January 29, 2013 – Any good scholar of dance music can tell you that its history is a dialectical one — an interplay between experimental techniques and visceral immediacy, between mind-bending sonics and floor-filling functionalism — and few artists have navigated that balancing act better than Matthew Herbert. While he is best known, these days, for politically charged projects like One Pig — an investigation of sustainable agriculture and industrial agribusiness that derived all of its sounds from the life cycle of a single pig — the British musician has also been responsible for some of dance music's most enduring classics, as well as some of the most gratifying long-players in house music (a genre not often conducive to the full-length format).A forthcoming boxset, to be released March 4, will offer a comprehensive overview of Herbert's avant-garde club music.

January 28, 2013 – "Without a Plan" is the second single from Lusine's upcoming album, The Waiting Room, and it's tempting to think that the song's title might just be autobiographical. While the Seattle musician's career has hardly been rudderless, neither has it ever seemed particularly calculated. Instead, across eight studio albums and a slew of EPs, Lusine (Jeff McIlwain) has allowed his sound to develop with an almost naturalistic ease. As the intricately detailed glitch techno of his early years has morphed into the lush, richly textured sound of 2009's A Certain Distance and this year's follow-up, he has revealed a canny pop sensibility that lurked just beneath the surface all along.

January 28, 2013 – They bring together members of Antibalas, the Phenomenal Handclap Band, and TV on the Radio; their music joins buoyant call-and-response harmonies, rippling highlife-inspired guitar leads, !!!'s muscular funk-punk, and the spirited pulses of Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Their name is Superhuman Happiness, because they are many — and because, really, what other name could approximate this kind of ragged, rootsy joy?Led by saxophonist Stuart Bogie — a core member of Antibalas, as well as a contributor in TVOTR, a close collaborator of Dave Sitek, and a soloist in Bill T. Jones' Broadway musical Fela! — Superhuman Happiness brings together a powerhouse lineup of seasoned players: guitarists Luke O'Malley and Ryan Ferreira, bassist Nikhil Yerawadekar, drummer Miles Arntzen, keyboardist Jared Samuel, trumpeter Eric Biondo, and baritone sax heavyweight Colin Stetson.

January 25, 2013 – Heartbeats quickened this week when a 30-second snippet of the Knife's new single, "Full of Fire," surfaced online; then, hearts sank just as quickly when those samples promptly disappeared. But the full nine-plus minutes of the thing are now available to hear in all their fiery glory in an unexpected — and NSFW — video. (Hat tip to Swedish site SVT Play for having it first.)The clip comes courtesy of "feminist porn" director Marit Östberg (click at your own risk) and features all kinds of atypical sexual scenarios being played out in public spaces. An elderly woman dresses up like a man then goes trolling; a middle-aged woman urinates in the street through her stockings; leather-clad lads in colorful makeup have a tryst; so do some biker girls in bondage; romance emerges between a protesting punk and a member of law enforcement.

January 25, 2013 – Putting together this week's roundup got a lot harder once I heard the news about DJ Koze's new album, Amygdala, a 78-minute opus featuring contributions from Caribou, Apparat, and Matthew Dear, and described as the German producer's Sgt. Pepper. Setting it aside until I finished writing this column has been difficult, to say the least, and I'm narrowly resisting the impulse to live-tweet it right here. (8:03: Wiped another string of drool off my keyboard.) So while I go listen to that, I'll leave you with this week's essential listening.

January 23, 2013 – With a booking policy neatly balanced between indie heavyweights, alt-rock elders, and experimental outsiders, Barcelona's Primavera Festival has developed into one of Europe's most respected festivals, something like a cross between Coachella (without, hurrah, the superfluous EDM) and ATP (without, alas, the chalets). Its profile has gotten to the point that this year, rumored lineup "leaks"— all of them fake — zipped across social media, weeks in advance of any official announcement.Primavera, it seems, can afford to tease its fans. A clock on the festival's website has been counting down to today's unveiling of the lineup, and at 7:30 p.m., local time, Internet users were treated to a lengthy press conference complete with Antony Hegarty impersonations and a series of comedy sketches about style mavens in hipster rehab.

January 23, 2013 – Call it an arcade fire sale: iconic video game maker Atari is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reports Forbes. That could mean that the troubled company is just about out of bonus lives, even though a press release from Atari Inc. stresses that the relief petition seeks to save the company "from the structural financial encumbrances of their French parent holding company… and secure independent capital for future growth."Despite the lasting impact of games like Pong, Asteroids, and Centipede — not to mention cult classics like Yar's Revenge — Atari was always best known as a maker of consoles. Perhaps for that reason, samples of Atari products turn up far less frequently in popular music, unlike Midway's Pac Man franchise or Taito's Space Invaders.

January 22, 2013 – Boddika and Joy Orbison spent 2012 turning out some of U.K. club music's most sought-after tracks on the vinyl-only SunkLo label; now they've got a date with destiny. "&Fate," the duo's latest collaboration, is due out on February 25 as a part of Think and Change, a new compilation on Boddika's Nonplus label. Judging from the four-minute preview just posted to SoundCloud, the two producers have further refined their particular brand of grudging, screw-faced endorphine rush.A long intro piles loops upon loops, teasing the filters and tickling the synapses while steadfastly refusing any kind of release. Then, bam: The tune kicks off in earnest, with nervous triplet arpeggios throwing elbows over a jacking house groove, and a moody vocal sample adding just the right amount of warmth.

January 21, 2013 – London's Disclosure got their start as precocious U.K. garage revivalists — the young brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence were still in grade school when the effervescent style of club music was at its peak, back around the turn of the millennium — but they've quickly made it clear that they're no mere nostalgia act. Following the thoroughly modern electro pop of their last single, the Sam Smith-fronted "Latch," the brothers are back with "White Noise," a sprightly, sparkly, satisfyingly now-sounding house anthem fronted with chirpy aplomb by AlunaGeorge's Aluna Francis.

January 18, 2013 – After a few weeks of loosely themed columns, this week's Friday Five goes back to the grab-bag approach. Out of the untold hours of promos, purchases, and SoundCloud surfing that constitute my listening every week, these five records jumped out. If you were to look for a common theme, you could say that most of them have a certain ruggedness to them: They're tough, bumptious, full-on — sometimes a little surly, sometimes sunshine-besotted.Grown Folk "The Boat" / "Keep Few Near" (Icee Hot) San Francisco's Icee Hot party takes a catholic approach to dance music; their guests have run from Jeff Mills and DJ Stingray to MK and Todd Edwards to Ben UFO and Oneman. The Icee Hot label seems determined to keep things similarly varied.