May 25, 2012 – While Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber is handing out a Best New Music badge to dance-pop superstar Avicii — prompting speculation that May 24 is the new April 1, and triggering, in the process, a minor meltdown on the site's Facebook page — I'm dedicating today's column to the underground, with left-field selections from Detroit's Andrés, Border Community hypno-techno wizard Nathan Fake, the Swedish outfit WRD, and the mysterious Dublin producer known as B.D.I. Plus, for good measure, the soundtrack to Mark Leckey's mind-bending 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which says more about the spirit of rave in a single looped frame than Avicii could manage with an entire battery of crystal-faceted rave stabs. That's not just for the sake of being "underground," mind you.

May 23, 2012 – While mainstream EDM is increasingly driven by soft-synth presets and pre-packaged loops, a funny thing is happening on electronic music's fringes, as a growing number of musicians immerse themselves in the deeply analog, resolutely DIY world of modular synthesis. Now, a New York festival called Source of Uncertainty will celebrate modular culture with a trade show, the Control Voltage Faire, designed to bring together artists, enthusiasts and developers of the esoteric, recombinant analog devices.

May 23, 2012 – The Montreal musician d'Eon describes his forthcoming debut LP, an "oratorio in four movements," as an appeal to the Archangel Gabriel, but you might detect the influence of another Gabriel as well: Peter Gabriel (who's going on tour this fall!).

May 22, 2012 – Writing in The Wire in 2009, David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop" — "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory" — to describe artists like James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never, who channel psychedelic tendencies through cultural memory. He was talking principally about a particular form of nostalgia; mapping the concept to the interzone between sleeping and wakefulness was purely metaphorical. ("Hypnagogic realms are the ones between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams.") But what if you could actually create music in a hypnagogic state, the way some writers keep dream journals? In fact, that's precisely the way that the Winnipeg producer Aaron Funk recorded his new album, Sleep, released on Planet Mu under his Last Step alias.

May 21, 2012 – It's been a good while since the Chilean-German techno shaman Ricardo Villalobos has released any new solo work. After 2007's Fabric 36, a seamless mix of all original material, and the following year's spate of releases — two EPs and an album for Perlon and, on his own Sei Es Drum label, "Enfants," a 17-minute, choir-sampling epic that became a runaway underground hit — it seems like the creative well dried up for a while. It's true that last year he teamed up with Max Loderbauer for Re: ECM, a double-CD set of remixes of the iconic jazz and new-music label; this year the pair released a similar set of reinterpretations of Conrad Schnitzler. And Villalobos has kept up a fairly steady stream of remixes for artists like DJ Sneak, San Proper, and Tobias., with one rework even landing him, however improbably, on the DFA label.

May 18, 2012 – Thirty-two years ago today, I sat on the roof of our house and watched a plume of ash rise 80,000 feet in the air above Mount St. Helens, whose newly reduced dome, some 70 miles away, peeked above the trees at the end of our street. The volcano had been simmering for months, but this was the Big One: a 24-megaton explosion that obliterated nearly a sixth of the mountain's volume, vaporized Spirit Lake and reduced 230 square miles of forest to rubble. Naturally, being 9 years old, I was over the moon. Of course, I sympathized with the victims and their families. But that didn't stand in the way of finding the eruption thrilling: this was history happening — geological history — practically right in my backyard. Which, pretty soon, took on a literal truth as well, as ash began drifting down like a lackluster snowfall, carpeting the grass with a thin, grey film.

May 18, 2012 – If, over the weekend, you should decide to listen to anything other than Donna Summer — which, honestly, little chance, but just in case — you could do worse than to turn to Marcus Lambkin, otherwise known as Shit Robot. With his rubbery arpeggios and silky leads, Lambkin's work is unthinkable without Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer's robo-disco template, and it pays heartfelt tribute to their carefully forged Munich sound. His new single for DFA is his first new music since 2010's From the Cradle to the Rave, and it finds the Irish producer in loose, limber form.

May 17, 2012 – Since 2009, London's Never Say Die label has built its Technicolor terrorcore empire one laser-cut breakbeat at a time, assembling a roster of grime, dubstep and drum-and-bass miscreants like Foreign Beggars, Dodge & Fuski, and Zomboy. Now they celebrate their reign with the label's first compilation, a double-disc extravaganza featuring exclusive cuts from Dodge & Fuski, Zomboy, Skeptiks, SKisM feat.

May 17, 2012 – Seventeen years ago, Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) began his career as a breakbeat gadfly, chopping up jungle with Jaco Pastorius into a style known briefly as "drill 'n' bass" (or, better still, "weirdy-beardy"). Since then, across a dozen albums, he has established himself as one of electronic music's least predictable musicians, capable of infectious 2-step garage, sepulchral ambient, molecular breakbeat science and even an entire album of solo electric bass. Fair-weather fans might snicker, "Spinal Tap Mark II performs Jazz Odyssey," but anyone who really knows Squarepusher — a gauntlet he threw down with 2002's Do You Know Squarepusher — recognizes that there's a method to his madness. Jenkinson is famous for meticulously constructed rhythms and audacious, even alienating, stylistic shifts, and both qualities are readily apparent in a conversation with him.

May 14, 2012 – Exercises, a new mini-album by the Montreal musician CFCF (Mike Silver) for Toronto's Paper Bag Records, is a masterpiece of restraint. With stately piano melodies informed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and judiciously applied synthesizers that convey a subtle touch of the cosmic, it's one of the most limpid recordings I've heard lately. So it's ironic that Skype decided to act up during my interview with Silver, turning his voice into a garbled robot mess; it sounded a little like the VoIP pipes had been infected by a malignant strain of mutant Auto-Tune.