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.

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!