October 24, 2012 – Zombie Nation returns to Tiga's Turbo label with Meathead, a five-track EP that, despite its title, bears little in common with 'roid-raging weightlifters. That's not to say that the Munich musician (Florian Senfter) has gone soft. Armed with beefy distortion, he knows how to pack a punch, but his lanky, slower-than-usual grooves are a far cry from the juiced-up electro house that has dominated EDM bro-downs as of late. As on his recent records with Tiga in the duo ZZT, Meathead explores the more sensual properties of the fuzzbox, wrapping lanky grooves and quavering synthesizers in a halo of white noise."Attic Sundays" finds him putting an unusually acrid spin on pitch-bent synths and detuned toms over a sputtering machine groove. Curiously, given the music's sour, singed qualities, the producer shares a name with senfter speck, a South Tyrolian type of smoked, cured ham.

October 24, 2012 – Additional tickets have been released for the Sensation Innerspace events coming to Brooklyn's Barclays Center this Friday and Saturday, October 26 and 27, giving dance-music fans — and those who just want to dress up as Tom Wolfe for a night — a chance to catch the inaugural stateside edition of the popular global event series. Launched in Amsterdam in 2000, and now held in more than a dozen countries around the world, Sensation is known for its spectacular production values, trance-heavy lineups, and a dress code, strictly enforced, mandating that attendees dress entirely in white.

October 23, 2012 – On Friday, DJ Mag announced the results of its annual Top 100 DJs poll, an institution in overground dance music. The results suggest some surprising shifts in a wildly mercurial and increasingly globalized assortment of overlapping scenes, even as they ignore vast swaths of some of the world's most dynamic, creative, and progressive electronic dance music.When it began as a print magazine's readers' poll in 1997, the list largely reflected the tastes of the U.K.'s clubbers, with a heavy emphasis on trance, house, progressive, and techno.

October 23, 2012 – Giorgio Moroder is nothing if not generous. We know that much from his 1975 hit with Donna Summer, "Love to Love You Baby," a tantric ode to extended eroticism that ran to nearly 17 minutes — a fairly unprecedented length for a dance-floor track in that era. Now, the Italo-disco pioneer is giving back to his fans in another way, by unleashing a massive trove of classic songs, alternate mixes, outtakes, instrumentals, and live versions on his two SoundCloud accounts. (It's unclear why he has two separate accounts; presumably, he opened a new one after maxing out the first.)He kicked off his spree three weeks ago with "Giorgio's New Dancing Shoes," a new production, and he continued with selections from the American Gigolo and Scarface soundtracks.

October 18, 2012 – Given his name, it's perhaps unsurprising that Damian Lazarus has a predisposition for themes of rebirth and renewal. (His predisposition for ponchos is another matter.) In December, the chieftain of the Crosstown Rebels crew will lead his ragtag band of rabble-rousers to a crossroads of a different sort — a spiritual one, if you will.Set at a picturesque site near the tourist town of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, Day Zero is the kind of party that only comes around once every 25 millennia or so. As the organizers explain in a press release: "The occasion will mark the end-date of a 25,625-year-long cycle and fifth and final cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

October 17, 2012 – Nathan Fake's "The Sky Was Pink," released on Border Community in 2004, is an undisputed classic of electronic dance music. James Holden's remix of the tune was one of that year's biggest anthems — one of those increasingly rare tracks that managed to unite fans across several of dance music's competing factions: progressive house, trance, techno, minimal, and IDM. Now, proving the song's durability as well as its malleability, Leeds' Vessels have recorded a hybrid cover version of the song, drawing inspiration from both the original and Holden's iconic rework."It's one of those tracks that brought the band closer together and re-invigorated our love for making music together," Vessels' Lee J. Malcolm explained in an e-mail. "The original by Nathan Fake sounded like an electronica artist recreating a live band. Then James Holden turned it into a dance-floor techno classic.

October 16, 2012 – Five years after their debut album, Anatomy, and with signs of a drum and bass revival in full swing, Calyx & TeeBee return with All or Nothing (RAM Records), a 12-track long-player that aims to bring DnB in from the cold. The album ranges from trim, elegant rollers to dystopian techstep flashbacks, with echoes of Photek, Source Direct, and even early Amon Tobin in its carefully sculpted breaks and gelatinous low end, while collaborations with Foreign Beggars & Craze, Kemo, and Beardyman make overtures to hip-hop. In many ways, it's a statement of the subgenre's core principles, but "Strung Out," one of the album's standout cuts, shows how far they're willing to stray from convention, with Calyx's vocals floating over watery keys and flickering rhythmic flourishes.

October 12, 2012 – I rarely have explicit themes in mind for the Friday Five when I begin putting together each column, but they still have a way of gathering in the margins. This week is all about classically-minded house and techno—big surprise, given that underground dance music is deep in the throes of a retro fetish. But these selections aren't old-school for the sake of being old-school, just prime exemplars of the old maxim about not fixing what ain't broke.Willie Burns, The Overlord EP (The Trilogy Tapes) You could call the reigning aesthetic behind the Trilogy Tapes label "cut-and-paste apocalypse." Founder Will Bankhead—a graphic designer for Mo Wax and Honest Jon's—draws visual inspiration from the scrappily subversive DIY graphics of punk and industrial, and the records he signs to the label go hand in hand, sounding raw and a little bit wrong.

October 12, 2012 – Twenty years ago, two young Parisians, Etienne De Crécy and Philippe Zdar, discovered techno for the first time at a rave called Transbody Express. "It makes such an impact on us that we don't miss a single one of the raves organized near the capital for the next year" writes de Crécy in the liner notes for Essentials, a new album that's part greatest-hits collection, part Bildungsroman. "We come up with the crazy idea of making an album.

October 11, 2012 – It can't be April 1, because Eric Prydz just announced a New York show at the Roseland Ballroom for November 21, a.k.a. Thanksgiving Eve. But the rest of the press release certainly feels like an April Fool's joke, as it's revealed: "At Eric's request, all tickets will be locked at $39.95—a low, low price that makes the event accessible to as many of his fans as possible."It gets better, though, even after you repeat that "low, low price" line to yourself, several times, in your best late-night QVC impersonation. The show is so cheap because Prydz is waiving his fee. "I'm playing for free, not making anything," he told Elektro magazine.Frankly, $40 doesn't seem like a "low, low price." It seems like quite a lot indeed, especially just to see a DJ with a laptop or a pair of USB sticks.