Electronica

eets-“Miami Vice” background synthesizers layered behind piercing keyboard sweeps.   Like a swarm of digital bees, “We Are the Night” scurries into your speakers and fades into a house party already in session. The single “Do It Again,” which already has a video making the rounds, is the second most fun song on the CD, […]

  Astralwerks Do you want something completely new and original or something really fun? If you don’t mind two German kids reworking a Cure song and some sometimes-generic electronic music, “Idealism” is an upbeat dance-the-night-away album.   The pair sampled and reworked The Cure’s “Fire in Cairo,” rebranding it “Digitalism in Cairo,” and adding a […]

Astralwerks  Fatboy Slim has been cobbling together sample-rific singles for a decade now. It’s amazing how many of them became instant pop-culture classics: “Praise You,” “The Rockafeller Skank” and “Weapon of Choice,” fun even without watching Christopher Walken waltz his way through an empty hotel. Indifference to 2004’s “Palookaville” has rendered Slim irrelevant for the […]

Virgin Since its start in the late Eighties, Massive Attack has been a leading force in electronic music and DJ culture. Even if you don’t know the band by name, chances are you’ve heard one of its oft-licensed songs. When a commercial, movie or TV show needs some down-tempo trip-hop with an icy chill, Massive […]

V2 In the liner notes for this Christmas-ready career-retrospective disc, Moby writes he’s baffled he’s had a career at all, claiming he’s “just a weird bald guy who makes music in his bedroom.” While that’s true, he’s also the one who helped propel electronica from club-only marginalization into a viable art form. Say what you […]

Existential Sounds Perhaps the best argument for the melding of man and machine since Steve Austin went bionic is “The Fire of Cumulative Hours” EP from Long Distance Runner. Essentially a one-man show starring Portland-based K. Briggs, “Cumulative” marks a masterful DIY debut of breakbeat electronica, both imaginative and playful, like the best of DJ […]