Piotr Orlov

As somebody who nit-picks the purpose of year-end lists, I have one basic question to ask here: What is an "electronic album?" (Do non-electronic albums even exist in the digitally saturated year of our Internet overlords, 2015?) As somebody writing an intro to such a list, it might not be ...

There is something about Emily Sprague's voice that both transcends twee indie-pop clichés even as it revels in them. The songs she writes for Florist — an Upstate New York quartet which recently decamped for the bright lights of Brooklyn, and is part of The Epoch collective alongside ...

Our final monthly Recommended Dose mix of 2015 includes Afrobeat from Amsterdam, techno by a retired ballerina, disco by a soft-rock progeny, remixes by two American club masters, and vibey electro in the vein of Hieroglyphic Being.

We'll be back in December with a megamix of our favorite ...

Tom Jones bills his newest album as a companion to his autobiography, Over The Top And Back. And were you to judge the facts of his life based exclusively on the Ethan Johns-produced, American-style roots music that makes up Long Lost Suitcase, you'd be hard-pressed to discover that ...

"Fulani Rock," the opening track of Baaba Maal's newest album, The Traveller, is a conceptual declaration, one of those in-studio meetings of an African artist and European producer that can either go very wrong or very right. Thank goodness that here it's very much the latter. Guided by ...

Few albums have the creation myth of Interludes For The Dead by Neal Casal's Circles Around The Sun. The 10 instrumental jams that encompass the release were commissioned by Justin Kreutzmann, the filmmaker son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, to accompany the biographical visuals he was compiling ...

For me, it is impossible to separate tindersticks' music from the times in my life when we intersected, because we never quite lived together. That youthful moment of discovery when, despite the commercial juggernaut of grunge/Nirvana/Seattle and the nascent ascendance of what would turn into Britpop,

It took a little while to shake-off the sugar crash of Halloween, but we're finally ready to present our October edition of Recommended Dose. This month features Balearic house from Australia, eerie techno from a fashion-minded Russian, Colombian club workouts from Northern England, Detroit-infused funk from London, hard-hitting bass from ...

There's a reason why Sébastien Devaud (a.k.a Agoria) has remained among French techno's brightest and longest-burning lights: When Devaud finds himself at a creative crossroads, he chooses to do "something different, always challenging myself to try to make other beats, other sounds." It may be a cliché, but it's ...

"For Mihaly," the final song on Auntie Flo's second album Theory Of Flo, is a wonderfully (and somewhat unexpectedly) plaintive last piece for a collection dominated by euphoric, globally minded dance music. With Poppy Ackroyd's violin supplying the song's melancholy central tenet, it's like a Yiddish ...

Since making his debut in 2009, Floating Points' Sam Shepherd has been an oddball in England's dance-music scene. Though the first in his steady stream of singles came out during the U.K.'s fruitful period immediately following the rise of dubstep, it was instantly clear that Floating Points didn't fit the ...

The elements at the heart of "Vacuum Packed" betray the knowing schizophrenia of Kode9's current sound. A standout track on Nothing, the first album that Kode9 (born: Steve Goodman) has produced since the 2014 death of his vocalist/collaborator The Spaceape (Stephen Samuel Gordon), "Vacuum Packed" is overstuffed with ideas ...

Finding an acceptable line between influence and appropriation has dogged musicians for generations, and Dexter Story addresses the issue in surprising and joyous ways on Wondem, his second album as a bandleader.

A 50-year-old multi-instrumentalist born and bred in L.A., Story has created a song cycle under the spell of ...

An Irishman in Berlin, Niall Mannion has recorded two albums under his faux-French nom de plume, Mano Le Tough. The title song from the second, Trails, implies much about what it means to be a writer of songs (as opposed to simply a producer of tracks) in dance ...

A songwriter better than you or I once wrote that "days grow short when you reach September" — forgetting to add that this is why you need more bangers for the seasonally expanding night-times. Enter Recommended Dose, whose monthly offering doesn't simply span multiple continents, but numerous rhythm sources, large ...

On this week's +1 Podcast, we talk with producer, DJ and musician Mark Ronson about the allure of vintage sounds and why he chose to build his career around making the old sound new again.

The roots of Mark Ronson's love for classic music run deep. This British-born musician spent ...

Even in the world of outré electronics, the experimental-music swings of Chicagoan Jamal Moss are radical. If you have the hips, stomach and brain for a steady stream of sonic surprises, he's your man in lo-fi techno. Among the many technologically astute and historically Afrocentric monikers Moss hides behind,

Earlier in his music career, Dan Friel was best known as a founder of Parts & Labor, an experimental Brooklyn rock band that expertly made its way around post-hardcore psych jams, with layers of noise and smarty-pants song structures for guides. Yet many years before Parts ...

How does an artist pay homage to roots he obviously cherishes without getting permanently entangled in them? It's a question many soul-music throwbacks struggle to answer. Some settle for permanent comfort amid the retro cushions, while others rage against and abandon the creative impulses that had previously guided them. Only ...

It speaks to The Black Keys' popularity and stature as one of America's finest working rock bands that early word surrounding The Arcs had it pegged as singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach's "side project." The Arcs' debut album, Yours, Dreamily, may have begun as a solo excursion, but ...