Synthpop

After a rather slow and mediocre start to the year, some great new electronic albums have finally started to appear. Here’s a quick look at some of my favorites.   Digits – Death and Desire I featured Digits’ single Lost Dream on my Synthpop 2011 playlist last year: an excellent track, but it only hinted at the quality of this Digits album. Moody and brooding, there’s something intoxicatingly late-night about the tracks [...]

Among the many album-based playlists I make, I’ve also created several “concept” playlists which all have a bit of back-story, inclusion dilemma, structuring precisions and multiple viewpoints. So here’s a list of 5 Concept Spotify Playlists that I’m especially pleased with. They’re not my most subscribed (this Drive soundtrack playlist has nearly 4,000 subscribers!) but these five I consider proper [...]

German electronic music shaped my music tastes more than any other. As a young boy in Scotland in the early 1980s, hearing Kraftwerk for the first time had such a huge impact on me that I immediately archived all my Beatles and ABBA records and sought out anything I could find by Kraftwerk, Nena, Alphaville and the rest of the Neue Deutsche Welle. I even signed up to learn German at school for the sole reason of being able to understand [...]

There haven’t been too many great electronic albums so far this year, but that’s no problem: I’ve been going back to check out some releases from last year that I’d initially missed. Here’s a short selection – a late delivery – of electronica from 2011!   Asura – 360 Asura expertly mix in trance ambient and World Music elements into their sound. Sometimes I find pure ambient music a [...]

In 2011 I must have listened to over 100 new electronic albums, give or take. And while I felt the quantity of good synthpop releases had fallen compared with previous years, the number of quality electronic albums in general was a joy and inspiration. Here then are my Top 20 Electronic Albums of 2011, covering synthpop, electro-industrial, psy-trance, “hauntronica” and all the synthetic sounds in between.   20. Michael [...]

Synthpop and electronic music website The Electricity Club (TEC) hosted their first ever live event at the weekend. Situated on New Oxford Street, The Bowery was the ideal venue for an extended night of English electropop. Featuring a team of TEC DJs and live performances from CURXES and VILE ELECTRODES, this was an essential event for anyone interested in new synth music. TEC writer Steve Gray kicked off the night the with first DJ set, [...]

An EP is a curious musical item: too short to be called an album, too long to be a single, in my pre-Spotify days I used to see them as a good way to buy “half an album” to see whether I liked a band or not. Anyway, here are four new electronic EPs I’d be happy to spend money on!   Tenek – EP2 Regular readers on this blog will know I love Tenek, whose album On The Wire featured in our Top 10 Synthpop Albums of 2010 (although [...]

On the outer edges of the electronic music scene lives a strange cargo of bands, geographically distant but all sharing a love of spaced-out retro electronica. Many in this expanding synth-wave have remodeled styles of early 80s sci-fi and VHS horror movie soundtracks to suit their post-Internet lives, while others re-imagine Krautrock and synthpop into new forms of music yet to be properly classified. Here are five new electronic albums [...]

Summoned from the depths of The Spotify Catalog using special powers, mixed into a sonical Potion of Awesome by my bare hands then cast as the finest Electro-Witch House, Haunted Pop, Dark Dubstep and Goth-Electronica – Here’s my bewitching (and slightly creepy) playlist of Hauntronica! Featuring The Weird Sisters of: Fever Ray, The Knife, Austra, Emika, Gazelle Twin, The Horn The Hunt, Zola Jesus, Labyrinth Ear, White [...]

My friends at synthpop website The Electricity Club are hosting their first ever live event next month in London, featuring Vile Electrodes and Curxes - two brilliant new bands, both of whom I’ve featured on this blog before. I got in touch with TEC head honcho Chi Ming Lai and asked him to tell us a bit about “TEC001” and what to expect. Why did you decide to put on a live TEC event: doesn’t editing and writing [...]