August 28, 2012 – As Boys Noize prepares to release his third album, Out of the Black, the Berlin producer is clearly making the most of his growing Stateside fame: He's got a residency at Las Vegas' Haze nightclub, a headlining slot at this weekend's Electric Zoo festival, and a new collaboration with Skrillex called Dog Blood. While he's riding high on the American EDM wave, Boys Noize (Alex Ridha) clearly isn't coasting. A pair of new releases on his BNR Trax label from Chile's Surtek Collective prove that he's willing to dig quite a bit deeper than many of his grandstanding peers. The name of that act might not ring many bells, but that's not for its members' lack of credentials.

August 27, 2012 – After collaborations with pop newcomer Eric Turner and pop hangover Lenny Kravitz, EDM golden boy Avicii released his first new solo track since "Silhouettes" this week, and for listeners expecting more lighters-in-the-air froth in the vein of his mammoth (46 million YouTube views and counting), Etta James-sampling "Le7els," the instrumental cut may come as a surprise. "Last Dance," released on Warner's fledgling dance imprint One More Tune, packs in all the chilly Scando-trance stabs and whooshing white noise we've come to expect from Ralph Lauren's blue-eyed muse, but there's a crucial difference: Whistling.

August 24, 2012 – Diddy has periodically flirted with dance music on record, from 2010's Diddy-Dirty Money album, Last Train to Paris, to an as-yet unreleased album he recorded with the Israeli tech-house producer Guy Gerber. But his enthusiasm as a clubber — not sequestered behind a velvet rope and a pyramid of empty Cristal bottles, but down in the scrum, sweating buckets — is well documented. Now, Diddy pays tribute to Ibiza, the site of his house-music baptism, with a documentary film to be released through Comcast's Revolt network, reports Billboard. Long before the Black Eyed Peas brought David Guetta on board, before Pitbull hooked up with Afrojack, before Kid Cudi commissioned a Crookers remix, before Kanye bum-rushed a bewildered Justice, Diddy was there, serving as one of dance music's unlikeliest acolytes. Diddy was there!

August 23, 2012 – Earlier this month, the Red Hot Organization announced This Is How We Walk on the Moon, a collection of Arthur Russell covers performed by a wide range of contemporary artists — comparative left-fielders like Laurel Halo and Sandro Perri alongside Robyn, Hot Chip, and even Scissor Sisters. As it happens, that's not the only Arthur Russell tribute coming this year.

August 23, 2012 – New York's UNO NYC is steadily building up one of the most diverse rosters in the American electronic-music underground: Jacques Greene, CFCF, Mykki Blanco, Fatima Al Qadiri, the unhinged Gobby — there's no doubt that for UNO, "EDM" stands for "esoteric dance music." In October, the label will present the debut from a new artist known as Aquarian, but don't expect hippie-dippy New Agery. UNO head Charles Damga describes it as "UNO's most club-minded 12-inch" so far, which may be true, but that doesn't come close to conveying the elegant savagery of Aquarian's overdriven approach. You can tell that Aquarian has been soaking up the thunder of techno peers like Blawan and Gingy & Bordello (who mixed his EP), as well as boning up on old electro and breakbeat hardcore.

August 22, 2012 – Cross-dressing aliases seem to be all the rage. Consider DJ Donna Summer (Jason Forrest), Sarah Goldfarb (Jean-Vincent Luccini), Karenn (Blawan and Pariah), Andrea (Andy Stott) and Millie (Miles Whittaker) and their Daphne label — not to be confused with Caribou's own femalias, Daphni. Enter Suzanne Kraft, who also adds a little continent-hopping into the mix. Despite the (assumed) Krauty surname, Kraft is the moniker of Los Angeles' Diego Herrera, a Dublab-affiliated slow-motion disco adept who made his debut last year on Gerd Janson's Running Back label.

August 21, 2012 – Somewhere in Ibiza, ca. 1989: A suave gentleman, nationality unknown, with an inverse pyramid of tanned skin glowing beneath the icy white of his unbuttoned shirt, is cornering his prey at the dark end of the bar. "I want to tell you something," he purrs. "Something about your language, about your roots." Strobe lights flash in time to the robo-disco throb. "What are you waiting for? Sing in Spanish," he whispers, drawing closer. "Spanish is beautiful…" That's one possible interpretation, in any case, of DJs Pareja's "Spanish Is Beautiful," released last year on London's History Clock label.

August 20, 2012 – Erol Alkan's new double-disc DJ mix, Another "Bugged Out" Mix & "Bugged In" Selection, ought to come with a warning label: "Beware Flying Objects." While recording the clubbier of the two sets, he says, the bass vibrations dislodged one of his monitors off its shelf and sent it crashing to the floor, where it left a deep dent in the hardwood. But he finished out the mix anyway — fuck a security deposit, right? — and kept the take. The lesson is clear: Assembling a mix in Ableton may be safer, but there's no plug-in capable of simulating that kind of white-knuckled energy. The album's mouthful of a title is a reference to Alkan's A Bugged Out Mix / A Bugged In Selection, from 2005, which introduced the world at large to the London DJ's surgically eclectic style.

August 17, 2012 – So many things could go wrong when remixing Elton John. For one thing, that's Sir Elton John, and now that Prince Harry has refashioned himself as a DJ, you can bet that there are royal repercussions for sullying the work of one of the Queen's own. So Australia's Pnau — the duo of Empire of the Sun's Nick Littlemore and Peter Mayes — must have felt some trepidation when they got their hands on the multi-tracks to Elton John's biggest hits from his golden period, 1970-76. (They did have one advantage over your garden-variety bootleggers: Sir Elton is apparently their official mentor, although it's unclear what, exactly, such an arrangement might entail — beyond, presumably, free eyewear.) Wisely, they went the extra-credit route.

August 16, 2012 – What do you do when your older cousin is one of the pioneers of your country's techno scene? In the case of Sweden's John Dahlbäck, the younger cousin of the indefatigable Jesper Dahlbäck, the answer has clearly been to prove himself even more prolific. In just a decade, John Dahlbäck has recorded four albums and scores of singles, for a wildly diverse list of imprints that ranges from techno staples like Kompakt and Morris Audio to big-room progressive labels like Black Hole Recordings, Defected, and Toolroom.