CONTROL VOLTAGE

January 11, 2013 – I still remember the day I first heard Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, in a record store in Portland, Oregon. It was 1985, I was 14 years old, and I had never heard music that sounded simultaneously so sweet and so fucked-up. I asked the clerk if the store's speakers were broken.

January 11, 2013 – Never mind what Homer Simpson thinks; democracy works! And for once, it worked in the ravers' favor.

January 10, 2013 – When Miami's Ultra Music Festival announced in October that its 2013 edition would take place over two consecutive weekends in March, it was greeted as a sign of electronic dance music's explosive growth — and even, perhaps, an indication that dance music has gained the upper hand over indie and alt-rock in the festival game.

January 9, 2013 – You're Avicii. You're responsible for one of the biggest dance-pop crossover hits of the past two years, "Levels," with 56 million YouTube plays (and counting). Your subsequent tracks, while successful, have sounded like "Levels" redux, minus the Etta James sample that made "Levels" so potent in the first place. In short, you seem to have writer's block.

January 8, 2013 – For all the clamor over what constitutes an authentically live performance of electronic music, SBTRKT has shown that it's not really all that hard to do, provided that you know your way around a MIDI controller and a drum kit — and have access to a singer as talented as Sampha.

January 7, 2013 – One of the most heartening developments in electronic music last year was the re-discovery of the pioneering computer musician Laurie Spiegel. Her 1980 album The Expanding Universe received a long-overdue reissue, including a second disc's worth of rarities and unreleased music,  plus her 1972 composition "Sediment" even made it onto the soundtrack of The Hunger Games.