October 17, 2012 – Nathan Fake's "The Sky Was Pink," released on Border Community in 2004, is an undisputed classic of electronic dance music. James Holden's remix of the tune was one of that year's biggest anthems — one of those increasingly rare tracks that managed to unite fans across several of dance music's competing factions: progressive house, trance, techno, minimal, and IDM. Now, proving the song's durability as well as its malleability, Leeds' Vessels have recorded a hybrid cover version of the song, drawing inspiration from both the original and Holden's iconic rework."It's one of those tracks that brought the band closer together and re-invigorated our love for making music together," Vessels' Lee J. Malcolm explained in an e-mail. "The original by Nathan Fake sounded like an electronica artist recreating a live band. Then James Holden turned it into a dance-floor techno classic.

October 16, 2012 – Five years after their debut album, Anatomy, and with signs of a drum and bass revival in full swing, Calyx & TeeBee return with All or Nothing (RAM Records), a 12-track long-player that aims to bring DnB in from the cold. The album ranges from trim, elegant rollers to dystopian techstep flashbacks, with echoes of Photek, Source Direct, and even early Amon Tobin in its carefully sculpted breaks and gelatinous low end, while collaborations with Foreign Beggars & Craze, Kemo, and Beardyman make overtures to hip-hop. In many ways, it's a statement of the subgenre's core principles, but "Strung Out," one of the album's standout cuts, shows how far they're willing to stray from convention, with Calyx's vocals floating over watery keys and flickering rhythmic flourishes.

October 12, 2012 – I rarely have explicit themes in mind for the Friday Five when I begin putting together each column, but they still have a way of gathering in the margins. This week is all about classically-minded house and techno—big surprise, given that underground dance music is deep in the throes of a retro fetish. But these selections aren't old-school for the sake of being old-school, just prime exemplars of the old maxim about not fixing what ain't broke.Willie Burns, The Overlord EP (The Trilogy Tapes) You could call the reigning aesthetic behind the Trilogy Tapes label "cut-and-paste apocalypse." Founder Will Bankhead—a graphic designer for Mo Wax and Honest Jon's—draws visual inspiration from the scrappily subversive DIY graphics of punk and industrial, and the records he signs to the label go hand in hand, sounding raw and a little bit wrong.

October 12, 2012 – Twenty years ago, two young Parisians, Etienne De Crécy and Philippe Zdar, discovered techno for the first time at a rave called Transbody Express. "It makes such an impact on us that we don't miss a single one of the raves organized near the capital for the next year" writes de Crécy in the liner notes for Essentials, a new album that's part greatest-hits collection, part Bildungsroman. "We come up with the crazy idea of making an album.

October 11, 2012 – It can't be April 1, because Eric Prydz just announced a New York show at the Roseland Ballroom for November 21, a.k.a. Thanksgiving Eve. But the rest of the press release certainly feels like an April Fool's joke, as it's revealed: "At Eric's request, all tickets will be locked at $39.95—a low, low price that makes the event accessible to as many of his fans as possible."It gets better, though, even after you repeat that "low, low price" line to yourself, several times, in your best late-night QVC impersonation. The show is so cheap because Prydz is waiving his fee. "I'm playing for free, not making anything," he told Elektro magazine.Frankly, $40 doesn't seem like a "low, low price." It seems like quite a lot indeed, especially just to see a DJ with a laptop or a pair of USB sticks.

October 10, 2012 – The London duo AlunaGeorge's "Your Love" sounds a little like a post-millennial Tricky in the hands of Deebs, a Toronto producer with a thing for snapping, hip-hop-inflected bounce and the flickering vocal samples of Joy Orbison. Preserving the original's lovelorn air, he adds oomph in the form of punchy 808 kicks and kinetic hi-hat patterns that go skittering like spiders across the tear-streaked terrain.Download Deebs' extended mix here; a shorter version is out now on AlunaGeorge's Your Drums, Your Love EP, alongside a drum and bass rework from the Prototypes and house remixes from Lil Silva and Duke Dumont.

October 10, 2012 – Richie Hawtin is no stranger to the North American electronic music scene. Growing up in Windsor, Ontario, just across the border from Detroit, Hawtin and his Plus 8 crew threw some of the Midwest's most legendary parties in the early 1990s. As Plastikman, Hawtin played raves from coast to coast, sharing bills with the likes of Moby and the Prodigy. Since moving to Berlin a decade ago, however, Hawtin has focused his energies primarily on Europe, where his brand of minimal techno thrives.Now he aims to crack North America once again.

October 9, 2012 – There's nothing shocking about the Bay Area's Shock — not in the Jane's Addiction sense, nor by virtually any other metric of voltage, outrage, or seismic shudder. Quite to the contrary, the trio's warm, sedate style exemplifies a particularly refined kind of adult disco, in the tradition of Hatchback, Windsurf, and Sorcerer. (In fact, Dan Judd, of Sorcerer and Windsurf, plays synthesizers in the band, alongside guitarist Michael Taras and the bassist and singer Terri Loewenthal, of the band Rubies.) But just because it's not likely to wake the toddlers doesn't mean that the music itself is a snooze.

October 9, 2012 – Last time Dan Snaith took on a new alias, it was because of a lawsuit — here's looking at the Dictators' Dick Manitoba, a man who truly lives up to his given name — but there wasn't any real, categorical shift between Manitoba and Caribou. Snaith's latest project, Daphni, however, strays from Caribou's lush, psychedelic avant-pop towards a leaner and more club-oriented sound, one that harnesses erratic synthesizer squelch and elements of funk and Afrobeat around stripped-down machine grooves.Snaith has never been a stranger to dance music, but he has spent the last couple of years reinforcing his club bona fides in earnest. His breakthrough, early in 2011, was a Caribou remix of Virgo Four's "It's a Crime," which reworked a lost Chicago house cut from the 1980s into one of the most bewitching club anthems in recent memory. (It proved an unlikely hit, too, placing at No.

October 5, 2012 – My partner is out of town, it's grey and rainy here in Berlin, and I spent two hours trekking to and from an interview on the outskirts of the city (in a rehearsal space owned by Rammstein, at that). There's no way in hell I'm leaving the house again anytime soon. Cue up the drones! Today's selection is all about ambient music, from no-fi improv dub to a must-hear reissue from the mid-1970s. My definition of "ambient" is loose: It also includes subliminal, minimal techno and, why not, black metal. Read on.Laurie Spiegel, The Expanding Universe (Unseen Worlds) The last few years have seen a wealth of pioneering electronic music get the reissue treatment, including work by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.