November 28, 2012 – Barcelona's Sónar festival today announced the cities and dates for five separate events taking place in the first half of 2013, including the 20th-anniversary edition of the festival in its home base in Barcelona, where Kraftwerk will present a new 3D show.In February, Sónar travels to Reykjavik, Iceland, for the first time with a two-night event including James Blake, Squarepusher, Modeselektor, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and other staples of the festival's history. March, April, and May will see the organization make return visits to Cape Town, Tokyo, and São Paolo for two-night engagements in each city. Finally, from June 13–15, Sónar will take place in its customary venues in the Catalan capital, occupying the MACBA/CCCB museum complex by day and the sprawling Fira Gran Via II convention center by night.

November 26, 2012 – Chances are a song called "Basement Love" would never sound especially wholesome, but Bot'Ox render the idea especially louche on their new single, a creepy-but-tender fusion of witch house, space disco, and Chris Issak-inspired soft rock. Philadelphia singer the Foremost Poets (a.k.a. jOHNNYDANGEROUs, the artist behind the 1992 Chicago house hit "Problem #13," better known for its refrain, "Beat that bitch with a bat") sounds as seductively seedy as the voyeur/narrator from Calvin Klein's short-lived 1995 ad campaign paying tribute to teenagers in rec rooms. Leave it to Pachanga Boys — the duo of Superpitcher and Cómeme's Rebolledo — to translate "Basement Love" from the split-level to the underground bunker.Stretching out the song into a 12-minute epic, they play up both the horrorcore and the heavy breathing, resulting in the most sinister kind of dance-floor apotheosis.

November 21, 2012 – I never expected to find myself standing in a rehearsal space owned by Rammstein, but here I am, weaving my way through mountains of flight cases, dodging cables and determined-looking roadies beneath an enormous black skull-and-crossbones flag. Which is kind of funny, because it's a skull that I've traveled to the outskirts of Berlin to see.Not a real skull, of course. The cranium in question stands perhaps seven feet high, is painted silver, and boasts stylized, vaguely sci-fi contours as well as evil-looking red bulbs lodged deep in its eye sockets. It is to serve as the centerpiece of Boys Noize's new live show — his first live show, in fact, despite the fact that he has been DJing for over a decade — and on the day I visit, just days before his tour begins, there are still many kinks to be worked out with the death's-head-cum-DJ-booth.

November 20, 2012 – Despite electronic music's ostensibly futurist bent, house music in 2012 sounds overwhelmingly like 1992 all over again: All tracky drum grooves, stabbing pianos, and staccato bass lines, with the odd wailing diva thrown in for good measure. That's hardly a bad thing — if it ain't broke, etc. — but the most encouraging side effect of house music's current retro fixation has been the way that it has helped to shine a spotlight on some of the genre's pioneers.Enter Chicago's Curtis Jones, better known under his aliases Cajmere and Green Velvet. House music was already deeply ingrained in Chicago by the time that Jones started making music in 1990, with just a drum machine, a Yamaha synthesizer, and a Tascam 4-track recorder.

November 16, 2012 – It's been a sad week in electronic music. On Monday, London's Martin Dawson died, 10 days after suffering an aneurysm in his studio. And yesterday, the ambient pioneer Pete Namlook (Peter Kuhlmann) was reported to have died "peacefully from as-yet-unspecified causes on 8th November," according to a statement his daughter Fabia made to Resident Advisor.It would be hard to overstate Namlook's impact on the last 20 years of electronic music. While, in many ways, he existed apart — as Allmusic's Sean Cooper wrote, "If most artists in contemporary electronica are like islands unto themselves…Pete 'Namlook' Kuhlmann is a whole continent" — his influence continually fed back into the techno, trance, and ambient scenes.

November 16, 2012 – Seth Troxler has been quiet on the production front lately, and no wonder. As Resident Advisor's Will Lynch chronicled after this year's WMC, the rising DJ keeps a schedule that could cripple all but the most seasoned road warriors. But Troxler recently found time out from his seemingly endless succession of gigs and after-parties (including a stretch of Richie Hawtin's "CNTRL: Beyond EDM" bus tour) to turn out a striking remix of Matthew Dear's "Fighting Is Futile," the latest single from Dear's album Beams."It's funny how the remix happened," Troxler told SPIN in an e-mail. "Matt and crew asked if I were up for it, [and] it had been ages since I worked on anything alone, since I'm always on the road and don't have a studio. Then Matt sent me the parts.

November 15, 2012 – Damon Krukowski's sobering analysis of how little recording artists make from streaming their music under current royalty rates — to wit, he says that his former band, Galaxie 500, would need to rack up 13 million streams to make the same profit they did selling just 1,000 7-inches, back in 1988 — has generated plenty of reactions, both positive and negative. Among the critical responses is the hoary argument that musicians need to suck it up and adapt with the times — specifically, by taking their show on the road.

November 14, 2012 – It might be hard to believe, but it's been 15 years since the Prodigy smacked their way onto the American scene with The Fat of the Land, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 and promptly turned pop culture upside down. (As SPIN's September 1997 cover story on the group noted, Helena Christensen, Cameron Diaz, Bono, Chris Rock, Diddy, and even Jerry Seinfeld all turned up at the after-party for the group's New York show.) Long before American promoters reconfigured "EDM" for the American festival landscape, the Prodigy brought breakbeats to the rock-club circuit, sowing the seeds for this decade's explosion of 'roid-raging rave. If you want to know how we got where we are today, thank/blame Liam Howlett and his band of not-so-merry pranksters: As Skrillex told me when I interviewed him for SPIN last year, "One of my first albums was The Fat of the Land.

November 14, 2012 – As part of the Sian Alice Group, Sian Ahern and Ben Crook made winsome indie rock that nodded to Galaxie 500, Low, and the Dirty Three. There's still a touch of American gothic to their new trio, Eaux, with Stephen Warrington, as well as the teensiest hint of actual gothic. (Between Ahern's airy soprano and the group's darkly ethereal atmospheres, it's tempting to think they took their name in homage to the Cocteau Twins.) But the balance has shifted decidedly away from strummy pastoralism towards programmed rhythms, velvety flourishes of synthesizer, and anxious clang.The trio's debut EP, i, came together in a few days in London's Tin Room studio, beginning as group improvisations and gradually taking shape. Despite the copious electronic touches, however, the music retains a distinctly live feel, stripped-down and in flux.

November 13, 2012 – "Some of you will be surprised, but yes, like you I'm a House head," confesses Pedro Winter, a.k.a. Busy P, explaining the unexpectedly rootsy turn that his Ed Banger label has taken with its latest release. Ed Banger is best known, of course, for the louche, super-charged electro mayhem favored by label mainstays Justice and their Parisian pals. But with the debut EP from Paris' Boston Bun (Thibaud Noyer), a 25-year-old producer who shares a studio with Winter, the label pays tribute to timeless house aesthetics. If you couldn't guess from the title, "Housecall" is a love letter to the skeletal, synthetic bass lines and choppy vocal samples of the late 1980s and early 1990s.