February 11, 2013 – I never thought I'd say this, but, as far as electronic dance music is concerned, last night's Grammys were actually the best possible scenario. (Okay, that's a lie. The best possible scenario would have been a full-scale military invasion by Liechtenstein, with stormtrooper ninjas shimmying down ropes in the Staples Center while Al Walser shot lasers from his fingertips, chanting, "I am the mouse that roared!")But within the realm of actual possibility, it really couldn't have gone any better. Skrillex won everything. Everything! His "Bangarang" won Best Dance Recording. His Bangarang won Best Dance/Electronica Album (even though I'm pretty sure it's technically an EP, but who cares?).

February 11, 2013 – If you've got a pair of 3D glasses lying around the house somewhere, left over from Avatar or The Hobbit or Top Gun or whatever, put 'em on now. Australia's PVT have pulled out all the stops for their new video for the single "Vertigo" — a claustrophobic but motion-filled clip that's been shot in glorious, stereoscopic red-and-blue. Oh, and if you've got a spare Dramamine lying around, now would be a good time to fish it out of your duffel bag as well. The video might begin calmly enough — indeed, you may at first find yourself wondering why they bothered shooting in 3D at all, given the five-foot depth of field and egregious lack of projectile effects — but the genius of their take on the trope is the way it sneaks up on you.

February 8, 2013 – Autechre's latest album, Exai, unexpectedly appeared for sale on Bleep and iTunes today, nearly a month before its previously announced release date; call it the m b v effect, maximizing listeners' attention by catching them off guard. I'm exaggerating — I doubt that Booth and Brown actually decided to unleash their new LP early because of anything that Kevin Shields did. (For one thing, it's only been three years since the last Autechre album, so there's really no competition there; if you average m b v's running time over the long span since Loveless, it took My Bloody Valentine that long to come up with just six minutes' worth of their new opus. Autechre can write whole new synthesis platforms in the time it takes My Bloody Valentine to change chords.)But m b v's impromptu online release party had me thinking of Autechre anyway.

February 7, 2013 – As club culture migrates online, thanks to DJ mixes posted to SoundCloud and real-time streaming venues like Boiler Room, technology has enabled clubbers unprecedented access to information about the music being played. Gone are the days when DJs could keep their music secret by spinning white labels (or even covering their records' center stickers with fake labels, as dancehall's competitive selectors once did).

February 6, 2013 – "Stupid is spreading."That was Pasquale Rotella's response to a recent Los Angeles Times article detailing 12 drug-related deaths of attendees, many of them previously unreported, at electronic-dance-music festivals and concerts produced by his company Insomniac Events between 2006 and 2012. Two more deaths were linked to events produced by Reza Gerami's Go Ventures, the other Los Angeles promoter who came under the Times reporters' scrutiny.The Times' investigation was based on coroner reports from jurisdictions in several states where the two promoters held a combined 64 events since 2006.

February 6, 2013 – The nu-disco dream-weaver Sorcerer is back with his first release in over three years, and he sounds as spellbinding as ever. Sorcerer is the solo alias of San Francisco's Dan Judd, a member of the sun-kissed duo Windsurf (with Hatchback, a.k.a. Sam Grawe) and the equally atmospheric space-disco group Shock (with Michael Taras and Rubies' Teri Lowenthal, Judd's former bandmate in Call and Response). Last we heard from Sorcerer, he was taking the whole "desert island discs" concept literally: 2010's Neon Leon (Tirk) sounded like the work of a guy left marooned with a stack of Jan Hammer, Alan Parsons Project, and Giorgio Moroder records (or, alternately, Tom Hanks drawing smiley faces on a disco ball).On his new EP for Diskotopia's A Kind of Presence sub-label, Judd sticks with the Balearic message-in-a-bottle theme.

February 6, 2013 – Who: Born and raised in South Africa, New York resident Jean-Philip Grobler is the creative force behind St. Lucia, a solo studio project and five-piece live band whose billowy textures and soaring choruses offer a potent elixir of tropical breezes and distilled sunshine. Grobler credits a youth spent performing in the Drakensberg Boys Choir ("South Africa's singing ambassadors") with the development of his lush, polyphonic esprit: "I assume that had something to do with it; learning classical theory and being surrounded by contrapuntal music made me feel like I needed to make something that's multi-layered. But that's not the only thing that I do. In the future, there might be some stuff that's a bit simpler."Sheltered No More: St.

February 5, 2013 – When it comes to the German musician Ulrich Schnauss' recorded output, the term "oeuvre" seems particularly apt. The three albums he recorded between 2001 and 2007 — Far Away Trains Passing by, A Strangely Isolated Place, and Goodbye — are designed less for listening to than for crawling inside, like nests woven together from twigs of shoegaze, swatches of Kompakt's ambient pop, and shimmering threads plucked from the Cocteau Twins' ethereal spool.The title of his last solo album marked the artist's move from Berlin to London; in retrospect, it also seems to have been a way of saying farewell to the style he had spent six years fine-tuning. Six years after Goodbye, Schnauss finally returns with a new solo album, and while it's impossible not to hear his signature in its gossamer textures, A Long Way to Fall represents a subtle but significant shift in his approach.

February 5, 2013 – America is experiencing a renaissance in homegrown house music right now. Pockets of classically minded, craft-obsessed producers are cropping up all across the country: New York's Steve Summers and the rest of the L.I.E.S. crew, D.C.'s Maxmillion Dunbar and his Future Times label, Pittsburgh's Pittsburgh House Authority, and Los Angeles' SFV Acid are all emerging as key nodes in a thriving network of DIY producers and labels. Now Oakland comes online with a fantastic new EP from Glenn Jackson, an East Bay producer and promoter (as well as a blogger and XLR8R contributor). The three tracks on Jackson's Morning Swim EP are awash in lush textures and limpid color: The record runs the gamut from heavy-lidded piano jams to sprightly, R&B-inspired cuts fleshed out with congas and spine-tingling digital synths.

February 4, 2013 – It's beginning to look like "global weirding" — an alternate term for global warming that emphasizes the increasingly erratic nature of weather events — isn't just about climate change; in 2013, the music industry just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. Bowie snuck out a new single without any advance notice; then Prince managed the same, on the internet at that; and then, holy smokes, Kevin Shields stepped up with a new My Bloody Valentine album.