The Best Electronic Music on Bandcamp, May 2024 – bandcamp.com

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We’ve got some real examples of the way that “being in it for the long haul” can reap special rewards. Two separate veterans of grime’s first emergence, show us—in very different ways—how its obtuse approach to rave sonics can still drive innovation. A Dutch electro god uses the same templates he has for decades, yet somehow still makes them sound as crisp and modernist as ever. A survivor of the illegal party scene enters rarefied and refined territories. Old-school players from Chicago ghetto house and the UK techno underground are as in love with sound and groove as they ever have been. There’s new schoolers too, making sampledelic deep house, lo-fi noise, and elegant club torch songs…There are whole generations of weirdness at play here. Hit play and let it roll over you.
“D1MMA is an alias!” this release proudly proclaims. But for whom? We don’t know! But whoever they might be, they bring a rare production finesse and sense of delirium to retro rave. As on their last track three years ago, there’s no smoothing off the edges nor any predictability in the retooling of peak 1992 blow-your-whistle, reach-for-the-lasers moments. Yet at the same time, the sonic values are futurist and exploratory. Traveling both forwards and backwards in time, it meets itself on the dancefloor and stays there, going absolutely wild.
Trim (aka Taliban Trim, Trimothy, Trimbale, etc., etc., etc.) is the misfit’s misfit—a belligerent poet who often ranks high in lists of the Greatest Ever Grime MCs, all the while existing somewhere way off to the left of the actual scene. He’s also kept the raw, minimalist, off-key spirit of grime alive on his selection of beats for mixtapes, including his own productions. Here, he’s collected a second EP of self-produced instrumentals and, once again, they slam—albeit in a nagging, lopsided way. Older-than-old-school bleeps and bass that echo the roots of UK techno and dancehall hold together jagged and rickety drum patterns, topped off with hooks that drill into your head and stay there.
Another stunner of a month for Local Action, with Finn McCorry delivering a particularly crisp example of one of his back-to-basics, sample-chopping, diva-house slammers, and this rather glossier EP of reworkings of Chicagoan Ariel Zetina’s 2022 LP Cyclorama. L-Vis 1990 gives a sassy shuffle to grime rhythm and bass on “Slab of Meat,” and DANNN turns “Smooch Track” into a club groove full of relentless synthetic toms and woodblocks. But “MAGIN” eclipses them both by giving a lavish restructure to their own sparse production on the original “Gemstone,” turning it into a strobe-lit torch song, one capable of getting whole clubs airborne.
Nondi_ is Tatiana Triplin from Pennsylvania, and HRR is her “collective that specializes in Web Folk, Nightcore, and Dubst.” She is also extremely prolific, releasing three EPs this month alone, all of them full of gruesomely warped and ragged rave and club detritus flung any which way but loose. This is our pick, because it’s the oddest and murkiest of an odd and murky bunch, with “Data Malfunktion” feeling like every nerve in your brain is being electrocuted. Bonus track “About Me” is like sliding into dissociation—in the best possible way.
Toby Tobias is one of those underground troopers who gives the lie to the perception of scenes as distinct entities. He’s kept his inspiration fresh over the years by dipping and diving from rave to Balearic, techno to disco and back. This first compilation for his new label Voice Notes features lots of friends from his old label London Housing Trust, and it glides effortlessly between all those dance poles—plus Artificial Intelligence–style electronica, soulful broken beat, and body-rocking electro to boot—without ever stressing itself about where it belongs. This is just gorgeous, glorious dance music, echoing through the decades with all its anxieties and identity issues thankfully left at the door.
People who’ve been to the other side when it comes to mind expansion and peak experiences can often find themselves falling back to safe, predictable, comforting aesthetics. Not so for Sebastian Vaughan who, as part of the rave crew Spiral Tribe and the SP23 studio through the ‘90s, experienced some of the most hardcore, lawless, feral techno parties ever. Like many people as they grow older, he’s softened his musical approach; but there’s nothing mind-numbing about this LP, with its eerie, ambient, alien planet landscapes; Steve-Reich-like minimalist repetitions; and—best of all—techno that goes back to first principles of stroboscopic rhythmic hypnotism. Even stone cold sober, it can take you to some very, very unusual places. The nine-minute “Grow With the Flow” alone is worth the price of entry. If you’ve ever loved Donato Dozzy or Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia, this track will give you the hit you’ve been searching for.
Florida duo THEMOVE are evnblu, who usually makes beautifully loose, soulful drum & bass, and Sangre.X, aka TONYxPALMA who is more on a house tip. It’s the latter tempo they gravitate toward together, and these five tracks are a perfect fusion of their styles. There’s a very live feel to them—a natural, human movement to the sample triggering that hints at what it might be like if J Dilla made house music. They unfold according to their own logic, sometimes stretching to six minutes, other times gently winding up after two. There’s a lot of Latin swing, a lot of soul, a lot of sun-bleached dreaminess, and a whoooooole lot of groove.
Detroit-via-NYC producer Lauren Flax has made crisp, modern acid house for I ♥ Acid, 2MR, Nervous and plenty other lynchpin labels. Chicago’s DJ Slugo is a pioneer of the high-velocity mid-‘90s “ghetto house” that later birthed juke. Together, they’ve made two of the jackingest 140 BPM pumpers you could possibly hope for, fizzing with modernist digital production detail, not fetishizing the poor pressing and mastering of old ghetto house, but still keeping its essential potent simplicity. Pure audio dopamine if you need a kick-start today.
It was recently pointed out that techno records taking away the kickdrum, then bringing it back is like “peek-a-boo” for adults—and honestly, it’s often that mind-numbingly infantile as well. But when an artist is in full conscious control of what they do, they can make even the most basic tricks fun again—and Spanish producer Cora Novoa is so gleefully abrupt with the stops and starts in her big, echoey doof-doof here, you might just find yourself cackling with glee as the kick slams in for the Nth time. It helps that she manages to give her portentous vocal samples a visionary sci-fi feel—and the cherry on top is the unexpected Latin trap-influenced three-minute gem “Oracle” in the middle of it all.
Everything about these three tunes radiates the absolute love of being in the moment with music. Each of them is named after a friend working at the club where Anna Schreit is resident, and they all amble along with a wonky gait, fun sounds, and melodic snippets that weave in and out of their steady house groove—totally capturing the times when you don’t know or care whether it’s A.M. or P.M., you’re just enjoying the movement of the beat and the funny details of the scene all around you. Not that this is blandly escapist: As you look back, you’ll realize the musical scholarship it takes to make the little chunks of rap vocal and the odd structural twists actually work. But in the moment, it’s just lovely, odd fun.
Way back at the birth of grime, West Londoner Jon E Cash’s sound—which he dubbed “sublow”—was uniquely rooted in dancefloor and soundsystem culture. It was no wonder that Dread.D, his protegé in the Black Ops crew, went on to become T. Williams, who took London bass right to the heart of the house world. And it’s also no wonder that lately, Cash has been deeply immersed in the South African sounds of gqom and amapiano, and is now flooding his Bandcamp with new productions that perfectly combine these sounds with decades of UK soundsystem’s sonic vocabulary. These three variations on a theme are case in point: Long, drawn-out, suspenseful, possessing pitch-dark hearts but also bubbling with pure celebration, they are precision tooled to demolish a dance.
Danny Wolfers, aka Legowelt, is a natural fit for NYC label L.I.E.S. Both of them are dedicated to super raw grooves made on old-fashioned machines. It’s incredible that after almost 30 years releasing copious tracks, he never got tired of or jaded with simple drum machine patterns, bouncing basslines, and quirky little processed vocal snippets—and I mean, he really, really hasn’t. Every tune here is fresh, fun, timeless, and exquisitely elegant in its funky geometry.

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