Sam Ribakoff misses the days when Bandcamp didn’t cater to Fortnite streamers on Twitch.
I began Ghost in the 404 because most dance and electronic music criticism at the time seemed to focus primarily around European techno and house producers, at the expense of more subversive dance music scenes in the U.S. and internationally. Things have improved. The few remaining music publications are publishing more reviews of electronic and experimental music outside of the Berghain-industrial complex. There have even been profiles on non-Western dance music styles and placements of their albums on “Best of the Year” lists.
But if you take a look at some best of the year lists from two months ago and tell me you didn’t think like George Clinton thought decades ago: that dance music needs to be rescued from the blahs. Dance music can be serious, lyrical, political, emotional, meditative, fun, stupid, silly, weird; the only thing it shouldn’t be is stiff or boring.
This will probably be the last entry into this column, so in retrospect, if there’s anything I think this column did right and stayed true to, it was writing about the most interesting dance and electronic music being made: from Chicago footwork, to Colombian guarapos, to Malian balani, to non-Muzak ambient music. Here’s one more charge in the fight against the blahs, featuring 10 of the most anti-boring and best dance and electronic albums released last year. Keep fighting the good fight.
One of last year’s best footwork albums answers one of the most pressing questions of our time: what kind of music would God command their followers to make if Jerusalem was on the South Side of Chicago? I like to imagine Chicago Heights native D.J. Spaldin heard the Lord’s voice in the quiet of night and sat down at an MPC to add Chicago footwork’s signature battering sub-bass toms, ricocheting hi-hats and neck breaking snare hits to a gospel choir sample.
Can’t Hold Me Down plays with hushed tranquil women’s gospel samples and folk-like singers soulfully instantiating religious ecstasy and longing. There is also footwork and ghettotech drums. It’s not necessarily revolutionary, plenty of early footwork tracks did similar things, but after an era where footwork producers were chasing EDM, trap, and drum and bass maximalism, it’s refreshing to hear a producer play around with all the space between the bass and snare hits. Listen to it at a high enough volume and you might just catch the holy ghost.
If you’re wondering when the break or the drop is going to hit, it ain’t coming on Tonight. This is lonely and dark gray–smog, rain and concrete-covered British ambient adjacent. Tonight is almost video game soundtrack music, somewhere among Burial, Space Afrika, and Dean Blunt’s spacier tracks. Like those folks, Leicester, England’s Mohammed Adam relies on repeating oddly timed loops of found sounds and haunted house piano lines to create rich, ominous, textures. Unlike Burial and Space Afrika though, Adam shares Blunt’s sense of surrealism and humor.
Throughout the album Adam includes DJ drops and shout outs and what sounds like swords clanking against each other. Like his forebears, you can hear Adam’s love for grime, dubstep, UK garage and dub in the way he deploys those samples. Adam has his own flavor to add to that mix of depressed lonely Brits and samples of South Asian music. On “time to change akh” Adam juices all of the beautiful longing in a South Asian vocal sample, then an instrumental section to pierce the fog with a glint of sunlight. As a recurring sample throughout the album repeats, the album is “absolutely deadly.”
The tracks on Slime Patrol 2 sound like if you took a nap behind the speakers at Chicago footwork mecca Battlegroundz while a sludge content-addicted teenager was mashing yacht rock instrumentals with trap acapellas and juke drums. In other words, it’s one of the best albums of the year.
Tunisian producer Al Hanafi honed in on this sound on the first instalment of Slime Patrol released on the small but vital L.A. label Fada Records in 2020. On the sequel she expands on some of the half-explored roads on the prequel, like using rap a capellas from the likes of Lil Keed, Waka Flocka Flame and Dej Loaf and harder low end on tracks like “You Know I Got That/Won’t Stop Calling” to juxtapose the even more cartoonishly kawaii video game like melodies.
For parts of the album it sounds like Al Hanafi is veerring towards making lo-fi footwork or even study-type beats, but then she breaks out the taunting shittalking vocals, repeating phrases like “she can’t move like me.” A record made for both Chicago dancers cutting it up and shut-ins watching clips of dance battles on YouTube.
This ones for you Resident Advisor readers screaming “WHERE’S THE TECHNO!? WHERE’S THE IDM!? DIDN’T SKEE MASK RELEASE SOMETHING THIS YEAR!?” He probably did [ed. note: it was good], but Monterrey, Mexico’s Regal86 put out the best techno music this year.
Throughout multiple self-releases on Bandcamp, Regal86 put out some of the nastiest, grimiest, techno of the year. But where some of his other albums meandered, the short and sweet Stereographs does not stray from the righteous path. Stereographs is that jet black dark, seedy, metallic chrome techno full of squirmy arpeggiated bass synth, pinging electronic bleeps and subterranean shuffling drums.
Regal86 knows that the difference between an okay techno track and a great one is a small addition to the tried and true formula. On tracks like “Cross-eyed view,” he flips a sped up and distorted horn sample to make the track sound like a manic distress signal from Cthulhu. If it doesn’t awaken ancient primordial monsters in you, check out tracks like the title track, “Stereographs,” where Regal86 makes galloping high hat hits and an out of breath whistle fall over themselves to catch up with Rhodes-like piano chords. Jeff Mills would approve.
When your dad was the late, great footwork innovator DJ Rashad, you are essentially dance music royalty. But DJ Chad isn’t relying on hype, press or nepotism, he’s putting in work. In 2024 Chad released three fantastic records, Raw is War, Levelz and Ghetto Origin – each filled with raw drum and sample tracks, experimental nightmares, and beautiful, soulful, timestretch sample flips a la Cakedog album (check out “95” on Raw is War).
November’s Ghetto Origins is where all those sounds get jumbled together into an overstuffed 35-track smorgasbord of overlapping samples and repeating vocal loops that are both claustrophobic and psychedelic. Dad would definitely be proud.
Berlin–via-Cairo producer Azemad makes trip-hop inflected breakbeat music that conveys an emotional state of mind. It conjures a gritty, La Haine-style atmosphere of encroaching danger. Azemad’s wise-beyond-his-years voice sounds like he’s slowly reading his rhymes from an unfurling scroll. All of the four tracks on the record share the same vibe, even when the mid tempo flow is briefly interrupted with drum and bass breaks.
In one interview, Azemad said he doesn’t want to make music specifically for dance floors because the meaning of his track could get lost in the fray. Instead, he said he wants his music and lyrics to speak to his own identity, ”through writing words about wanting God to guide me and to escape life’s distractions.” That’s what Mahma sounds like: a soundtrack to see your way through the fog of the world with all the grace and humanity you can muster.
When a creative new Brazilian funk song hits the TL there’s always a tinge of excitement seeing the culture grow and expand. You hear artists reinterpret and reimagine the confines of what’s considered “good” or acceptable.
Belo Horizonte’s Paraiso isn’t going viral anytime soon. His music is too dark, too slow, too weird, and too idiosyncratic. On two albums this year put out by Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes, Paraiso plunges the listener deep into his style of funk mineiro, or “miner funk.” These are sensory deprivation tank albums where scruffy voiced Brazilian MCs rap and occasionally sing in the tempo of funk’s tamborzão rhythm. He’s accompanied by out of tune piano clinks, violin stabs, haunted tubas, church bell chimes, chanting, groggy reed instruments and the occasional sub-bass rumblings of what any David Lynch fan would recognize as electrical wires buzzing (RIP).
All of the tracks float in a netherworld between ambient and even a capella and dance music because of their commitment to stark minimalism. Like any true artist, Paraiso knows you shouldn’t give your audience what they want. You give them what they need.
From hyper-minimal to hyper-maximalist. Sisso and Maiko are Tanzanian producers making a hyperactive style of neighborhood block party dance music called Singeli. The music is recklessly fast, with warped sample loops, distorted jammed up synths, Marshall percussion and wails of electronic noise.
This is not the result of a mad teenager hyped up on energy drinks and chewing tobacco, but two veterans jamming in the studio like a bizarro world version of The Grateful Dead. Sisso, a veteran singeli producer and operator of a studio in Tanzania, handles the laptop keyboard, providing tracks with their galloping, pummeling, drums. Ex-computer repairman Maiko provides the swirling, often oddly candy coated and ear-shatteringly loud melodies on a keyboard hooked up to Fruity Loops. The results are pure abandon.
Singeli Ya Maajabu sounds like two dudes who have been playing together for years who know the ins and outs of each other. They improvise, listening to each other, and just let the music take them to the outer edges of what’s possible.
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British DJ Nia Archives has worked harder than most to both prove her mastery of jungle and to reintroduce it to the masses. Nia’s debut major label album cashes in that sincere fidelity for big-room-bedroom pop, jungle breaks, and Nia taking on singing duties.
I should be calling this sellout music, but it works. For all you crusty junglists, don’t worry, Nia still knows how to edit and mix your favorite breaks at 160 BPM in a way that sounds immediately familiar, but tweaked, fiddled with and glitched up in a way that sounds fresh.
With a working class British vibrato, Nia sings about problems with relationships and family. She calls her own style “emotional junglist” music. The lyrics aren’t really bringing anyone to tears yet, but for elder junglists with an open heart, hearing someone move the genre forward, and bringing lots of young folks could make even the most hardened originals a little teary.
DJ Rata Piano fulfills the possibility of dance and electronic music: a producer coming up with wild experimental ideas in their bedrooms and out at parties all over the world. He hails from Barranquilla, Colombia, a city northeast of Bogota on the Caribbean coast that’s known for their huge carnival celebrations.
Armed with a consumer grade CASIO SK 5 mini-keyboard from the mid-80’s, Rata Piano loops guitar licks and keyboard vamps sampled from West African highlife and Congolese soukous tracks, then shapes them into Afro-Colombian champeta music rhythms. He implements cheesy but infectious percussion sounds, splashes of DJ drops, and laser beam sound effects. Dogs bark and lions roar in this overstuffed music that bursts at the seams from all the sounds bouncing off each other. That’s why I love it. It’s the sound of different kinds of people mixing, partying, and sampling each other’s music to make something unique, stylish, and fun as hell.
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