Live At The Troxy shows how the highly personal world of that album [Plunge] develops further onstage.

It's peaceful and distantly serene, but with flickers of dissonance rubbing away at the edges. Those contrasting textures are part of what makes The Inheritors perhaps the year's most revealing and intriguing album yet.

Midway through RR7349, "Wardenclyffe" cuts back and forth from cheeky synth pop to stratospheric synth vistas, revealing how much better S U R V I V E are with the latter approach. They finally concede to their strengths in the album's second half.

Some portions of Strands are so calming that it's hard to stay focused on Hauschildt's expertly woven details. But the album doesn't just seek to relax its listeners.

After the existential questions of Ghettoville, it feels unfussy and workmanlike. Which isn't to do it down: now that he's back to just getting on with it, Cunningham can once again produce mirage-like moments of beauty like nobody else.

So while Cold Spring is in many ways a massive leap forward for Mount Kimbie, it's also the sort of transitional album you might expect from a group with a knockout debut.

You might also hear the elegiac rise and fall of Stars Of The Lid, an emotional Hollywood score or William Basinski's sound of decay. However, as Konoyo unspools, you may look back and realize that this all combines to sound like no one other than Hecker.

These are the few moments where she sounds wet behind the ears, but then she's still a relatively fresh face on the scene. And whenever she puts an awkward foot forward, she's immediately redeemed by a hint of pop brilliance.

Overstuffed with ideas, some of Magic Oneohtrix Point Never's odd juxtapositions and clever references feel merely "neat." You don't get the sense Lopatin's deeply invested—more that he's throwing concepts at the wall and seeing what sticks. There are stunning moments on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never.

At their best, Boy Harsher capture the bittersweet feeling of being young, in love and on the road, oblivious to the inevitable spin-out.

The album imagines pop as computer-generated architecture: vivid, plastic and physics-defying.

Platform is full of beautifully corrupted, synthesised signals.

Now, in 2014, Vessel has given us one of the year's best electronic music albums, and it's hardly electronic.

Throughout the record, there are gestures toward what has already passed and what will eventually come. With its constant shifts in energy, Ecce Homo succeeds in opening up new temporal and textural dimensions.

These abrupt transitions are clearly of central concern for Lopatin, and it's these rapid shifts that make R Plus Seven unlike anything he's produced to date.

Music this haunting is more universal than local.

For an artist who has traditionally experimented with recording methods, Quixotism is another landmark, thanks largely to how natural it sounds in spite of its ambitious approach.

For a debut album from such a young artist, 99.9% is remarkably self-assured. It sets up Celestin as someone carving out his niche.

Movement, then, is more a proof of concept than a fully fleshed-out thought, though Herndon brings enough passion to her sound to suggest one is coming.

Potential is largely a wonderful collection of uplifting and humbling electronic pop.

The forms are extraordinary and the surfaces dazzling, but it's unclear how to navigate through them. You're impressed but also confused, and you keep an eye out for the exit. Several tracks shine regardless.

LateNightTales' 17 tracks are unsurprisingly tasteful, including many that are impossibly rare. But it's not an overly studied trainspotters' paradise. Many of the obscure songs should appeal to the fanbase drawn in by Shepherd's productions.

It's a surprisingly approachable piece with an appeal far outside the experimental music community, which speaks to Basinski's ear for melody and grasp of emotion. Not many artists could turn a source as abstract as black hole recordings into music this beautiful.

World Eater is Power's most eclectic record to date. Dumb Flesh, his second album as Blanck Mass, moved away from the wall of sound of his self-titled debut.

Stern's use of repetition is powerful and carefully considered, making space for deep thought and reflection. Pockets of silence strengthen this concentrative quality.

If the album doesn't always hit the same highs as the excellent Mondo Beat or Trance LPs, there's still plenty to love: the bending techno synth waves on "Modularity," the slowed-down Nitzer Ebb flashbacks on "Post Industrial," and the krautrock computer glitches on "Noise Floor."

Open Your Eyes has a confidently evolved sound.

What's completely clear about All The Right Noises is that it's a highly personal album. In his exploration of them, Flügel makes these non-spaces his own.

By most measures, Crush is an excellent record. But its aggression and obtuseness, for me at least, is relative—once the shock wears off, there remains a slight reserve, a sense that Shepherd's innermost rage has only fitfully overpowered competing aspects of his psyche.

Stylistically, it's more of a grab-bag than ever before, occasionally tipping the scales from charming to bombastic.

If The Inheritors was the sound of the former trance artist undergoing a spiritual rebirth, The Animal Spirits is as close as he's come to transcendence.

An entire album of the stuff would likely be twee overkill, but Gonno's endearing quirks and lighthearted sensibilities are charming in small doses.

He's essentially building sonic environments, the kind a listener can enter and explore. That experience is less about the details than the journey, which Gengras carves out with the skill of a seasoned designer.

It shows him settling into a state of deep contentment, evoking the same warm and fuzzy feeling you get from throwing on a record that you know inside and out.

Voigt's mix of art music, techno and classical, of fairy tales and field recordings, feels singular and timeless 25 years on. It's not Voigt's most beautiful or immersive record as GAS, but it remains a forest we can all get lost in.

FabricLive.61 showcases a producer similarly disinterested in genre orthodoxy. But he's doing it in a different way. The mix might have its roots in dubstep's swampier side but is now intertwined with gnarled techno and thorny breaks.

It never fully sounds laid back, as if the producer is unwilling to let his sounds run as rampant or give into the funk quite like his Californian counterparts.

It could just be good timing, or that he remains the same ingeniously innovative songwriter, but Club Rez is yet another victory for the young producer.

[The album's] obfuscating mires of navel-gazing perhaps precludes it from attaining Ninja Tune classic status, but those of a darker disposition will likely be of the opinion this challenging opus collates Ortega's strongest work to date.

It's bold, maybe even avant-garde, but from beginning to end it's raucous, barnstorming, chair-dancing fun.

Visa finds Ripatti attuned to a very specific, focused energy, and the result is some of his best work.

It's an interesting diversion for Romans, and might just be the most admirable part of Valere Aude.

Their tenth LP, For That Beautiful Feeling, returns to their well-established formula once again, at times surging with renewed ambition and other times falling curiously flat.

Since the beginning, DJ-Kicks has been about finding unique takes on this craft. Kozalla's 50th instalment more than lives up to this tradition.

Wonderland shies away from the textural depths the duo made their name on. But what the album lacks in psychedelic richness it makes up for with wild, off-the-cuff energy, and it sounds like Demdike Stare had a lot of fun making it.

Patience is one of Kirby's most consistent and stylistically severe albums in recent memory, mostly solo piano with the occasional vocal thrown in.

A solid diversion from two artists who we know can do better.

Once it pulls you into its core, its dissonant sound becomes comforting, and then cathartic. In evoking confusion as to where man ends and machine begins, Borders offers a musical interpretation of a very modern dilemma.

No Home Of The Mind strikes a chord without uttering a word.

Staring into a murky void, Thundercat has actually made his clearest music yet.

With each transition, you can tell Agius has taken the time to get the stitching just right, which allows him to cover a broad range of sounds and textures without derailing the flow.

Ghost Culture is a good record from an artist who is probably capable of a great one.

Hauschildt's minimal electronica here works its way into those ambient soundscapes and offers a singularly calm fusion of both genres. No longer caught between oppositional impulses, Hauschildt seamlessly channels freeform ambient and regimented synth tones into the same space, and produces some of his most cohesive, conceptually sound work to date.

What Barnes has done here is give us a full tour of a hidden place he only let us peek at before, a place that's even more breathtaking than Dagger Paths made it out to be.

In many ways Ghost Systems Rave is as bumpy and nerve-jangling as a joyride in a stolen Ford Fiesta. Whether that's your idea of fun or not, no one could ever claim it's clean and healthy.

It's old, new and never boring.

On Giant Swan, the duo display a fearsome mastery of techno dynamics, but it's their detachment from that world that makes their music so compelling.

Where Devotion was light and feathery, Colourgrade is haunting and visceral. She sounds wiser, more assured, laser-focused on what matters most.

The album is not only one that fans will cherish for years to come, but it will surely be the record that draws a whole new generation of fans into her deeply personal, and always captivating, world.

It's striking how simple and affecting Devotion is as a whole. At a time when so much music is political and intellectualized, Tirzah's sincerity and candor is a breath of fresh air.

Drone lives and dies by its inviolability and rigidity, but Lopatin throws that away in favor of something madder, weirder and altogether more enticing.

Despite its shortcomings, Howl is a fine album for those interested in analog electronics and curious what can be done with them outside of a club environment.

For those of us undeterred by Halo's vocal approach, Quarantine is an often breathtaking piece of emotive reverie that stands sonically as one of the year's more consistently inviting ambient LPs.

New Path's final moments are fleetingly hopeful, conveyed through faintly chirping birdsong. But once that warmth fades, the album's unsettling mood is what lingers. It's one of Essaie Pas' finest efforts yet.

It's not often one comes across an album that is somehow both more evolved and primitive than its predecessor, yet it's a trick Container has pulled-off with LP.

rje had another ace up his sleeve: It's the Arps, a glistening modern disco EP that, at the risk of splitting hairs, is probably his finest yet.

Metal, techno and noise fans will all find solace here, as the band juggle sounds from all three to make something that sounds new, and almost natural.

An elegant and often bewitching entrant in the surfeit of night-weary synthscapes.

With KOCH, Gamble has found a canvas that's just the right size to fit everything on, to hold the whole beautiful thing up at once.

Without a doubt an early contender for electronic album of the year.

Smith never went away exactly, but Bleeds feels like as storming comeback.

It's an album that could have been a near-perfect EP--at its high points No Future presents the most inventive work of Moiré's career. As a whole package, though, it's a bit of a grind, as glum as it is propulsive.

Like all of Lustwerk's music, it's moody, it's sensual, it's vaguely ridiculous. It's a total fantasy—which makes it all the easier to get swept away.

Rather than crystal-clear crooning, we get choirs of Tesfayes swirling and winding around elaborate, meandering songs.

Fool is the product of a powerful imagination, the kind of mind that's unburdened by assumptions and orthodoxies.

It's a record more about sound design and structure, an abstract deconstruction of Night Slugs' sleek chrome aesthetic.

Some of the most affecting ambient music of the year, and perhaps even the very best in Halo's rich, unpredictable catalogue.

What Burton nails on Communion is how to fold in sounds from all over--electronic music and the real world--to make powerful and terrifying music in 2015. If the club is a shelter from an oppressive and dangerous society, then Communion is what waits outside.

Like staring at a laptop screen for so long the glut of information makes you feel sick, Another Life is a complete sensory overload you can't turn away from. It's the duo's most triumphant release yet.

That feeling of organic growth and decay is, definitively, what makes Blondes unique--everything is in its right place, but instead of processed-to-death perfection, it just feels natural.

Overload is suffused with love: love for self, love for community, and especially love for Muldrow's longtime creative and romantic partner, the rapper Dudley Perkins.

It keeps intact what makes her one of the most exciting UK pop acts of the 2020s, gesturing towards the mainstream while still keeping one foot in her musical hometown. It's the kind of record a promising artist puts out before they release something truly next-level.

Morgan sings and raps on the LP, the first time they've used their voice on their records. That helps make Power their most accessible release. The singing is charmingly unpolished.

While McIlwain is operating within more rigid structures, another hangover from his ambient productions is that he can sometimes sound a bit directionless.

Magazine 13 doesn't feel like a coherent album so much as a more open-ended platform for the same thing we get on his 12-inches.

Casual and understated as ever, Greenspan and Didemus seemed to be making a point: Big Black Coat isn't the triumphant return of Junior Boys, it's just the next chapter in an ongoing story.

Gamble has said that Mnestic Pressure is a response to our turbulent times, and an attempt to confront the world rather than offer escape from it. That intention comes through, but the key to the album's brilliance lies elsewhere: in the way it balances fun, challenge and surprise more deftly than anything he's made before.

Ellison remains keen on confronting and articulating his inner quarrels in the name of taking weirdness to the masses, and in doing so writing a new chapter in the pantheon of great Afrofuturist music.

There's something truly extraordinary about Al Qadiri's constant balancing act of light and dark, and each passing moment brings with it a new thrill. The romance, despair and yearning of Middle Age verses comes through effortlessly in Medieval Femme, where Al Qadiri's own talent as a storyteller is magnificent.

When Bruner's social conscience speaks up, the insights--spiced with slacker humour, free of sanctimony--are persuasive, even moreso when accompanied by an embrace of his flaws.

At times, it seems like his most interestingly textured and complicated release to date.

We can imagine these 32 tracks stretched out in three hours, and we can enjoy the way they squeeze into 76 minutes equally well.

Emerson's decision to duck out of dance music and resurface as an indie-electronica artist for her long-awaited debut album feels like a risk, but in its well-worn and world-weary approach to songwriting, it's also deeply familiar, almost comforting.

Baha's production skills are clear across Free For All. Fans of instrumental grime artists like Slackk will find much to admire in the austere yet precisely constructed "Aliens," whose sense of space is uncommonly sophisticated.

Across Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, she continues to craft poignant work that tints the atmosphere, transporting the listener to the remembrances and moments of imagination that float freely within the mind's eye.

Slow Knife's best moments might even trump Severant. But Teasdale's efforts to escape the shadow of his debut sometimes lead him astray.

Blondes' new arrangement seems to working fine so far, and suggests that subsequent live shows will be pretty special, too.

The end result is unified in its daydreamy mood. What we get from each track, and from all of them together, is a mellow sense of the sublime.