New artist Emile features as Felix K’s label emerges with a pair of records due in the next month.
Blackest Ever Black are still pursuing new iterations of that Holy Grail, Christoph De Babalon’s 1997 LP If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It. ‘Bleak, bombed-out soundboy electronics’ could just as easily be the context for Raime, Killing Sound, Tomorrow The Rain Will Fall Upwards and December; but here, vividly, it’s applied to a label debut from Felix K that feels as much a visual score as any kind of dance-inspired musical exercise.
Our final podcast of 2014 features two hours of dubby, half-time and deep techno sounds from Hidden Hawaii boss Felix K.
When sitting down to discuss and finalise the albums worthy of inclusion on this list, it soon became apparent just how many great long players were released over the course of the past twelve months. In fact, it felt that this year saw the LP as a medium for electronic producers really come into its own, realising through the course of our discussions just how many artists used the album format as a means to explore concepts or themes that go far beyond collecting a series of tracks aimed at getting people on the dance floor. With the number of 12-inch singles being released on a weekly basis continuing to rise, and a increasingly unfavourable signal-to-noise ratio, the electronic LPs of the year largely offered us an opportunity to step outside the rising number of uninspired dance singles and see things through new eyes.
Although this is a selection of albums that covers many of this year’s more prevalent narratives in the underground – contemporary grime, the jungle revival, industrial techno, and the fringes of house music being some of the most notable – these albums were the ones that took those concepts and stretched them to breaking point. For those fatigued by the near-constant revisitiation of the past in 2013, there are plenty of albums on this list that offer a tantalising suggestion as to where dance music could be going next, as well as a selection of albums who didn’t try too hard to do anything massively different, but instead focused on just doing it well. In fact, this year was so good for albums, that we felt it justified to expand the list to 25 to accommodate those the editorial team just could not countenance missing out on the recognition they deserve.
There’s an alluring sense of trepidation when holding Felix K’s Flowers Of Destruction; 15 flowers – or tracks – planted into three gun-metal discs, encased in glossy silvered sleeves. Its gatefold packaging – greyscale and sleek in design – silently stares back at you like an unopened Pandora’s Box. Central to the album’s artwork are off-cuts of pencil-sketched creepers, reminiscent to the coloured drawings of Roger Corman’s 1960 The Little Shop Of Horrors. An opened gatefold reveals the album’s cover art in its spread and inverted form; a rectangular strip of sprawling ivy, the mutant kind you’d expect to see strangling the walls of Chernobyl, in parts spilling over its rulered edges like tentacles reaching out of a fish tank.