CONTROL VOLTAGE

June 11, 2012 – Making electronic music has changed drastically in the past decade or so. Beats that used to be programmed and manipulated in real time are increasingly constructed on screen, and sampling has grown from a matter of spit-and-chewing-gum into something approaching an exact science.

June 8, 2012 – If there's an unusually sunny cast to the Friday Five this week, blame the fact that I'm spending the month on the Balearic island of Menorca, and my seasonally-affected listening instincts are kicking in hard under the hot sun.

June 8, 2012 – For a while now, boosters have been touting Las Vegas as "the new Ibiza." When I visited a year ago, I thought the comparison was something of a stretch; as I noted in my SPIN feature on Skrillex and the “New Rave Generation,” Ibiza's club scene extends back to the 1980s and, for all its garish excess and monied interests, has grown somewhat organically.

June 4, 2012 – A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new breed of bass music structured according to a principle I called the "anti-drop": A refusal of gratification, an inversion of mainstream EDM's sugar-rush dynamics and everything-louder-than-everything-else proportions.

June 1, 2012 – Last week, in an annotated playlist for Red Bull Music Academy, Simon Reynolds traced the interplay between American R&B and U.K. garage (or 2-step), a short-lived hybrid of house and jungle that dominated the British underground and briefly exploded into the pop charts, back around the turn of the millennium. As it happens, I've been dusting off a lot of my old 2-step records lately.

May 31, 2012 – When most people think of the music scene in Portland, Oregon, they probably think guitars (and the beards that buff them).