SPIN

May 25, 2012 – While Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber is handing out a Best New Music badge to dance-pop superstar Avicii — prompting speculation that May 24 is the new April 1, and triggering, in the process, a minor meltdown on the site's Facebook page — I'm dedicating today's column to the underground, with left-field selections from Detroit's Andrés, Border Community hypno-techno wizard Nathan Fake, the Swedish outfit WRD, and the mysterious Dubli

May 23, 2012 – While mainstream EDM is increasingly driven by soft-synth presets and pre-packaged loops, a funny thing is happening on electronic music's fringes, as a growing number of musicians immerse themselves in the deeply analog, resolutely DIY world of modular synthesis.

May 22, 2012 – Writing in The Wire in 2009, David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop" — "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory" — to describe artists like James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never, who channel psychedelic tendencies through cultural memory. He was talking principally about a particular form of nostalgia; mapping the concept to the interzone between sleeping and wakefulness was purely metaphorical.

May 21, 2012 – It's been a good while since the Chilean-German techno shaman Ricardo Villalobos has released any new solo work. After 2007's Fabric 36, a seamless mix of all original material, and the following year's spate of releases — two EPs and an album for Perlon and, on his own Sei Es Drum label, "Enfants," a 17-minute, choir-sampling epic that became a runaway underground hit — it seems like the creative well dried up for a while.

May 18, 2012 – Thirty-two years ago today, I sat on the roof of our house and watched a plume of ash rise 80,000 feet in the air above Mount St.

May 17, 2012 – Seventeen years ago, Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) began his career as a breakbeat gadfly, chopping up jungle with Jaco Pastorius into a style known briefly as "drill 'n' bass" (or, better still, "weirdy-beardy").