September 5, 2012 – With his debut single, 2009's gossamer "Hyph Mngo," Joy Orbison was greeted as dubstep's golden boy: The guy who introduced house beats to the wub kids. But the man who could've been the next Burial has dedicated his subsequent discography to screwing with our expectations, gradually muting his gleaming keys and infusing sullen beats with equal parts doubt and menace. And also sex: His recent co-productions with Boddika have been as sensual, in their twisted way, as anything in bass music, although black bile lurks beneath every quickened breath. He's the rave-culture counterpart to Animal Collective's balance of dulcet melodies with delirious overload. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: King Tubby – The Roots of Dub

September 5, 2012 – If you were anywhere in Europe in 1999, there's a good chance you were treated to the exceptionally perky strains of Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone," which ruled commercial dance clubs, youth hostels, and the subwoofers on every passing import tuner. Even in dance-phobic America, the trance-fueled Eurodance hit went to No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100. In truth, there was no Alice and no DJ: Judith Pronk served as singer and beard for five Dutch producer/songwriters. Witch-housers Salem rescued the single from ringtone purgatory with a dirge-like cover version in 2011. Geologist: I worked in a parrot store on Greenwich Avenue.

September 5, 2012 – Finland's Sasu Ripatti has explored every nook and cranny of electronic music through his various aliases — Vladislav Delay, Luomo, Sistol, Uusitalo. Recorded under his glitchiest and sparsest pen name, 2000's Multila captured the former jazz drummer's most muddled years, a tumble of druggy loops and ghost rhythms that he barely remembers making. As ephemeral as the Aurora Borealis, as cryptic as the Numbers Stations, it was far out even for the Chain Reaction label. Panda Bear: We'd gotten into electronic music but this sounded…vague. Everything was so vague and muted. Geologist: It wasn't sharp and in-your-face, it wasn't tape music that sounded old. Avey Tare: It would almost start like it wouldn’t be anything at all.

September 5, 2012 – "You are now listening to Araabmuzik." That telltale voice is back, and so is Abraham "Araabmuzik" Orellana, the MPC champion and Dipset producer turned EDM acolyte, whose Electronic Dream 2 appeared on eMusic yesterday, with no advance warning. Or is he back? Just a few hours after London's FACT announced the album's arrival, Orellana tweeted, "ED2 is not coming out yet," asking his followers to disregard "the tracklist and cover on emusic.com." But the album certainly sounds like Araabmuzik, from its dubstep swagger to its gossamer synthesizers, and the phantom Electronic Dream 2 is not the work of an impostor. "The release was actually not fake," a source tells SPIN. Instead, it was a "deleted version," not meant for public distribution, that slipped through the cracks somewhere between label, distributor, and retailer.

September 4, 2012 – The music industry may be burning to the ground, but record collectors have plenty to fiddle with these days: We're awash in box sets, 180-gram reissues, colored vinyl, marbled vinyl, sparkly vinyl, picture discs, audio postcards — you name it; if grooves can be cut into it, they probably have. The new label Svakt may not have the most radical proposition, but in purely conceptual terms, it's one of the more unusual: Svakt specializes in single-sided vinyl pressings, limited to 300 copies — and here's the kicker — featuring only a single, 20-minute track. (For the turntable-disabled, Svakt's releases will be available digitally on iTunes.) Given the quirkily rigid standardization of the format, it's perhaps fitting that "Svakt" sounds like something Ikea might name one of its modular shelves.

September 4, 2012 – Matthew Herbert's Accidental label, per its owner's own off-kilter sensibilities, has always gravitated towards the fringes of electronic pop and dance music. So Accidental's newest signing, San Francisco's Dave Aju (Marc Barrite), must feel right at home: After all, his debut EP was called The Unorthodoctor. For nearly a decade now, Aju has been crafting gooey, funk-infused tracks that might be termed "house by another means." In the process, he has proven himself one of the more rigorous disciples of Herbert's own conceptualist ethos.

August 31, 2012 – Mosca's "Done Me Wrong" and "Bax," released last summer on Glasgow's Numbers imprint, were highlights of the ongoing U.K. garage revival. Reviving the plucky organ bass and fidgety, swinging drums of Groove Chronicles, Zed Bias, and the style of 2-step known briefly as "nu dark swing," Mosca's tunes were dead ringers for the rough-cut, spit-and-chewing-gum anthems of yore. Simon Reynolds would probably count the record as another win for retromania in its protracted battle against futurism, but it sure worked wonders on the dance floor.

August 30, 2012 – Asheville, North Carolina's Moogfest announced a number of new additions to its lineup this week, including Nas, Tim Hecker & Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), and Morton Subotnick; on October 26 and 27, they join Primus, Orbital, Richie Hawtin, Squarepusher, Four Tet, GZA, and Actress in rounding out one of the most adventurous festival lineups in North America — and that list of names only scratches the surface. Moogfest wasn't always like this: It began in New York, in 2004, as a rock-oriented tribute to Bob Moog, the pioneering synthesizer inventor, who passed away in 2005. For four years, the festival's lineup gravitated towards prog heavyweights, jam bands, and jazz and funk icons — Keith Emerson, Jan Hammer, Parliament-Funkadelic's Bernie Worrell, Umphrey's McGee — before organizers pulled the plug.

August 30, 2012 – Currently in talks with a couple of U.K. independent labels, Dublin's Forrests describe their style as "beta-unblocking electronic music." That sounds about right: Beta blockers inhibit the human fight or flight response, and Forrests' music is all about flight — the soaring-in-air kind. The duo's hardware-centric approach and heavy-lidded bliss suggest a kinship with bands like Blondes, Fuck Buttons and Teengirl Fantasy, with throbbing synthesizers, tribal drum loops, and pneumatic vocals tracing Spirograph shapes against a pastel sky. The unreleased "Tarifa," below, channels the Who's "Baba O'Riley" and Power Corruption & Lies-Era New Order into a dreamy house cut in the emotive vein of John Talabot or Pantha du Prince; springy arpeggios and wordless voices weave a net for catching found sounds and thundering drum breaks.

August 29, 2012 – Fresh off Chrome Lips, their dank, gothed-out mixtape with the 16-year-old Barbadian rapper Haleek Maul, Chicago's Supreme Cuts return with a dreamy remix of Physical Therapy's "Drone On" featuring Jamie Krasner. Just about the only thing the two releases have in common is that they're both free. Where Chrome Lips sounds like rap's answer to Demdike Stare, their "Drone On" remix has all the golden glow and feathery drift of a Swedish shampoo advertisement from the '70s. The original, released this spring on Physical Therapy's Safety Net EP (Hippos in Tanks), was already a particularly buoyant fusion of drum 'n' bass and '90s trance, and Supreme Cuts' jittery, footworking toms and spider-legged hi-hats lend a whole new level of levitating grace. Imagine Cocteau Twins going juke, and you're just about there.