their start — bands like Lightning Bolt and Force Field, and the Fort Thunder space.

I was really young, so I have a hard time even now — there’s a big separation because of my age and what was going on there. They all seemed very adult and smart to me, and I was living with my parents a lot of the time. I’m sure it has an influence, but I’ve never really given it much consideration. But I definitely think of [that scene] as being kind of fine-art in a way that I flirt with, but that’s not where my head is. That’s a world that Black Dice can play around in, but Bjorn exists there much more. They all seemed like fine artists to me, just living, like, kind of extreme.

But again, Bjorn was going to school there and was more part of that conversation and brought it to Black Dice. I feel like there’s one degree of remove from my approach to that, just because I took it from Black Dice’s aesthetic rather than coming upon it [for myself], because I was just a kid.

Your work has such a murky, gnarled aesthetic; have you ever wanted to do something clean and hi-fi?

Yeah, I’ve tried to do things like that; there’s smaller projects I’ve done that were more traditional sounding. I’m trying to say “yes” to things [like that] because in some ways, you sort of paint yourself into a corner at a certain point. I like the idea, but I’d want to find somebody who could do it with me, instead of figuring it out right now. I have a way of working that I like, and it changes based on really basic things like a new piece of equipment. I’m not like chasing that sound. I think it’d be a curious sort of addition to the story, but that’s not the direction I’m heading. Just, sometimes I want to get in that orbit and take off again.

When you’re working in the studio, is part of the creative process in the way that you wire the studio? I’m imagining you in there routing machines through lots of obscure hardware boxes and seeing what comes out.

Barely any. It’s like, I use two effects: I use a pitch-shifter and a delay unit that has another sound on it. Sometimes I’ll use a phase box. But for the most part, my tools are really basic. Gear guys have no interest in my tools. I’m not part of that scene. I actually think you could probably have done what I did 30 years ago. They’re that primitive. It’s not longer ago, it’s not early ’70s; this shit’s really stupid. There’s nothing cool about my gear.

Who did the record cover?

You know, I did. I was kind of under the gun. I like it; the criteria I wanted for this one was just that you could see it on a computer screen really small and it would communicate big colors. But then after I turned it in, I was like, “Aw, this just looks like a really B-rate Broken Ear Record.” It’s just stripes and an ass. Too late; that doesn’t matter any more. I think it’s cool. It does what I wanted it to.

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.

Piecing together a loose approximation of dance music out of misshapen scraps of funk

Somewhere between Four Tet and Lightning Bolt lies RocketNumberNine, which consists of London brothers Tom and Ben Page. Like Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, who released their single “Matthew & Toby” on his own Text Records label in 2010, they come at genre from oblique angles, piecing together a loose approximation of dance music out of misshapen scraps of funk. Like Lightning Bolt, they manage it all with just four hands, with Tom Page’s live percussion providing the rhythmic muscle and Ben Page’s synthesizers taking care of all the rest. And “live” is the operative word here: Rather than editing and overdubbing, they roll out their lumpen shapes in real time, lending a rough-around-the-edges quality that’s rare for the kind of corkscrewing, groove-focused electronic music that they emulate.

The re-recorded “Matthew and Toby” pays tribute to the stabbing keys of classic rave tracks, and “Rotunda” is a throbbing take on the Caribbean-influenced house subgenre known as UK funky, but RocketNumberNine don’t limit themselves to genre studies. “Deadly Buzz” interpolates tough, metallic techno with the soaring affect of Apparat or Radiohead while still finding room to sneak in ambiguously Eastern tonalities; “Lone Raver” explodes breakbeat hardcore into a screaming maelstrom of progressive metal.

They make the most of the limitations they’ve set for themselves, too. MeYouWeYou never sounds as prosaic as a drummer and a synth player sitting down to jam; tuned drums do as much melodic work as the keyboards, while foaming, distorted synths take on the heft of electric bass and Marshall-stacked guitars, spilling out of the speakers in great waves of feedback. It’s not just that RocketNumberNine are so deep in the pocket; what gives their album its visceral thrill are the sumptuous textures they find there.

Surprisingly immediate 21st-century pop music

Moderat is an on-off project from Berlin bass duo Modeselektor and ambient experimenter Apparat, and you certainly get what you’d expect from the partnership. Their first, self-titled album from 2009 (the one with the cartoon of a woman punching herself in the face on the cover) pulled off a nifty synthesis of the dreamy, introspective aesthetic favored by Sascha Ring, aka Apparat, and the boom-driven, report-to-the-dancefloor values of Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary.

Moderat was as succinct a summary of the magnetic Berlin sound as you could wish for: clean, beautiful, pulsing with energy and wildly promiscuous, drawing in everything from glitch to hip-hop to dancehall to the ghosts of ambient prog. Almost five years later, Ring, Bronsert and Szary remain in restless magpie mode for this second album, adding abrasive electronic R&B textures, soulful, post-Frank Ocean human voices and especially the midnight clatter and throb of dubstep to their ever-changing scheme of things. The album’s signature track “Bad Kingdom” transplants the snap and bounce of a daytime radio pop-soul hit into the echoing no-space inhabited by Burial or Shackleton; the epic 10-minuter “Milk” is minimal house with a glittering dubstep sheen; “Let In The Light” is a slow jam so thoroughly zonked on shoegazing energies that it dissolves into bleary bliss. Most striking of all is the scale — everything here is big.

Though their lineage is in the febrile worlds of dance and electronica, Moderat have created some surprisingly immediate 21st-century pop music that’s as accessible to people who never venture into dark and noisy spaces as it is to the obsessive crate-digger and subgenre freak. It’s a bit of a triumph.

Straightforward rhythms and good hooks, with a homespun quality

The throwback impulse has become so predominant in electronic dance music that it’s almost cliché to mention it, and yet it’s hard not to think about the ’80s when you hear Ikonika’s second album. On Aerotropolis, the West London producer (real name: Sara Abdel-Hamid) favors neon-plastic synths redolent of the Miami Vice era, crossed with the beat structures and floor-filling imperative of early house music and techno. (No surprise the album’s title recalls Cybotron, the band Juan Atkins was in before nailing the techno blueprint solo with Model 500.) Like a lot of people who were identified with dubstep in the late 2000s, she’s moved into more straightforward 4/4 rhythms, but even the most obviously anthemic tunes have a homespun quality. She writes good hooks, too, none better than “Lights Are Forever,” a G-funk synth whine that’s far better L.A.-freeway music than most of Random Access Memories.

But in Ibiza, dance music was still all over the board: Quirky recent Europop hits, New Wave oldies, early house, offbeat disco, art-rock, jazz-funk, world music, dub reggae, near-ambient cuts — nearly any ’70s/’80s style with a syncopated rhythm that felt good in warm weather and got tourists dancing — were all being played at clubs like Amnesia, which sported an open-air dancefloor that heightened the free-spirited Mediterranean vibe.

Oakenfold, Rampling and Fung then brought Ibiza’s eclectic programming philosophy back to London. Unlike other genre trends favored by the DJ cognoscenti, the resulting Balearic Beat didn’t take hold because it was intrinsically pan-genre and anti-trend — like Northern Soul, the name referred to the region that claimed certain records as its own, and not to their place of origin. Balearic’s embrace of anything-goes grooves slower and gentler than house’s pounding 120-and-up BPMs paved the way for massive international hits by Soul II Soul, Enigma and other acts that went on to inspire chillout and trip-hop. As the current wayward programming of Lindstrøm, Aeroplane and other recent EDM fusionists have proven, Balearic is arguably hipper than ever today.

We’re explaining all this because we’d like to share our enthusiasm for a ridiculously entertaining series of compilations that have been in our library since last fall but feel particularly right for this summer. Compiled in Sweden by EMI staffer Jens Peterson Hällefors, the Balearic series is arguably the most out-there digital-only collection of music ever presented by a major label. At 11 volumes specializing in house, rock, soft rock, leftfield dance, electronic, world, reggae, pop, ambient, progressive rock and “blend” (an introductory sampler), Balearic goes deep, deeeeeep into the aesthetic to embrace both familiar cuts and oddities that will delight even the most dedicated diggers. Some are bona-fide Ibiza classics while many are choice cuts presented in the same boundary-crossing spirit, yet with a Scandinavian slant: This is the first time that most of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish acts presented here alongside their American, English, German, Jamaican, Japanese, Brazilian, French, Belgian, South African, Australian and Spanish brethren have ever snagged a legitimate international release. (We’re crossing our fingers that Hällefors’s latest three Scandinavia-specific Balearic comps will sometime soon be released here.)

So pour a cool beverage, dance around the pool, throw a roof party, head to the nearest beach or simply imagine yourself on vacation with similarly inclined celebrants, and stretch out with these everything-but-the-kitchen-sink collections. If you’d just like to dip your toe (or even shake them), may we suggest our own 30-track playlist that’s sequenced like a Balearic DJ set? Prepare yourself to hear everyone from Simple Minds to Peter Tosh in a way you may never have heard before.