The Year in Electronic Music
Shawn Reynaldo and Philip Sherburne take a look back at 2016
Most of the time, RBMA Radio’s First Floor show focuses on the newest of the new, with host Shawn Reynaldo scouring the latest electronic music releases each week and subsequently sharing only the best stuff. On a recent episode in December, though, it felt right to look back over the past 365 days of music.
Rather than tackling this task alone, Shawn has enlisted the talents of Philip Sherburne, a fellow Barcelona resident and esteemed electronic music writer who currently serves as a contributing editor at Pitchfork. Together, the two discuss and share some of their favorite tunes from 2016 while also examining some of the trends and storylines that colored the year in electronic music.
AMBIENT / NEW AGE / BALEARIC
Shawn Reynaldo
In my estimation, 2016 was one of those years in electronic music where there wasn’t one defining trend.
Philip Sherburne
Yeah. I felt similarly. It’s funny because people talk about pop music and what a strong year it was with big releases like Frank Ocean and Beyoncé, but in terms of electronic music there weren’t any big defining trends. Last year, I think a lot of the Arca, Lotic, Rabit, Elysia Crampton, stuff, while it wasn’t new, it broke through in a big way and it made a big impact. This year, those people kept doing great work but it didn’t feel like there was a big new twist on it and there was nothing else taking its place.
Shawn Reynaldo
Thinking about the year gone by, I feel like a lot of the trends were just people building on stuff that had started in years past. One of those things was ambient music. It just felt like all kinds of people that were normally listening to house or techno or other kinds of electronic styles were all of a sudden getting really into ambient, new age and Balearic music.
Philip Sherburne
It’s funny because that music has been part of the core of my listening for so long. It’s almost hard to notice when it becomes a “thing.” But it did feel like it had a higher profile this year.
Shawn Reynaldo
A lot of new artists started experimenting with ambient, new age and Balearic sounds. One example is Huerco S., who made one of my favorite albums of the year. Previously, he’d always been making house. He was lumped in with the “outsider house” movement when that bubbled up a few years ago. This year, he put out this album on Proibito – which is Anthony Naples label –and it was entirely ambient. I don’t even know if there are any drums on the record.
Philip Sherburne
I don’t think there are. That album is also one of my favorites of the year and it made me go back to his previous album. I realized how ambient-inclined that previous record really was, even if it didn’t feel like that at the time. It was more in the middle zone, almost in the Actress sort of way. The percussion was sanded down, but there were still drums in there. It’s not powerful dancefloor material, but it was a stepping stone to the full-on ambient of the new one. Also, there’s that amazing cassette he just did on Quiet Time. That’s a label out of New York and it was just the entire side of a cassette – basically one long, evolving chord – and it’s beautiful.
Shawn Reynaldo
Were there other ambient or ambient-ish records this year that caught your attention?
Philip Sherburne
One of the most recent ones was from Sarah Davachi. She’s from Canada – Vancouver, BC –and she’s been doing a bunch of really minimalist stuff. She studied electroacoustic music at Mills College and she’s been doing stuff with tape, voice, violin and piano. It’s all very minimalist, drone-oriented music. There are no real notes. It’s just overtones and shimmer. She just did a really beautiful record called Vergers on Important Records. It’s just three long tracks. It’s a lot like Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Horizon, if you remember that one. Very La Monte Young, Folke Rabe kind of stuff. I loved it so much.
Another mini-trend that I thought was really interesting this year was that there seems to be renewed interest in Japanese new age and electronic music from the 1980s. I definitely don’t know much about it and I think a lot of people in the West don’t know much about it because the music never really got released here. There are some excellent blogs now and you can find stuff on YouTube, but there’s also Motion Graphics, who’s a New York artist. He had a heavy Japanese influence on his debut album.
There’s also that Portland duo Visible Cloaks who’ve got an album coming out on RVNG next year. They released their first couple of singles this year and it was all Japanese, ambient-oriented stuff. Another duo from New York called Georgia had an album called All Kind Music on Palto Flats, the label that reissued the Mariah album, an actual Japanese ’80s electronic album, last year. The Georgia LP is weirdo improv. It reminded me of Max Dunbar’s Lifted a little bit; it’s pretty shaggy, but it had this one track in particular, “Ama Yes Uzume,” which had a really blissful ambient vibe.
Shawn Reynaldo
One thing that I found myself doing a lot during the year on the ambient tip was just relying on certain labels like International Feel and Editions Mego. There was also reissue stuff, especially from labels like Music From Memory, who come up with these records that maybe came out in the ’80s and lots of times got very little attention, yet they still sound extremely contemporary. They put out this Suso Sáiz compilation – he’s a Spanish avant-garde artist who’s actually still active today. They collected 20 years of his material.
They also put out this four-track record from The System, which is from that era of the 1980s where people were getting into big proper recording studios and making a lo-fi, sort of boogie, sort of new wave. Lots of times, this music was instrumental or avant-pop. RVNG Intl. was another label that did a lot of really cool stuff, both on the reissue front and with new music. It just feels like there’s so much territory to explore in that end of the electronic spectrum.
Philip Sherburne
The RVNG Intl. that really stuck out to me was that Breadwoman album. Breadwoman and Steve Moshier. It was just so weird and really cool. Really minimalist and otherworldly. As for the Music from Memory guys. I don’t know where they get their music because I’ve never heard of 90% of it, but it all has a very interesting sensibility. It’s like you said, sort of lo-fi. A lot has a kind of bedroom vibe.
Shawn Reynaldo
There is also a lot of interesting stuff in the experimental synth realm that I feel like fits into this. You saw people like Suzanne Ciani
Philip Sherburne
Looping back to the Balearic thing, there was the Shy Layers album, which I was crazy about. It’s like a little bit of West African and South African influences, with a little bit of Kraftwerk’s vocoder and a little bit of Steely Dan. Just recently, I realized the thing that it reminded me of so much was that Cat Stevens record “Was Dog a Doughnut.” Even though Cat Stevens was a folkie, this was a weird, electro boogie-ish record with drum machine and four-tracking stuff. The Shy Layers LP reminded me a lot of that.
LO-FI HOUSE
Shawn Reynaldo
I feel like the closest thing to a new trendy style that popped up in 2016 is something that seems to have just come about recently and that’s lo-fi house. I had never really seen the term and then there was this FACT magazine article about it, like a month ago.
Philip Sherburne
Yeah. I hadn’t heard the term as such, not “lo-fi house.” The “outsider house” thing of a couple years ago with L.I.E.S. was, if anything, lo-fi. But the lo-fi thing, at least going by this FACT article, seems to have gone into a 2.0 phase.
Shawn Reynaldo
It almost seems like the lo-fi house aesthetic has metastasized and spread onto to SoundCloud. There definitely is a glut of the sound. I feel like there are a lot of primarily young producers who probably heard labels like Mood Hut, 1080p and Future Times, and maybe they’re listening to ambient records or Balearic records too, and they want to blend it all together. From that, a sort of template has arisen where it’s like ’90s house drums, maybe some jazzy chords on top and then a silly internet name for your artist name. Some examples are DJ Seinfeld or Ross From Friends. I don’t want to categorically bash all of these people, because some of the songs sound alright, but it does seem like we’re hitting a sort of critical mass.
Philip Sherburne
I suspect a lot of it is probably not super hard to make. For the sake of comparison, as much as I love and respect L.I.E.S., a lot of their records aren’t necessarily hard to make. Now, the difficulty of making a track isn’t what makes it good or not, but when a smaller pool of people is doing machine-driven hardware jams, that’s one thing. When everybody starts doing something similar, it becomes slightly less special. I imagine a lot of people are replicating that now with soft synths. You get a tape compressor plug-in and you get the right sound sets. The FACT article actually mentioned that now you can buy sample packs for lo-fi house. All of these things become recognizable signatures.
What I thought was really wild was this DJ Boring song “Winona.” He has like half a million plays for that song on YouTube and I’d never heard of this guy. The track is fine. It’s alright, but what I want to know is where are people finding this stuff? I wonder if it is a generational thing and I wonder if it has to do with people who maybe do more of their listening online and discover music online. A couple of years ago, there was Eton Messy and Majestic Casual and those awful YouTube channels that would put up deep house tunes with some girl in a bikini. Those all had hundreds of thousands of plays as well. It seems like this is a new iteration of a similar concept.
Shawn Reynaldo
I don’t want to harp on this lo-fi house thing too much, but one thing that bears mentioning about these producers – and I think this is something that’s been going on for decades in electronic music – is that a lot of them are openly aping stuff from Detroit, whether it’s Theo Parrish or Omar S, just that whole soulful, jazzy house aesthetic. It’s been done before and done really well by people who are often considered the masters and now, a 22-year-old kid in the Midlands of the UK is making his version of it. I don’t want to say that certain people don’t have a right to make certain styles of music, but I don’t even think some artists are aware of how far back this lineage goes.
That said, on this lo-fi front, I do think there are a lot of labels that are still doing good stuff. Some of them I mentioned already. Mood Hut, 1080p, also Rhythm Section, Lustwerk Music, Future Times, PPU. There are gems to be found, but I feel like with the glut of stuff that’s out there, we just have to be a little more selective and not grab every lo-fi record that comes our way.
Philip Sherburne
Look at a label like Workshop, which in its origins was as “lo-fi” as anybody. They were looping a sample against a drum machine and just letting it go; it had that tape compression and it was very unpretentious and it was very raw. Now, you look at Kassem Mosse’s recent album for Honest Jon’s and he went in a very different direction. He could’ve kept knocking out cozy, 110 BPM deep house jams in his sleep but instead, he went to weird synthesizer experiments. The music is kind of cold and prickly and it’s not always a lot of fun to listen to. In some ways, it’s lo-fi because it’s unvarnished, but it’s also a world away from DJ Boring.
EXPERIMENTAL CLUB
Shawn Reynaldo
Another bubble of electronic music that sometimes is a bit lo-fi is the whole club music, or experimental club music world. Different terms get thrown around, but under the umbrella of club music there are so many different styles – grime, footwork, hip-hop, noise, experimental goth stuff, ballroom and more sub-genres are popping up all the time. Dancehall gets mixed in there occasionally, plus rhythms that come out of Africa, Latin stuff, cumbia... There are so many artists from labels like Night Slugs, Fade to Mind, PAN, NAAFI and GHE20G0TH1K.
Philip Sherburne
Even the Príncipe stuff a little bit.
Shawn Reynaldo
Yeah, of course. The interesting thing about all of these labels and artists is that none of them are making music that is 120-to-130-BPM house or techno. Yet, there seems to be a real energy around it. It exists in its own lane, doesn’t need the Resident Advisor stamp of approval to exist and it just seems to keep growing.
Philip Sherburne
I think it’s interesting how all of these different styles seem to have finally united under the umbrella term of “club.” I mean, obviously, before there was Jersey club and Baltimore club. Those are styles that go back a long way. People like Fade to Mind and Night Slugs have been kind of repping those styles or paying homage to those styles; of course, they also have the Club Constructions series, which I suppose is part of what helped bring that word into currency.
Regardless, I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of the batida guys like Príncipe records and DJ Marfox as club music per se. For a couple of years, we had this idea of bass music. There were actually a couple different ideas. There was bass music, which was UK-based post-dubstep, which was often just like house or techno with a slight swing or a slightly broken beat. Then there was the global bass thing, which was this idea of the bass diaspora. It seems like that has fallen away and the batida artists, kuduro artists, etc. have been brought under the umbrella of club music.
Whatever you call it and whatever the term actually encompasses, I think it’s undeniable that there’s a lot of really interesting electronic music being done outside of house and techno. It’s largely being done by people of color, and largely by people who aren’t in the United States or England or Europe. A lot of these artists are connected to gay, lesbian and transgender communities too. It’s a breath of fresh air for everybody.
Shawn Reynaldo
I think where other genres tend to be defined by certain beat structures or tempos, club music seems to be a genre that is often designated by identity. It is vocally for people of color and people from marginalized communities and lots of times, that seems to be where artists find common ground. You could go to a Janus party in Berlin and they might have Total Freedom playing, the NAAFI guys from Mexico and one of the batida guys from Portugal playing some kuduro hybrid. Somehow, it all makes sense together. I think the fact that this music gives voices to these communities, especially as electronic music has seemingly gotten whiter in other genres, is something that’s really great. It also seems to be very youth driven, which is a nice trend to see, especially as genres like house and techno are aging a bit.
Philip Sherburne
It also really flips the idea of authenticity on its head. If you look at lo-fi house, it’s so indebted to the past, with a certain aesthetic and production style that we’ve inherited from Chicago in 1985, Detroit in 1988. This club music stuff is like a zero-hour moment. It’s punk in that respect. It doesn’t care about anything that’s come before. Not to say that it doesn’t recycle. Things like Masters at Work’s “The Ha Dance” are part of its DNA.
Still, it’s not super concerned about living up to a standard of what came before. It doesn’t matter how it’s produced. Most of it I think is done in the box on a computer and that’s just fine. A lot of it has a really computer-y sort of sheen to it.
Shawn Reynaldo
Another thing that’s interesting about this experimental club scene is its willingness to engage with the pop-culture mainstream in a way that house and techno and a lot of the electronic music spectrum is not. Experimenting with pop music is specifically frowned upon in a lot of the electronic world, but these young artists don’t really differentiate between Rihanna and some ’60s soul track as source material. It’s all source material and they’re not really differentiating between underground and pop in the same way that I certainly did when I was young and continue to do now. So it’s interesting to see that, even if it occasionally rubs me the wrong way.
The one thing I will say though is that because it’s so dominated by young artists and also because all of these issues of gender and sexuality and ethnic background are tied up in it, I feel like sometimes the narratives behind the artists end up being more interesting than the music itself. I think the music doesn’t always pass the “Is this fun to listen to in a club?” test. There’s a lot of stuff where it’s just people taking a pop song and running it through a distortion filter and putting a footwork beat on it. That’s a generalization, but a lot of these tunes wouldn’t work in a party and wouldn’t work in a club setting for everyone; but at the same time, they’re not necessarily designed to be for everyone. I feel like a lot of these artists would respond by saying, “Well, my friends like it and that’s what matters.”
Philip Sherburne
I went to see Rabit play here in Barcelona a few weeks ago and that was not a friendly club set. Still, people were dancing even though there were literally no discernible beats in the set. I don’t know what they heard, but it was great because they were expressing themselves. But the music was just a nasty morass of sound, really aggressive and really chaotic. I was pretty impressed. It’s a different model. I interviewed him before his set and he was saying that he doesn’t make party music, he doesn’t really make music for clubs and he wasn’t even sure how much longer he wanted to keep playing live, because he makes weird listening music.
Shawn Reynaldo
One theory that was suggested to me this year was that, for a lot of these younger producers in this world, it’s important to remember that they grew up as part of a highly visual generation watching blockbuster movies, and that’s what their music sounds like. There’s this very widescreen sensibility to it. With a lot of club music that I hear, it’s almost akin to listening to... you know when you go to a movie theater and before the movie starts, they have the ad for the soundsystem? It’s like sound design and everything sounds huge. I feel like these artists are channeling that sensibility through their music. Everything sounds big and they want the bass to really hit you in the gut and it’s not supposed to be subtle.
HOUSE AND TECHNO
Shawn Reynaldo
We’ve been hanging out this whole time and we’ve barely talked about house and techno, which is the primary backbone of electronic music, at least club-oriented electronic music. It seems like house and techno are at this interesting place where they’re sort of ubiquitous, but I feel like people in the music industry and journalists like us seem to have run out of things to say about them.
Philip Sherburne
I definitely turned down a lot of reviews because I don’t have anything super compelling to say about a perfectly good club record. One of the things that I feel like is happening in house and techno right now is that there is less consensus than ever. When I look at Resident Advisor’s Top 50 DJ poll of every month, half of those records I don’t know or – not to be a snob – but I’m just like, I would never play those or listen to them. It seems like every place you look, you’re seeing a different set of taste standards represented. There seems to be very little consensus out there, which is cool. More diversity is great.
Shawn Reynaldo
One good byproduct of that lack of consensus is that we’ve seen a doorway open up for new artists and new sub-genres within house and techno to get more attention they used to. I feel like 2016 was one of the better years in memory for female artists within the world of house and techno. The Black Madonna has become an international superstar. Besides her, there are people like Avalon Emerson, who had a really big year. Lena Willikens, Helena Hauff, even Via App and Volvox, who are from the more experimental New York techno scene. I don’t think there was any doubt before that girls could DJ and that women artists have something valuable to say, but it does seem like there is a real appetite now to see more women in the DJ booth and see more women putting out records.
Philip Sherburne
I hope that the media is finally getting the message. If you’re ignoring the women who are making music and playing music, you’re not doing your job. I think slowly but surely, there’s a trickle-up effect there. This year with my DJ mixes column for Pitchfork, I tried to have a 50-50 balance with every column, so I ended up listening to a lot of sets from artists whose names I didn’t know and discovering some really great people. Courtesy comes to mind. Claire Morgan. These were sets that I just ran across on SoundCloud and they were fantastic.
Shawn Reynaldo
There’s obviously no way that we can name everyone, but Aurora Halal comes to mind. Eclair Fifi from the UK.
Philip Sherburne
Jubilee had a really great record this year.
Shawn Reynaldo
It’s good to see and hopefully this will continue.
Philip Sherburne
I also suspect there is just a lot more out there than anybody in media is really aware off. You mentioned Via App. I wasn’t really aware of her until this year and I heard her record, I heard her DJ sets and they were all phenomenal. This is somebody that was off my radar. I think there are probably dozens or hundreds of people like her that are out there, probably bubbling up on SoundCloud. You just need to sift through and look for them a little bit. I’m pretty optimistic, but I just think people in media and booking need to do a better job of giving a chance to people that don’t have that name recognition.
Shawn Reynaldo
Part of the problem is definitely that the social structures in which people find out about music tend to be dominated by men. Guys ask their other guy friends, “What are you listening to?” It’s slowly changing, but I feel more people like us need to be proactive about it like you’re doing. I try and do the same thing as best I can with the radio show, but we can do better.
Anyways, we’ve been talking about house and techno and I was curious, Philip. Do you think they’re still as relevant as they used to be? Do think they’re still as vibrant as they used to be?
Philip Sherburne
Relevance is hard to measure. If you look at somebody like Duke Dumont or Disclosure, the things that are actually charting in the UK, it’s all very much predicated upon a house beat. ’90s house is everywhere right now. It’s definitely relevant within the... I wish there were better term for the middle ground, the stuff that gets booked in Ibiza and charts in the top 25 on Resident Advisor. It’s not really underground anymore. Within that culture, I think this music is maybe not as central as it was for a little while, but it’s definitely still the core clubbing experience for huge swath of people.
Shawn Reynaldo
What were some of the house and techno records or artists that caught your attention this year?
Philip Sherburne
Mr. Fingers – Larry Heard – put out an amazing record this year, which was so nice to see because it was his first Mr. Fingers record in 11 years. It was a four-track EP. The whole thing was good, but there were two just phenomenal tracks on there for me. There was “Outer Acid,” which was a quite minimalist, burbly acid track. It was very unlike most acid. Then there was “Qwazars,” which is the anthem. It’s not like a hands-in-the-air anthem, but it’s just beautiful with the Neil deGrasse Tyson sample in there. That was a big one.
Midland had a pair of killer records this year. He had “Blush,” which I really love, which had an almost new wave flavor. Then he had “Final Credits,” which was more disco-y and quite uptempo. I understand that was quite an anthem this year. He’s just doing amazing stuff and as a DJ, he continues to get more and more accolades, which I think is totally appropriate.
Shawn Reynaldo
One artist that I really enjoyed in 2016 was Joey Anderson. He had a few EPs and he’s definitely exploring weird territory within house and techno. Call Super also has been doing some really interesting work under a variety of names.
Labels like Dekmantel, obviously, were important. Dekmantel has gotten really big with their festival and turned into this kind of brand, but I feel like their releases have been consistently really excellent. They signed up Robert Hood to the label this year. Speaking of Robert Hood, he also put out another really excellent Floorplan album this year. It just feels like he’s getting better with age somehow. There are also labels like Hivern Discs right here in Barcelona, which is run by John Talabot
There’s still a lot of really good house and techno happening out there. Even if it’s not the most exciting thing to talk about, I still think there is some very valuable music being made, especially if you want to dance in a club, which is what a lot of this music is designed for.
Philip Sherburne
Even though a ’90s traditionalism still reigns supreme, there are still new twists being made. I’m thinking of Hessle Audio and Livity Sound. Would you call them strictly house and techno labels? I don’t know. They come out of that nebulous UK bass thing. Hessle and Livity Sound are doing great stuff. Ploy’s “Move Yourself” and Forest Drive West’s “System” were two of my favorite tracks this year and they were both quite linear, technoid sorts of things. They didn’t sound like anything else that I had heard before and I really appreciated that.
Shawn Reynaldo
It’s funny. Hessle Audio only put out a few records in 2016. They pretty much only put out a few records every year. But even with that limited release schedule, they continue to be one of the most respected record labels out there. It’s worth noting that the long-awaited debut album from Pangaea, one of the label’s founders, was also quite good.
I also noticed this year how breakbeats came back into fashion. I’ve been talking about this all year long on the show, but Ilian Tape has been at the forefront of the breakbeat techno sound. They had a lot of great releases. The Skee Mask album comes to mind. However, they certainly weren’t alone in pushing breakbeats back onto the dance floor.
Electro has come back into the picture with people like DJ Stingray, plus there’s Luca Lozano and all of the different labels that he runs. Even someone like Shed under his Head High alias does a lot of breakbeats. Tuff City Kids have been pushing breakbeat sounds within house and techno for a few years now, and they put out a full-length album this year. It’s nice to see people continually riffing upon some of these old-school rave, hardcore and electro sounds. Even though they are retro in a way, it freshens things up and it’s nice to not just hear 122 BPM tech house all the time.
Philip Sherburne
Electro is the gift that keeps on giving. It hasn’t become a full-fledged “thing” again, but I keep running across new electro records that are exciting and they sound great. It’s a nice way to change up a set.
Shawn Reynaldo
Along similar lines, I feel like we definitely need to talk about what’s going on with techno. Not specifically with electro, but it’s in a similar territory where people have been folding in industrial, post-punk and noise elements into the techno sphere. I’m thinking about artists like Silent Servant, Adam X, Orphx, Surgeon, Beau Wanzer and Blawan. I really like what all of those people are doing, but the aesthetic that they have created has kind of... it’s almost gone too far, if you ask me. There is so much noisy, dark, bleak industrial techno out there.
Philip Sherburne
It’s interesting because Blawan has moved away from that to a certain extent. Surgeon, with his Anthony Child stuff, he’s gone in different directions as well. I definitely feel like there’s a glut of what got showcased at the Berlin Atonal festivals over the last couple of years. I wasn’t there, but just reading through the roster, there’s a ton of greyscale, doomy techno that’s for the floor, but there’s not a lot of swing, not a lot of polyrhythms, not a lot of syncopation. It’s just a dark churn with charcoal shading. I’m being intentionally reductive here, but a lot of it sounds pretty reductive to me.
Shawn Reynaldo
I definitely feel the same. Especially if you like Detroit techno, which is so bright and colorful and soulful, even though it’s machine music. You can hear the humanity in it. I’m not saying there’s not room for bleak and dark music out there, but I don’t always want to be pummeled.
That said, there is some stuff in that dark techno world that I think is inventive. There is a label that sprung up in New York City this year call Bank NYC. It’s building on what L.I.E.S. started, with sort of hardware jams and distorted stuff but bringing in punk and industrial influences in the cool way. I also thought the Powell album was really interesting this year.
Philip Sherburne
The Powell album is a great record and it’s funny. It has a sense of humor without being cornball, I think. Maybe some people would think it was cornball, but I think it’s unusual. There’s definitely a post-punk influence, but there’s a lot of breathing room in there. There’s a lot of space and light gets in and there’s not this pall of doom hanging over it. On more of a coldwave tip, I thought the Young Male album was really interesting. His records for White Material had been pretty straight-down-the-middle techno, kind of club tools. I thought they were good – they didn’t blow me away – but this new album, it’s all like synthesizer sketches. It’s two- and three-minute tracks and it’s dark but it’s not unrelentingly dark.
Shawn Reynaldo
Speaking of coldwave, I also wanted to mention that the Dark Entries label out of San Francisco has been doing this onslaught of reissues. A lot of it pulls from post-punk and industrial, but they’ve also gotten into Italo and early house stuff. Some of the releases are anthems that people have been wanting to get reissued for years. Some of them are obscure, weird bands that no one has ever heard of. There’s probably too much for any one person to listen to and it’s definitely contributing to the glut of the sound out there, but I do think that they’re doing some really excellent work.
