July 25, 2012 – Matmos, the Baltimore-based duo of brainiac multi-taskers Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, are planning to release a new EP, The Ganzfeld, on a new label, Thrill Jockey, in October. And in typically high-minded Matmos fashion, the pair will base the music on experiments in psychic research and feature a remix from the mysterious Bay Area techno producer Rrose; an album, The Marriage of True Minds, will follow in early 2013. Their new home at Thrill Jockey, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, coincidentally marks a new chapter in the 20-year partnership of Daniel and Schmidt. Four years have passed since their last major album; in the intervening years, they have turned their efforts largely towards academic and art-world pursuits, and the new EP suggests an interest in wrapping up all of their disparate interests into sprawling, but pleasure-filled, art pop.

July 24, 2012 – Four Tet's Kieran Hebden has kept vinyl buyers busy over the past year with a steady stream of releases on his Text Records label. In just the past few months, he's put out two new Four Tet 12-inches, "Jupiters"/"Ocoras," "128 Harps," plus a third collaboration with Burial, the single-sided "Nova," which followed 2009's joint effort "Moth"/"Wolf Cub" and last year's "Ego"/"Mirror," featuring Burial and Thom Yorke. Today, Hebden unveiled the next Text release on his SoundCloud account: "Bird Songs," a percussive, broken-beat techno jam credited to an artist known simply as Percussions. Whoever Percussions is, all signs point to Hebden's involvement: Both the title and chirpy sound effects recall Four Tet's "Conference of the Birds" DJ mix from April, and the deconstructed tribal rhythms have Hebden's fingerprints all over them.

July 20, 2012 – America hasn't produced many viable electronic-music scenes in the past decade or so — that is, local or regional communities with their own sound, like Chicago house or Detroit techno in the 1980s and 1990s. There are some, sure, but not really to the extent that the rest of the world has served up localized interpretations of a specific sound. But maybe there's a silver lining there. Isolation can also breed creativity, and even in an era when the internet has supposedly made place irrelevant, distance from cultural hubs can lead to productive misinterpretations. In the past few weeks, I've been struck by a number of albums by American artists that use certain canonical styles of techno as jumping-off points for more idiosyncratic investigations.

July 17, 2012 – With rockers from Tommy Lee to Korn's Jonathan Davis dabbling in electronic music, it's not that surprising that Flea has a little sideline in beatmaking himself. However, given that the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist is working alongside Radiohead's Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich in the cyber-supergroup Atoms for Peace, it's a no-brainer that their output is a damn sight more cerebral than what his hammier, EDM-ier peers have come up with. Atoms for Peace isn't actually a new thing — the band came together in 2009 to perform Yorke's The Eraser album in Los Angeles, and then toured the U.S. in 2010 — but until now, there's been scant recorded evidence. Finally, in August, Modeselektor's 50 Weapons imprint will release the group's debut.

July 17, 2012 – New York's DFA label seems to be feeling generous. (Perhaps that's a positive side effect of the aimlessness that label founder James Murphy is reported to be experiencing, according to a recent New York Times profile by SPIN contributor Zach Baron.) This week, DFA released a limited-edition 12-inch of remixes of the Rapture's "Children," and today, they're giving away the Darkstarr "Diskotek Remix" for free. Darkstarr is the duo of British house veteran Ashley Beedle and Bitches Brew label head Colleen Murphy, and their rework hones in on bass, drums and wide-open space in the fashion of classic disco edits; fleshed out with marimbas and shaded in pastels, it's got summer written all over it.

July 16, 2012 – Dubstep continues its Borg-like assimilation of all music ever with Flinch's new single, "Underwater," released this week on Scion A/V. The dulcet vocals come from Kylee Swenson, best known as the singer of mild-mannered San Francisco indie poppers Loquat. She's hardly a vocalist you would have associated with the rave-tested mayhem we've come to expect from Flinch (Adam Glassco), a Los Angeles producer who records for SMOG and Trouble & Bass. She holds her own, adding a human touch to the song's enormous slabs of crystal and steel, but Flinch's grinding mid-range riffs leave no doubt as to the winner in the coming war against the machines. The free, five-track EP is out Tuesday, July 17; it joins digital releases from the likes of Moodymann, 12th Planet, and Dave Nada in Scion A/V's growing catalog.

July 16, 2012 – Barbarella has long served as a source of inspiration for musicians: Duran Duran, Matmos, even trance legends Sven Väth and Ralf Hildenbeutel, who assumed the alias Barbarella for a series of records in the early 1990s. The latest artist to fall under the spell of the camp classic is London's Ben Ash, a.k.a. Two Inch Punch. The video for his new single "Moonstruck" artfully manipulates footage from the 1968 sci-fi sex comedy into an oddly synaesthetic complement to Two Inch Punch's own brand of exaltation transference. "Moonstruck" is out today as part of Saturn: The Slow Jams, a five-track EP released on London's PMR label, which released Two Inch Punch's Love You Up EP last year. With a pneumatic sound that incorporates James Blake's sprightly tunefulness and cloud rap's vaporous textures, Ash is right at home among label-mates like Jessie Ware and L-Vis 1990.

July 13, 2012 – With the year dipping down past the half-empty mark, I'm taking a page from No Trivia's book to compile what he termed "a glorified list of my favorite songs" for the first half of 2012. I had hoped to be somewhat objective, balancing criteria like forward-thinkingness with sheer sonic thrills, but at the end of the day, this list is far more about me than it is the State of Dance Music in 2012. There are few big sellers here; my list doesn't include many of the top-charted tracks on Beatport, Resident Advisor, or any of the other arbiters of dance-music consensus (much less Billboard's "Dance/Club Play" chart). You won't find much conventional tech-house, or dubstep, or electro-house, or trance; for the most part, the tracks here tend to live in the cracks between scenes and sounds. They're mostly a bit rough around the edges; their euphoria has a nail-bitten weariness to it.

July 12, 2012 – One benefit of Ricardo Villalobos refusing to set foot in the United States for so many years is that it allowed plenty of time for Stateside producers to form their own impressions of his squirrelly, spiraling groove fantasias (and the kinds of dropped-jaw reaction they inspire) without ever actually catching the minimal maestro in person.

July 11, 2012 – He may be called Oneman, but his tastes are legion: dubstep, hip-hop, grime, U.K. funky, garage, all tussling and tumbling over one another. In contrast to the linear, single-tempo mixes that are the norm from most DJs, Oneman's sets are like many-vectored tugs-of-war played out over constantly shifting terrain — a group sport as choreographed by MC Escher. In his sets at clubs like London's DMZ, FWD, and Fabric, and in his Sunday-night broadcasts on Rinse FM, Oneman (Steve Bishop) has earned a reputation as one of the most versatile selectors in dance music. All the hand-wringing about DJs just pushing play, or just playing the same 10 pop-dance crossover hits as everyone else — that doesn't apply to him. Even within the dubstep scene, he's known for having deeper crates than most, and for his willingness to span decades in the course of a single set.