Top Electronic Albums of 2010.

Note: I appreciate we're a few weeks into 2011 now and most best of lists have long since been and gone. To hell with convention though eh, here's a belated list for you all to enjoy

2010 was as fragmented and schizophrenic a year as ever in the world of electronic / dance music. In what strange world is Actress dubstep or Instra:Mental drum & bass? Artists seemed to be inter-breeding at an unprecedented rate with an irreverent approach to genre-bending. Flying Lotus transcended his Dilla’esque associations and pulverised everyone's brain with a bar-raising genre-less masterpiece. Meanwhile Shed made a techno album that jumped wildly between tempos and beats yet hung together beautifully. Similarly, the masterful Actress created an album that took in a bewildering range of influences yet pulled it all off with aplomb. In each of these cases, the artist took their genre as a frame to hang everything else onto; a starting point or a set of signifiers within the music. This was about building from the past but not in a nostalgic way. The best of these albums were surreal mutations adeptly mixing up old fragments into unlikely shapes.

Music & The Internet Part 2. Running Out Of The Past?

Looking back at the broad sweep of twentieth century music, its hard not to notice how fresh and powerful it often was. Think about the dissonance and strange rhythms of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the jazz prodigies who rewrote the rule book, the artistic and cultural impact of the bands of the 1960s. Think about Brian Eno's ambient experiments, Public Enemy's use of samplers, post-punk, Kraftwerk's machine music, Juan Atkin's dystopian hymns to Detroit, Aphex Twin’s other-worldly electronics, the glitch aesthetics of Autechre, Oval and the Mille Plateaux label, the dub techno minimalism of Basic Channel, the rise of the DJ and club culture through disco, house, rave and techno. The twentieth century is full of examples of music that had a powerful artistic and cultural impact that went way beyond the surface level. It seemed reasonable to assume therefore that, catalysed by the digital technologies of the early twenty-first century, the trend wouldn't just continue but actually speed up. Jaron Lanier was surprised at the lack of musical progress in the noughties; “I entered the internet era with extremely high expectations. I eagerly anticipated a chance to experience shock and intensity and new sensations, to be thrust into lush aesthetic wildernesses, and to wake up every morning to a world richer in every detail because my mind had been energised by unforeseeable art” . It came as a surprise to Lanier however, that, at the tail of end of the noughties, this hadn't come to pass. For a while he put this down to a temporary lull, the calm before the storm, but after a while it felt more like a slump. Lanier’s growing suspicion was that the internet, far from facilitating musical evolution, was leading to an unprecedented picking over of pre-internet culture. In his view, “the reinvention of life through music was in retreat”. Culture was now “fixated on the world as it was before the web was born”.