May 16, 2013 – Various Artists Acid Arab Collections EP01 (Versatile) "We don't paste oriental sounds on occidental beats, we want to embody both cultures without pretending to reinvent oriental music or fooling ourselves by believing we're inventing Eastern dance music." That's the Parisian DJs Guido Minisky and Hervé Carvalho explaining their new project Acid Arab, which is exactly what it sounds like: A fusion of acid house and Arabic music. It's a risky proposition, especially coming from two dudes who profess to "have fallen in love with this music after a trip to Tunisia." But at least Minisky and Carvalho are refreshingly circumspect about their cultural tourism.

May 9, 2013 – Michael Mayer, Mantasy Remixe 2 (Kompakt) A good seven months since the release of Michael Mayer's Mantasy, do we really need new remixes of it? As it turns out, we do. Agoria, Robag Wruhme, and Will Saul and October's reinterpretations are wildly divergent — from each other, and from the source material. You could almost call them counterintuitive. Saul and October take the Moroder-flavored "Mantasy," whose defining feature is its robo-disco bass line, and refashion it into a cosmic techno epic with virtually no audible bass line whatsoever, just aching pads and clattering woodblocks underpinned by subsonic swells.

May 8, 2013 – If you follow the Twitter feed of NASA's Johnson Space Center, you'll know that Skrillex has been spending the afternoon at the space agency's facilities in Houston, Texas. What has he been doing there? Oh, the usual: taking a virtual-reality spacewalk, meeting astronaut Mike Massimino, eating space food in the Astronaut Food Lab (which looks suspiciously like a conference room, but hey, budgets are tight), even driving rovers and going on board the freaking space shuttle. (No, we're not envious. Not even a little.) We hope that Skrillex has been paying attention to his guided tour, because he's been live-tweeting the whole thing, from the world's biggest indoor pool to what looks like the world's biggest tea strainer, which we can only imagine would come in handy if they ever do find water on Mars.Why is he there?

May 7, 2013 – Peter Rauhofer, a former resident at New York's Roxy nightclub and a popular DJ on the circuit party scene, died of a brain tumor today, according to an announcement made on his official Facebook page. In April, Rauhofer had been diagnosed with the tumor after suffering a seizure, and just yesterday his team had announced that, owing to his health, he would not be performing at his fourth annual WORK party during Pride Week at New York's Roseland Ballroom on June 29.Rauhofer, a native Austrian, was the founder of the Star 69 label, and he was a go-to remixer for club updates of pop hits; his discography includes remixes for Madonna, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Kylie Minogue, Depeche Mode, Cher — he won a Grammy in 2000 for his rework of "Believe" — and dozens more artists of their ilk.

May 6, 2013 – After living in hotels for the past decade, Skrillex seems to be settling into his newfound digs in Los Angeles quite nicely. He recently posted a Vine video documenting his recently completed home studio, but that's just the beginning. In a conversation with Summit Series' Jeff Rosenthal at last month's IMS Engage conference in Los Angeles, Sonny Moore revealed that he recently purchased an 11,000-square-foot building in Chinatown where he is building a studio for "in-the-box producers" like himself — that is, traveling laptoppers who could benefit from a high-tech home base for plugging in and jamming out.But, rather than constructing an industry hit factory, his vision sounds a lot more like Warhol's Factory — a multi-disciplinary creative hub where collision and collaboration are at the root of everything. "There's nothing in L.A. that's like that for our generation," said Skrillex.

May 3, 2013 – This Sunday, Amsterdam's house and techno community will come together to raise money for Dimitri Kneppers, one of the city's most revered DJs. Kneppers, better known simply as Dimitri, helped kick-start the Netherlands' house and techno scene in 1988 with his parties at Amsterdam's Roxy club, and he currently holds a residency at the city's celebrated Trouw club. With the exception of a three-year retirement spent volunteering with disabled children on a farm, Dimitri, the proverbial (and literal) DJs' favorite DJ, has been a constant presence on the Dutch scene for a quarter century — until recently, when he had the toes on his right foot amputated after contracting a bacterial infection. Shortly thereafter, his conditioned worsened, and doctors were forced to remove his lower leg.As the organizers of a fundraiser for him note, "This is of course a huge setback.

May 3, 2013 – Following last year's Silent Congas, the Greek-born, Milan-based psych pop shaman Larry Gus returns to DFA this June with Years Not Living, a steady-dripping dopamine rush that's as colorfully chaotic as an explosion at the Sherwin-Williams plant. It's more polished than his last album, but not in the sense of studio sheen — think, rather, of agates fresh out of the rock tumbler. Variously channeling Afro-pop, Tropicalía, free jazz, and Krautrock, it's all spun together like some magical combination of the Avalanches, Stereolab, and Madlib (with a touch of David Bowie in the singer's supple delivery). Forget chillwave, this is chill-wild.In advance of the album, Greece's Hana and London's Hello Skinny (a drummer for Matthew Herbert and Mulatu Astatke, as well as one of SPIN's Best New Artists for October 2012) have turned in remixes of two Silent Congas cuts.

May 1, 2013 – Welcome to SPIN's new weekly roundup of the best (and, occasionally, the worst) in dance music. Like Control Voltage's Friday Five, an earlier iteration of the same theme, it's an entirely subjective, proudly authoritative look at the artists, tracks, and trends we think you should know about, as you try to navigate dance music's whirpool of change.Huerco S. "Apheleia's Theme" (Future Times) After several months of what Maxmillion Dunbar described as "really shitty, haunting mystery problems" at the pressing plant — "It's not even stuff we've dealt with before, it's just this static electrical noise, and it is seriously delaying our shit," he told me when I interviewed him a few months back — D.C.'s Future Times label is back in action. Test pressings of the new EP from Kansas City's Huerco S. have finally passed muster, and the 12-inch is due out shortly.

April 29, 2013 – "It always comes and goes in waves," says Michael Mayer of Kompakt's tendency to oscillate between anthemic techno and more esoteric electronic pop. "It's nothing we intentionally plan, like, 'Let's stop releasing dance tracks.' It goes in circles. Every two years, for instance, there would be the Field and Gui Boratto with new albums at the same time. In the years between there would be GusGus, say. It always goes in the circles of an artist's life, and the label is following that natural rhythm without pushing anyone to deliver an album that doesn't feel ready. There are more ambient and more experimental times, and sometimes it gets more pop."Coma's In Technicolor, then, is the perfect album to commemorate the label's 20th-anniversary celebrations, given the way that it neatly joins the two principal facets of the imprint's bipolar personality.

April 26, 2013 – There's no getting around the fact that Rex the Dog's new single, "Do You Feel What I Feel," sounds a whole lot like Bronski Beat — particularly in the soaring falsetto of the featured vocalist Jamie McDermott, of the Irrepressibles — but this is not a problem, for two reasons. One, Bronksi Beat rule. Two, Rex the Dog absolutely nails it, just as you might expect from someone with his storied pedigree. (As you may recall, Rex is the British producer Jake Williams, who had a Top 10 rave hit under his JX alias in the 1990s before reviving his career in 2004 with a string of mystery singles for Kompakt.) Also, Bronski Beat rule.The single, due out May 6 on Southern Fried, includes remixes by Jacques Renault, Riva Starr, Tiger & Woods, Kim Ann Foxman, and Rex himself, and Foxman's is particularly striking.