October 1, 2012 – Judging purely by the sound of Tom Skinner's Hello Skinny project — a warm, breathable, downright cozy mixture of African rhythms, low-key electronics, and Krautrock shimmer — you might not guess that there's a link back to the Residents, those eyeball-headed tricksters of America's outsider avant-garde. But there is: Skinner, a drummer whose résumé includes work with Matthew Herbert, Zero 7, and Mulatu Astatke, borrowed the name of his mostly solo venture from a song off the Residents' 1978 album Duck Stab! / Buster & Glen, and he also covers the song on his eponymous debut album, to be released November 12 on Slowfoot Records.Now, you may be thinking, "Wait a minute: Didn't Primus cover that song?" In which case, you'd be correct; it's long been a live staple of the slap-happy freak-funkers, who included it as a bonus cut on the 2002 reissue of their 1990 album Frizzle Fry.

September 28, 2012 – There's nothing like four days of crappy hotel internet to drive home the fact that the music industry churns out way too much product these days. Talk about glut: After four days offline, it took me five or six hours to download, unzip, and file all the promos that had arrived in the meantime. And that's just the administrative part: I still haven't listened to squat, beyond deciding which bits will never merit a second airing. There's something profoundly joyless about that kind of triaging, but what's a beleaguered critic to do? If part of my job is to be a filter, well, I'm clogged.As a gesture of protest, then, today's column is dedicated to recent albums that require time and attention — or time and distraction, but certainly time.

September 28, 2012 – Some Freaking Velvety Acid? Somewhat Fungible and Variable Acid? Stealthy Far-out Voluptuous Acid? We could keep playing this game all day, but the "SFV" in Zane Reynolds' alias is actually pretty prosaic: San Fernando Valley, our hero's home stomping grounds. Reynolds' new EP for New York's UNO label, however, is anything but prosaic.

September 27, 2012 – Stockholm's Roll the Dice make futuristic electronic music with a decidedly old-world flair — something you might have guessed from press photos that depict the duo garbed in 19th-century work-wear and soaked head-to-toe in oil. Consider them the Stockholm techno scene's answer to There Will Be Blood. Their invocation of manual labor is no mere shtick, either: If you've seen them play live, you know that members Malcolm Pardon and Peder Mannerfelt (a.k.a. Fever Ray and Glasser co-producer the Subliminal Kid) are all about getting their hands dirty. No space-bar pantomiming here: Just hardware synthesizers, step sequencers, and overdriven Rhodes piano spewing intractable geysers of viscous tone.To coincide with a new EP, Roll the Dice Meets Pole – In Dubs, the Leaf label has commissioned a new video for "Cause and Effect," a stately, seven-minute epic from their 2011 album In Dust.

September 26, 2012 – New York's Midnight Magic made their debut in 2010 with "Beam Me Up" (Permanent Vacation), a buoyant, joyful indie-disco number that still hasn't worn out its welcome on dance floors, thanks to the dizzying interplay between octave-jumping bass, judicious horn charts, and Tiffany Roth's unstoppable vocal presence. On "Diamonds," off the band's forthcoming debut album, Walking the Midnight Streets, it sounds like they're still soaring through the upper atmosphere. Untethered from disco's four-to-the-floor pulse, the nine-piece New York group of DFA alumnae rides aloft a breezy synthesizer melody and swirls of dub delay; Roth can still belt it out, but there's a newfound softness to her melismatic attack that fleetingly recalls Children of God-era Jarboe.

September 24, 2012 – Dance music's dirty little secret is that watching other people dancing can actually be pretty weird, if not downright unsettling. Bryan Black plays up the creepiness factor in the video for his new single "Black Acid," released under his Black Asteroid alias on Speedy J's Electric Deluxe imprint. Dressed in flowing pieces by the Ukrainian designer Anna October, fashion model Nadya Shapoval writhes and flails like an antic snowflake (or an arctic chicken), smoke leaking from her mouth as though there were something broken inside. There's a weird power dynamic playing out here: Shapoval, looking confrontational and more than a little unhinged, seems like she's trying to short-circuit dance music's voyeuristic impulses, shooting down prying looks with a dead-eyed glare.

September 24, 2012 – Brodinski and his Bromance label got a shout-out from an unexpected place recently, when a certain DJ Mosey told Mr. Porter that his tastes leaned towards "French artists who haven't made it abroad yet, such as Gesaffelstein and the scene from Reims: Yuksek and Brodinski." Unexpected, first, because Mr. Porter is a men's luxury retailer of brands like Balmain, Lanvin, and Maison Martin Margiela, rather than a dance-music website.

September 21, 2012 – After a short break, the Control Voltage Friday Five is back! Appropriately, today's selection is all about letting off pent-up energy, from Blawan's sly sadism to Theo Parrish's total percussive meltdown. This week's roundup is roughly 40 percent "bass music," 20 percent techno, 20 percent post-colonial electronic fusion, and 20 percent apocalypse on wax — par for 2012's course, in other words.Blawan, "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?" (Hinge Finger) Hinge Finger? More like Unhinged Finger. The third release from Joy Orbison and Will Bankhead's gleefully contrarian imprint finds Blawan sounding flat-out deranged. Plenty of producers lately have tried to inject a bit of industrial menace into techno, to mixed results.

September 20, 2012 – Four Tet has been spending most of his time on the dance floor lately, from his DJ gigs at venues like Fabric and Creamfields to the chunky, percussive output of his Text Records label. (He recently collected eight of Text's throbbingest cuts on his latest album, Pink; read our review here.) But even dyed-in-the-wool rug cutters need their snuggle time, as he suggests on his new remix of the xx's "Angels."The remix premiered on BBC Radio One last night following the British trio's performance alongside the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and now FACT comes through with the radio rip, via Beats Per Minute. Accentuating the lullaby-like quality of the original, Hebden steers clear of the broken-beat house and techno of his recent singles and instead hones in on Romy Madley Croft's limpid voice, framing it in faraway bleeps and rustling, incidental rhythms.

September 19, 2012 – A first encounter with the music of Disclosure is enough to make you wonder if it's 2000 all over again, given the way they sling bump-and-flex 2-step rhythms peppered with jewel-toned vocal snippets and diamond-tipped rimshots. There's a lot of old-school U.K. garage going around at the moment, but Disclosure often sound particularly, uncannily, like the second coming of MJ Cole or the Artful Dodger. Never mind that brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence were still in grade-school short pants during garage's heyday.Disclosure aren't merely revivalists, however. What's impressive about their music isn't so much its fealty to golden-age 2-step—its re-re-rewind, if you will—but the finesse they bring to their productions, suggesting the chops of far more experienced producers.