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.

January 16, 2013 – Last week, the New York Times reported that the Finnish phone maker Nokia's fortunes are finally turning around, and this week, the Finnish duo Renaissance Man premiere another cut from their Call2Call EP on Turbo, which finagles telephonic bleep and buzz into six emphatically funky club cuts with an impressive signal-to-noise ratio. Coincidence, or a suggestion of insider shenanigans?We'll leave that up to the SEC, but there's no doubt about the record's potential to move butts, if not markets, fusing as it does the hair-raising analog frequencies of electro revivalists like Dopplereffekt and i-F with Neptunes-inspired clicks and clatter. "We're both big electro fans since a long time," explains Renaissance Man's Ville Haimala, "and it felt it was the right time to finally write stuff like that. We wanted to take our music back to the club after the less clubby album.

January 15, 2013 – Is 2013 going to be the year of stealth mode? First David Bowie sneaked out a new single — his first new music in a decade — with no advance notice, neatly sidestepping the music industry's dreadfully boring controlled-leak model (in which details as to cover art, featured cameos, and tracklistings are treated as major news events, and every announcement merits its own pre-announcement).Now Four Tet (Kieran Hebden) has up and dropped a brand-new album on an unsuspecting public. Early this morning, Hebden tweeted, "I am going to release a new Four Tet LP today"; an hour later, the object in question, 0181, was up on SoundCloud, and for free download at that.The 38-minute mini-album contains previously unreleased material produced between 1997 and 2001 — that is, from two years before Four Tet's debut LP, Dialogue, until the year of its follow-up, Pause.

January 14, 2013 – After teaming up to edit Lindstrøm's Smalhans in 2012, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Todd Terje will officially join forces this summer with a collaborative live set at Melt!, Nuits Sonores, Sónar, and other festivals still to be confirmed. To inaugurate their partnership, the two Norwegian musicians get a jump on summer with "Lanzarote," a new single that pays tribute to a popular Canary Islands getaway for sunburned Scandinavians.Flush with Terje's trademark arpeggios and Lindstrøm's knack for chunky disco grooves, the tune brings out the best qualities of both producers, as they daub spangles on top of sequins to come up with what will surely be one of the season's most unabashedly feel-good anthems. The rolled rs of the voiceover outro — "I want to go to Gran Canarrria!

January 14, 2013 – Today Kompakt announced new remixes of Justus Köhncke's 2004 classic "Timecode," which find hip-house pioneer Tyree Cooper and Swedish house miscreant Axel Boman injecting fresh energy into the perennial crowd-pleaser.Originally included on Köhncke's Zwei Photonen EP, "Timecode" represents a perfect balance of the Cologne musician's divergent tendencies. Reduced to the bare essentials — rock-steady drum groove, flashing synth vamps, and, above all, that unforgettable bass line — it's simultaneously a study in dance-floor economy and a sly nod to disco populism. (If the tune gives you déjà vu, it's not just you: The bass line quotes liberally from Lipps, Inc.'s "How Long.") Köhncke has always been a poptimist: His debut album, 1999's Spiralen der Erinnerung, covered Carole King, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Webb, and Janis Ian.

January 11, 2013 – I still remember the day I first heard Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, in a record store in Portland, Oregon. It was 1985, I was 14 years old, and I had never heard music that sounded simultaneously so sweet and so fucked-up. I asked the clerk if the store's speakers were broken. I no longer recall exactly what he said in reply, but I'll never forget the look he gave me; it was as though he had summoned every last iota of condescension in the universe and focused it on me in a single, laser-like beam.Naturally, I bought the cassette, and not only out of a sense of shame. What I learned that day is that, done right, there's nothing better than music that sounds wrong.

January 11, 2013 – Never mind what Homer Simpson thinks; democracy works! And for once, it worked in the ravers' favor.

January 10, 2013 – When Miami's Ultra Music Festival announced in October that its 2013 edition would take place over two consecutive weekends in March, it was greeted as a sign of electronic dance music's explosive growth — and even, perhaps, an indication that dance music has gained the upper hand over indie and alt-rock in the festival game. One-upping Coachella's re-run model (in which identical lineups are repeated across two weekends), Ultra promised the audacious proposal of six full days of programming comprising "two separate and distinct highly unique experiences for our attendees." Now, however, their gambit may be in jeopardy.

January 9, 2013 – You're Avicii. You're responsible for one of the biggest dance-pop crossover hits of the past two years, "Levels," with 56 million YouTube plays (and counting). Your subsequent tracks, while successful, have sounded like "Levels" redux, minus the Etta James sample that made "Levels" so potent in the first place. In short, you seem to have writer's block. Why not try outsourcing?At least, that's one theory to explain his latest project, "Avicii x You," in which the Swedish musician (a.k.a., Tim Bergling) is soliciting fans to provide the building blocks of his next production. According to a press release: "Avicii will act as executive producer, curating sounds like the baseline [sic], effects, melody, rhythm, and vocals. Avicii will then pick his three favorite contributions on a weekly basis and put these samples up for a public vote.

January 8, 2013 – For all the clamor over what constitutes an authentically live performance of electronic music, SBTRKT has shown that it's not really all that hard to do, provided that you know your way around a MIDI controller and a drum kit — and have access to a singer as talented as Sampha. Live, released today, collects 10 songs from SBTRKT (Aaron Jerome) and Sampha's performance last October at London's O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, showing off the musicians' stage chops as well as the malleability of his songs.Crowd noise, copious reverb, and muscular drum grooves lend a sense of energy that's a world away from the quiet intimacy of his self-titled debut album, and on several tracks, string players from the Heritage Orchestra flesh out an even fuller sound.