CONTROL VOLTAGE

January 4, 2013 – Now that Skrillex has gone and given us his best Burial impersonation, all bets are off for electronic music in 2013. For the record, I applaud Skrillex for trying something different, but his beats here aren't a patch on those of the Hessle/Hemlock axis that seem to have inspired him, and the piano and vocals are way too saccharine for my tastes.

January 3, 2013 – As SPIN reported yesterday, the casting director behind an as-yet untitled reality show about DJ culture is Doron Ofir, the man responsible for discovering the outsized personalities behind Jersey Shore, RuPaul's Drag Race, Millionaire Matchmaker, and dozens of similar series — a man whose claim to fame, you might say, is making other people infamous.Nevertheless, he assured SPIN in a breathless phone interview yesterday that his intent

January 2, 2013 – Reality television has already produced its first celebrity DJ in the form of Jersey Shore's Pauly D; it seems only fair, then, that non-celebrity DJs now have a shot at becoming honest-to-goodness reality stars in their own right.

December 11, 2012 – As we know from Groove magazine photographer Ragnar Schmuck's popular photographic series on DJs' living rooms, Germans tend to put a premium on keeping their Musikzimmer tidy. (Well, most of them do. Dominik Eulberg, not so much.) Now, Berlin resident Peaches sings an ode to keeping one's wax sorted: "Me, My Shelf, and I."No, that's not a joke, and it's not a cover of a Weird Al parody of De La Soul.

December 7, 2012 – Woe be to the artist who releases an album in late November or, worse, December. With critics and retailers hell-bent on year-end recaps those end-of-year albums tend to evaporate into a discursive void. To that end, today's column covers five new or recent albums that were at risk of disappearing into the virtual recesses of my own iTunes playlists.

December 6, 2012 – After the 2013 Grammy nominations were announced last night, one question began echoing through dance-music circles: "Who the hell is Al Walser?"Left-field picks don't get much further out than Walser, a Liechtensteinian producer and self-described "entertainment mogul" who received a Best Dance Recording nomination for his song "I Can't Live Without You," landing himself in the elite company of Avicii ("Levels"), Calvin Harris ("Let's