June 27, 2012 – Earlier this month, the media baron Robert F.X. Sillerman made waves in the electronic dance music scene when the New York Times reported his plans to spend $1 billion buying up local and regional dance-music promoters in the effort to create an entertainment behemoth to rival Live Nation, a company formed out of Sillerman's previous holdings. But he'd better act fast: Live Nation seems determined to snap up the goods first.

June 27, 2012 – Speaking affectionately here, but acid house might be something like the cockroach of dance music: You just can't kill it. Long after nukes have turned the earth's surface to glass, and/or the Cloud and our post-Singularity selves are wiped out by a sloppy bit of coding by the Tyrell Corporation, acid house's trademark gurgle and snap will just keep skittering along, mutant as ever. Despite electronic music's supposedly futurist bent, acid house revivals have been cropping up practically since the molten eruption of a TB-303 first hit the ground and began to cool, and they have kept recurring as regularly as 4/4 kick drums. Uwe Schmidt, a.k.a.

June 26, 2012 – One of the great things about Detroit techno is the way it has spawned sister-city scenes across the world. Berlin and Amsterdam are the most notable, but Vienna also has been an outpost for Motor City styles, especially when it comes to twitchy, live-wire electro. In the late 1990s, the cities felt connected as if by a transatlantic aquabahn, as Detroit labels like Adult.'s Ersatz Audio and Ectomorph's Interdimensional Transmissions traded artists and ideas with Vienna's Sabotage and Craft imprints. It was through that nexus that I discovered Austria's Epy, back around '97-'98, but I should hasten to add that Epy have never been strictly an electro-revivalist act.

June 25, 2012 – Signs of the EDMocalypse? Late Friday night, Deadmau5 opened up Pandora's Serato box with a Tumblr post entitled "We All Hit Play," in which he alleged that dance music's top-billed acts (himself included) do more pantomiming than actual performing onstage. The next day, Swedish House Mafia apparently called it quits, posting this message to their website: "Today we want to share with you, that the tour we are about to go on will be our last. We want to thank every single one of you that came with us on this journey. We came, we raved, we loved." Coincidence? Did the Mau5 get the Swedes' goat? After all, the Swedish House Mafia are favorite targets of EDM's skeptics, given the disproportionate balance between grandstanding and hands-on mixing that tends to characterize their sets.

June 21, 2012 – "Anthem" is a funny word. In dance music, there's hardly any higher praise; it signifies the elevation of a song to something nearing universality — a social fact. But in the more traditional sense of the word, anthems are awkward, embarrassing things; at worst, they're propaganda; more often, simply pompous. (Who actually enjoys singing the American national anthem?) But perhaps that's partly the point: Anthems, by definition, preach to the converted; the same people going apeshit for Avicii's "Levels" aren't likely the ones drooling over Julio Bashmore's "Battle for Middle You," and vice versa. All five of this week's selections play, in one way or another, with epic scale and anthemic status, but they do so from a position of ambivalence.

June 20, 2012 – Exactly what kind of cheese has Deadmau5 been nibbling lately? One wonders if it's laced with some kind of lysergic fungus, given the warped, woozy sound of the latest release from his Mau5trap imprint, Foreign Beggars' "Flying to Mars." This isn't the sound you might have expected from the label: For one thing, it's dubstep, and for another, it's a world away from the buzzing, zapping laser maelstroms of Skrillex, who got his own start on Mau5trap. Working alongside drum and bass producer Alix Perez, Foreign Beggars take their wobble back underground: The low end is a gelatinous rumble more felt than heard, freed from all the hard-edged excess of contemporary main-stage dubstep. MCs Orifice Vulgatron and Metropolis' tightly wound verses lend to the paranoid air, while the British crooner and U.K.

June 19, 2012 – Someday, when we're all dead and buried, anthropologists will puzzle over the mysteries of our generation — opaque conundrums like Dorito taco shells, drop-crotch jeans and, particularly, the fact that Sandro Perri's 2011 album Impossible Spaces (Constellation Records) went so bizarrely unheralded in its own time. Perhaps I'm being hyperbolic: The Toronto musician's third album did, in fact, make it to No. 117 on the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop music critics' poll, like a bright, shiny jewel tucked between the blackened husks of Mogwai's Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will and Tombs' Path of Totality. Still, it hardly made the splash it deserved, given the record's effortless musicality, stunning electro-acoustic production and suggestive references to Arthur Russell, the Sea and Cake and Balearic soft rock. There's still a chance to rectify the neglect, however.

June 18, 2012 – In case you thought the whole EDM-as-pop-on-steroids thing was a uniquely North American phenomenon, think again: Dance music's mainstream U.S. breakout is also changing the shape of the scene in Europe — even in Spain, a country whose fans traditionally have shown a preference for harder, more uncompromising, and more underground sounds (and where, it must be said, dance music has been more or less mainstream, anyway). The first sign of the shift was David Guetta's appearance last summer at Monegros, a desert festival that has served as a showcase for techno at its toughest.

June 15, 2012 – Of all the lumpy cardboard mailers that the postman brings (with increasing, and distressing, infrequency, I might add), few get me quite as excited as those from New York's Golf Channel Recordings. Helmed by Phil South, a Brit long since established in Brooklyn, Golf Channel just keeps keepin' on as though nothing in the music business had changed in the past 10 (or even 20) years. Founded in 2007 with the release of Mark E's now classic "R+B Drunkie," a slow-mo house refix of Janet Jackson's "R&B Junkie," the label is resolutely vinyl-only, eschews press releases ("I leave that to the pros! Or the annoying people, depending on your point of view," South told me), and puts out records only when the time is right.

June 13, 2012 – Musical systems are so intuitive (just ask Bobby McFerrin) that we tend to think of them as natural — innate, hard-wired, as elemental as the tides and the stars. And, indeed, the science of music, in which any sound can be broken down to its composite waveforms, each humming at a given number of cycles per second, would seem to reinforce that gut feeling: Sound, after all, abides by the laws of physics. But what Western listeners assume as "natural" is, of course, conditioned by culture. Our preference for regal triads and perfect fifths has less to do with the laws of nature than our own assumptions about symmetry and harmony — and anyway, those categories are hardly as fixed as we might think: Western systems of tuning have shifted dramatically, multiple times, over the past 600 years, according to religious dictate, scientific research, and aesthetic choice.