Amon Tobin has been making forward thinking electronic music for over fifteen years. His latest effort, ISAM, which you can stream in its entirely, is unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. He’s bringing his album on tour with a stage show that matches the intensity of the album. As my friend Ryan said after the show, ‘that was important’.

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Amon Tobin is the maestro of surreal electronic music. I always wanted to make a video for one of his songs, so when I had the chance to start this project, I was more than inspired. Instead of using computer generated effects, I did everything by hand. All the effects and images on this video were shot in studio.

This is a personal documentation about Apparat’s new album, The Devil’s Walk, and follows his change from electronic to more instrumental sounds.

Scott Hansen, the multi-talented musician, graphic designer and artist known as Tycho, will release Dive, a new album of his trademark ambient/downtempo/techno on November 15. Fans of moody electronic music will love the vibe of Tycho. A free preview song from the forth coming album is available on the Tycho website now.

I’ve been digging Caribou’s latest album Swim a lot lately. It’s full of easy beats and cruisy vocals, mixed with mathematically driven instrumentals. This is Jamelia, one of my favourite tracks.

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British producer Bibio (aka Stephen James Wilkinson) has just released his sixth album, Mind Bokeh, which is out now on Warp through Inertia in Australia. We caught up with him for a chat.

A few of your album titles, such as Vignetting The Compost and your latest release, Mind Bokeh, refer to effects in photography. How would you describe the relationship between photography and the music you make?
‘In my head, I make connections between the various sensory worlds. When I tweak the timbre of instruments, I often think of adding more yellow or more red, and so on. Sometimes it’s texture. Like, I might think to make a guitar track sound like sand or the bark of oak. Other times, I make links between cooking and production.

‘We are sensuous beings, with several different ways of sensing the world. All those senses can be considered separate, like smell, touch, sight. But they all go to make us what we are, so from an artistic point of view, they can be linked. The links I make between sensory worlds may not be scientific. Sometimes they are, but in art, there are no rules. So it follows that my love for light and sound are connected in my love for recording and photography’.

Were there specific photographers you were looking at while working on your latest album, Mind Bokeh?
‘Not really. There’s a hell of a lot of talent on Flickr. I could spend hours browsing through that site. Sometimes things catch my eye on there, like diamonds in the rough. I guess the most powerful photographs are ones with a palpable mood or atmosphere. They don’t have to be bling and they don’t have to be lo-fi.

‘Photography can be like poetry in that the simplest presentation of something can lead to something more than the sum of its parts’.

How did you come up with the concept for the artwork?
‘After I thought of the title for the album, I had various ideas which involved my head full of ‘bokeh’. I tried various things with layering medium format film negatives, and so on. But the outcome wasn’t quite there.

‘Then I remembered playing around with this mirror that my girlfriend made in the shape of my head. I was capturing it on video and liked the way the mirror was in focus but the image in the mirror was out of focus, or blurred. In other words, ‘bokeh’ inside my head.

‘My girlfriend cut me out another mirror of my profile that was more refined and up to date (with my haircut at the time), and after some experimenting with fairy lights, I ended up with a shot of the mirror on my living room wall reflecting fairy lights, which were hanging on a black cloth the other side of the living room.

‘The mirror and wall are sharply in focus, but due to the shallow depth of field caused by the type of lens and setting I used, the fairy lights are out of focus and appear in the mirror as bokeh highlights. So the front cover is one single photograph: no photoshop trickery going on there. It ended up coming out so perfect that it almost looks computer generated, but it’s not.

‘I used the same technique for the sampler video I did before the release date, but obviously in that there is movement. I achieved this by hanging the mirror on a thread and spinning it so it periodically reflects the out of focus fairy lights’.

Which electronic musicians are inspiring you at the moment?
‘Hudson Mohawke and Chris Clark’.

With buzzing, loud sentiments of big beats and velvet-like compositions, Mr. Moustache, a 20 year-old disco and house producer from the Czech Republic, presents the core medium of electronic music with his debut EP, Female. As obscure as his name is, the Louis La Roche-inspired producer brings a memorable first impression on tracks like Big Tasty and Female, which incorporate Warp-like synths overdubbed with cut-and-paste vocals reminiscent of Crystal Castles.

Danish duo Syntaks‘ remix of Pale Sketcher’s Can I Go Now (Gone Version) employs a ‘double-time rhythm and a cloud of shoegazey guitars to bring the track to new heights’. We think it’s red hot. And it’s off the always hip Ghostly International label.

Our favourite electro label, Ghostly International, commemorated 100 releases for both the Ghostly and Spectral labels this year by reviving this 2009 mix for Self-Titled magazine.
GhostlyCast #38: Michna/SV4 – Seeing Colors: Ghostly Influences by ghostly

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Norwegian electro-pioneers Röyksopp have recently released Senior, the counterpart to last year’s brilliant Junior. More introspective and freeform than its poppier partner, and fully instrumental, Svein Berge and Torbjorn Brundtland recorded Senior at the same time as Junior and it finds Royksopp in musical voice. Again!
Senior by Röyksopp

Prolific electronic music producer Christopher Willits has produced twenty albums in ten years — both solo and in collaboration with artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto on 2008′s Ocean Fire. Tiger Flower Circle Sun is his second release for Ghostly International and is his most technologically complex album yet, ‘drifting skyward in a swell of ambient hums and subtle polyrhythms’. [Listen to his song Sun Body]

Jenny Graf (Ex-Bride of No No guitarist and one half of noise duo Metalux) is set to release her first solo record via Wachsender Prozess out of Germany as well as distributed by Graf herself. Influenced by ragas, ’70s synth-prog, and American primitivism, Graf’s latest iteration of structure-free sample-and-electronics-driven meditation remains as non-combative as ever, but not unchallenging, increasingly in-tune with the spiritual and intellectual revival that’s occurring.

Already boasting an arsenal of powerful pop tunes, UK band The Chap are to release their fourth album, Well Done Europe, layered with wacky choruses and sounds that will take you on a trip to the future. As a teaser, the band has recently released a 3 minute 30 second compressed preview of the new album. But, we have a better teaser: their song Auto To You [listen below], from their 2005 album, Ham.

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The Semi Circle EP is Japanese-American producer Shigeto’s (aka Zach Saginaw) first release for Ghostly International. It’s a deep, vividly beautiful suite of electronic music.

Like their hyperactive creator, Deastro’s songs can’t sit still, hopping from swooning dream-pop to gonzo TV theme songs to whisper-soft folk to crunching robot-rock, and always ringing with Chabot’s earnest tenor. [Read a Secret Playlist by Deastro, where he writes about his eight favourite songs]

Tycho is the electronic music project of San Francisco-based artist, Scott Hansen, mixing beautiful cascading melodies with glitchy beats and static coated synth lines. We have the Shigeto’s Adrift A Dream Remix single of his track Adrift [listen here] as a free download in our Music Download section [psst, it's in the third column]

Why am I so fond of The Knife’s latest track? Yes, the opera chanting opening takes me down memory lane: reminiscent of Edea’s theme song, reminding me of childhood Final Fantasy VIII playstation days. But ultimately this collaborative effort with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock is ambitiously rich in sparkling percussion and takes the listener on an ethereal journey to Darwinism.

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The beautifully hypnotic video for the Syntaks‘ song Blue Sunshine is an appropriate tribute to the pair’s approach to music-making: a wash of color, fleeting glimpses of half-remembered imagery both heavenly and apocalyptic, and vertiginous shifts in scale superimposed over its creators’ faces. [Read a Secret Playlist from Syntaks where they write about their favourite music right now]

Remember Fade To Grey, that seminal new romantic dance hit from 1980s. Well, neither do we. But regardless, we checked in with Rusty Egan from the group Visage and asked him about the music that is inspiring him some 30 years after Visage’s sublime moment on glory. He started with the Deadmau5 track, Faxing Berlin [listen below]: ‘This track introduced me to Deadmau5 and I have been an avid fan ever since. He is the only DJ I have gone to see perform. To people who came for his music, his gigs at 02 club, Matter, and at The Roundhouse in London, the sound and lights were the stuff of my dreams from my early ecstasy trips at acid house parties’. [Read the rest of Visage's Secret Playlist]

The hypnotic video for Syntaks’ Blue Sunshine features fleeting glimpses of half-remembered imagery, both heavenly and apocalyptic, and vertiginous shifts in scale superimposed over its creators’ faces. The clip was directed by Syntaks’ own Jakob Skott and stars his musical collaborator and romantic partner, Anna Cecilia. [Read a Secret Playlist by Syntaks, where they write about the music that is inspiring them right now]