1. Flying Lotus
2. Caribou
3. LCD Soundsystem
4. Gonjasufi
5. Pantha Du Prince
6. Bonobo
7. Emeralds
8. Holy Fuck
9. Darkstar
10. Morgan Packard
1. Flying Lotus Cosmogramma (Warp)
At only 26 years of age, Flying Lotus (aka Steve Ellison) has made effective use of his relatively short run in the limelight. In the five years since he first appeared on the scene, the Los Angeles native's talents have grown in such leaps and bounds that he now finds himself pioneering a full-blown West-Coast beats renaissance. "At this point," Ellison says, "I can really dream things up and see them manifest. It's a great feeling." In 2010, no other producer dreamed up an album as vividly as the monumental Cosmogramma. Released last May, Cosmogramma is a free-jazz space opera for the bass generation. Three albums in, Ellison has finally grown comfortable with letting go of trends and instead following personal influences in his work. Those range far and wide, from the jazz background of his family (his great aunt is Alice Coltrane) to the Technicolor sounds of his Adult Swim days, where he once composed soundtracks.
"Cosmo was a very special time in my life," he concedes. "I went through a lot of tough discovery, and just learning about life. Just right around the time I was starting to find the sound that I was looking for in the record, my mom passed away. That spun my life around in a different direction and put a lot of things in perspective, in terms of what I want to say with my work. I just felt that if I was going to make a statement, it needed to be the most honest one I could make." In fearlessly chasing that honesty, this year Flying Lotus has exceeded what listeners have come to expect from genre-conscious electronic musicians. The ingredients at work here are often disparate and unfriendly ― 8-bit noise, cartoonish synths, swelling Alice Coltrane harps, dense breakbeats ― but in Ellison's hands they unearth a digital side-door into the complex rhythmic territory of free jazz, and fully earn him comparisons to the likes of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.
Dimitri Nasrallah
2. Caribou Swim (Merge)
Critics have called this fifth album from Dundas, ON-via-London, UK Pro Tooler Dan Snaith his most organic album to date; Snaith himself describes it as his most technologically-based. Swim, somehow, comes off as both. In nine paisley-pasted manifestos, Snaith harmonizes, synthesizes, terrorizes and hypnotizes. Sure, all of those shit-hot dubstep and witch house artists may have fresher ideas and sexier visages but in ten years from now, they'll still be remembered as dubstep and witch house artists. Caribou will be remembered for Swim.
Daniel Sylvester
3. LCD Soundsystem This Is Happening (DFA)
In what could end up being LCD Soundsystem's last album, James Murphy went out with a bang. Or make that a "Pow Pow." Giving us another one of his tailor-made history lessons, he revisited Bowie, the Talking Heads and Gary Numan, all with his own modernist touch. And while he's often regarded as a producer with his sights set on the clubs, This Is Happening proved to be an even more contemplative, inward look than 2007's soul-bearing Sound of Silver. If it's the "end of an era," as he tells us, at least he left us with his best.
Cam Lindsay
4. Gonjasufi A Sufi & A Killer (Warp)
If you were fussing over a sampler plate of awesome flavours from Bollywood, Turkish delights, and breezy '70s soul food your concoction might resemble the colourful mishmash the Gaslamp Killer and Flying Lotus have set before Gonjasufi, awaiting his vocal digestion. Would you be bold enough to experiment with garnish like cabaret piano and hardcore punk bass lines though? Gonjasufi's wonderful croon and croaking, like a love match between Fozzy Bear and Bad Brains, adds final ingredient to make the supersaturated magnetic tape bubble like a long-forgotten blaxploitation classic. From Dimension X. A feast for the ears.
Eric Hill
5. Pantha Du Prince Black Noise (Rough Trade)
Pantha du Prince's Black Noise combined elements of minimal techno, house and shoegazer to create a uniquely distinct sound palette that engaged dance music enthusiasts and indie rockers alike, especially given his leap from the boutique Dial label to much bigger Rough Trade. Pantha's 2007 album, This Bliss, put him on the map as a young producer to watch. Black Noise is Pantha's logical evolution toward the pop spectrum, featuring collaborations with Panda Bear and LCD Soundsystem's Tyler Pope. A phenomenal third outing from this leading German producer, Black Noise masterfully submerges you within his warm dense layers and subtle grooving melodies.
Andrea Ayotte
6. Bonobo Black Sands (Ninja Tune)
Grounding electronic music elements with jazzy guitar, violin and horns, Bonobo is a rare artist to unite the digital and analog while blurring differentiation of one from the other. Black Sands echoes and reverberates naturally like a bird's wings fluttering into the night sky. On "Stay The Same" Bonobo's production and instrumentation, with fellow Ninja Tune artist Andreya Triana's clarity of voice, create magic to touch human emotion in a desensitized world. Black Sands shows Bonobo at the height of grace making music so individually authentic to sound both familiar and like nothing you've ever heard.
Sarah Ferguson
7. Emeralds Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Editions Mego)
Despite an endless array of releases, side projects and band-run labels, Emeralds were complete unknowns at the start of 2010. But that all changed with Does It Look Like I'm Here? Ditching the side-long slow burners of their earlier work, the Cleveland, OH trio skyrocketed to new astral planes of kosmische wizardry with their Editions Mego debut, filtering their retro-futurist synth/guitar attack through a more focused, pop-oriented lens. But despite the more compact approach, Emeralds lost nothing in the way of ambition. Does It Look Like I'm Here? grabs hold of electronic music's past and flings it far into the future.
Brock Thiessen
8. Holy Fuck Latin (Young Turks/XL)
Toronto-based experiment Holy Fuck finally lived up to its expletive with Latin. Like its predecessors, their third full-length presented popular electronic music forms as interpreted through live performance, without looping or laptops, but the block rocking results on Latin were that much more realized. The group finally stepped outside their influences to create something beyond themselves, achieving catharsis through epic songwriting and rich production, with a level of consistency never before achieved by founding keyboardists Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh, now supported by a permanent rhythm section. The sense of a stable studio environment was palpable, culminating in a glorious road-trip album if there ever was one.
Alan Ranta
9. Darkstar North (Hyperdub)
Instead of mostly irrelevant dubstep comparisons, it's more pertinent to ask whether Darkstar is this era's Portishead, or perhaps the Human League, whose "(You Remind Me Of) Gold" is gorgeously transformed on this disc. Darkstar have updated a winning formula combining dramatic, Anglo-melancholic songcraft with cutting edge mid-tempo electronic music. North's strongest association to UK bass music is its simultaneous double and half-time rhythms, as well as a tense, spare sound. But North impresses most as a pop album: chord changes are reassuring in their minor-key way, and vocals are perfectly cool yet fraught.
David Dacks
10. Morgan Packard Moment Again Elsewhere (Anticipate)
Moment Again Elsewhere was cerebral-techno producer Morgan Packard's second solo album since his 2005 collaboration with Anticipate label-boss Ezekiel Honig, and it's by far his most self-assured and compelling work to date. Packard's unique brand of jazz-influenced glitch moves effortlessly from ambient to IDM and hints of deep house. Using his custom-made software, Ripple, the live piano, accordion, and saxophone intertwine with the electronics to create alternately brittle and lush layers of analogue warmth, making for one of the most intimate headphone experiences yet created by an increasingly fertile new generation of American producers.
Vincent Pollard
2. Caribou
3. LCD Soundsystem
4. Gonjasufi
5. Pantha Du Prince
6. Bonobo
7. Emeralds
8. Holy Fuck
9. Darkstar
10. Morgan Packard
1. Flying Lotus Cosmogramma (Warp)
At only 26 years of age, Flying Lotus (aka Steve Ellison) has made effective use of his relatively short run in the limelight. In the five years since he first appeared on the scene, the Los Angeles native's talents have grown in such leaps and bounds that he now finds himself pioneering a full-blown West-Coast beats renaissance. "At this point," Ellison says, "I can really dream things up and see them manifest. It's a great feeling." In 2010, no other producer dreamed up an album as vividly as the monumental Cosmogramma. Released last May, Cosmogramma is a free-jazz space opera for the bass generation. Three albums in, Ellison has finally grown comfortable with letting go of trends and instead following personal influences in his work. Those range far and wide, from the jazz background of his family (his great aunt is Alice Coltrane) to the Technicolor sounds of his Adult Swim days, where he once composed soundtracks.
"Cosmo was a very special time in my life," he concedes. "I went through a lot of tough discovery, and just learning about life. Just right around the time I was starting to find the sound that I was looking for in the record, my mom passed away. That spun my life around in a different direction and put a lot of things in perspective, in terms of what I want to say with my work. I just felt that if I was going to make a statement, it needed to be the most honest one I could make." In fearlessly chasing that honesty, this year Flying Lotus has exceeded what listeners have come to expect from genre-conscious electronic musicians. The ingredients at work here are often disparate and unfriendly ― 8-bit noise, cartoonish synths, swelling Alice Coltrane harps, dense breakbeats ― but in Ellison's hands they unearth a digital side-door into the complex rhythmic territory of free jazz, and fully earn him comparisons to the likes of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.
Dimitri Nasrallah
2. Caribou Swim (Merge)
Critics have called this fifth album from Dundas, ON-via-London, UK Pro Tooler Dan Snaith his most organic album to date; Snaith himself describes it as his most technologically-based. Swim, somehow, comes off as both. In nine paisley-pasted manifestos, Snaith harmonizes, synthesizes, terrorizes and hypnotizes. Sure, all of those shit-hot dubstep and witch house artists may have fresher ideas and sexier visages but in ten years from now, they'll still be remembered as dubstep and witch house artists. Caribou will be remembered for Swim.
Daniel Sylvester
3. LCD Soundsystem This Is Happening (DFA)
In what could end up being LCD Soundsystem's last album, James Murphy went out with a bang. Or make that a "Pow Pow." Giving us another one of his tailor-made history lessons, he revisited Bowie, the Talking Heads and Gary Numan, all with his own modernist touch. And while he's often regarded as a producer with his sights set on the clubs, This Is Happening proved to be an even more contemplative, inward look than 2007's soul-bearing Sound of Silver. If it's the "end of an era," as he tells us, at least he left us with his best.
Cam Lindsay
4. Gonjasufi A Sufi & A Killer (Warp)
If you were fussing over a sampler plate of awesome flavours from Bollywood, Turkish delights, and breezy '70s soul food your concoction might resemble the colourful mishmash the Gaslamp Killer and Flying Lotus have set before Gonjasufi, awaiting his vocal digestion. Would you be bold enough to experiment with garnish like cabaret piano and hardcore punk bass lines though? Gonjasufi's wonderful croon and croaking, like a love match between Fozzy Bear and Bad Brains, adds final ingredient to make the supersaturated magnetic tape bubble like a long-forgotten blaxploitation classic. From Dimension X. A feast for the ears.
Eric Hill
5. Pantha Du Prince Black Noise (Rough Trade)
Pantha du Prince's Black Noise combined elements of minimal techno, house and shoegazer to create a uniquely distinct sound palette that engaged dance music enthusiasts and indie rockers alike, especially given his leap from the boutique Dial label to much bigger Rough Trade. Pantha's 2007 album, This Bliss, put him on the map as a young producer to watch. Black Noise is Pantha's logical evolution toward the pop spectrum, featuring collaborations with Panda Bear and LCD Soundsystem's Tyler Pope. A phenomenal third outing from this leading German producer, Black Noise masterfully submerges you within his warm dense layers and subtle grooving melodies.
Andrea Ayotte
6. Bonobo Black Sands (Ninja Tune)
Grounding electronic music elements with jazzy guitar, violin and horns, Bonobo is a rare artist to unite the digital and analog while blurring differentiation of one from the other. Black Sands echoes and reverberates naturally like a bird's wings fluttering into the night sky. On "Stay The Same" Bonobo's production and instrumentation, with fellow Ninja Tune artist Andreya Triana's clarity of voice, create magic to touch human emotion in a desensitized world. Black Sands shows Bonobo at the height of grace making music so individually authentic to sound both familiar and like nothing you've ever heard.
Sarah Ferguson
7. Emeralds Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Editions Mego)
Despite an endless array of releases, side projects and band-run labels, Emeralds were complete unknowns at the start of 2010. But that all changed with Does It Look Like I'm Here? Ditching the side-long slow burners of their earlier work, the Cleveland, OH trio skyrocketed to new astral planes of kosmische wizardry with their Editions Mego debut, filtering their retro-futurist synth/guitar attack through a more focused, pop-oriented lens. But despite the more compact approach, Emeralds lost nothing in the way of ambition. Does It Look Like I'm Here? grabs hold of electronic music's past and flings it far into the future.
Brock Thiessen
8. Holy Fuck Latin (Young Turks/XL)
Toronto-based experiment Holy Fuck finally lived up to its expletive with Latin. Like its predecessors, their third full-length presented popular electronic music forms as interpreted through live performance, without looping or laptops, but the block rocking results on Latin were that much more realized. The group finally stepped outside their influences to create something beyond themselves, achieving catharsis through epic songwriting and rich production, with a level of consistency never before achieved by founding keyboardists Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh, now supported by a permanent rhythm section. The sense of a stable studio environment was palpable, culminating in a glorious road-trip album if there ever was one.
Alan Ranta
9. Darkstar North (Hyperdub)
Instead of mostly irrelevant dubstep comparisons, it's more pertinent to ask whether Darkstar is this era's Portishead, or perhaps the Human League, whose "(You Remind Me Of) Gold" is gorgeously transformed on this disc. Darkstar have updated a winning formula combining dramatic, Anglo-melancholic songcraft with cutting edge mid-tempo electronic music. North's strongest association to UK bass music is its simultaneous double and half-time rhythms, as well as a tense, spare sound. But North impresses most as a pop album: chord changes are reassuring in their minor-key way, and vocals are perfectly cool yet fraught.
David Dacks
10. Morgan Packard Moment Again Elsewhere (Anticipate)
Moment Again Elsewhere was cerebral-techno producer Morgan Packard's second solo album since his 2005 collaboration with Anticipate label-boss Ezekiel Honig, and it's by far his most self-assured and compelling work to date. Packard's unique brand of jazz-influenced glitch moves effortlessly from ambient to IDM and hints of deep house. Using his custom-made software, Ripple, the live piano, accordion, and saxophone intertwine with the electronics to create alternately brittle and lush layers of analogue warmth, making for one of the most intimate headphone experiences yet created by an increasingly fertile new generation of American producers.
Vincent Pollard