August 15, 2012 – House and techno are about to get a little freakier. Active since 2005, Amsterdam's Juju & Jordash have spent the last couple of years wowing audiences with their improvised live shows, utilizing analog machines and a bit of black magic to create a far-out amalgam of deep house, Detroit techno, kosmische musik, and dub. Their records, for labels like Golf Channel, Rush Hour, and Dekmantel, follow suit, boiling down exploratory studio sessions into potent capsules of skunked-out machine funk. With their upcoming album Techno Primitivism, their second for their hometown's Dekmantel, they continue to feed us club transmissions from another dimension, sounding more alien — and also more refined — than ever. Today, they unveiled director James Murray's new video for the album cut "Dr. Strangepork," and it's every bit as cryptic as you might expect.

August 14, 2012 – As Las Vegas has fallen under the sway of electronic dance music, casino magnate Steve Wynn has emerged as one of the most gung-ho supporters of EDM at its gaudiest. Wynn Resorts' four nightclubs — XS, Surrender, Tryst, and Encore Beach Club — have locked down residencies from some of the most recognizable names in dance music: David Guetta, Skrillex, Afrojack, Deadmau5, Tiësto, Steve Angello, Sebastian Ingrosso, Diplo, Dada Life, Nero, Steve Aoki, along with rising stars like Porter Robinson, Nervo, and Audrey Napoleon.

August 13, 2012 – In the five years since Róisín Murphy's last album, Overpowered, the Irish singer has seemed anything but. To the contrary, she's done what she damn well pleases. On 2009's self-released "Orally Fixated," she celebrated her imminent motherhood with a song that scanned, more or less, as a meditation on breastfeeding — although the racy cover favored a far more salacious reading of lines like "My cupboard is bare, you're already there." (Thank goodness, Ms.

August 13, 2012 – For many DJs, 130 beats per minute isn't simply a tempo, it's a state of mind. In the last couple of years, though, 130 BPM has become a meeting point for DJs and producers across the dance-music spectrum, perched midway between dubstep and house. And it's not just a DMZ for artists from those genres: More and more junglists are also getting in on the action. Enter Japan's Makoto (Makoto Shimizu), a soulful drum-and-bass producer and long-time affiliate of LTJ Bukem's Good Looking Records. Like many of his breakbeat brethren, Makoto has been flirting with deep house and dubstep for the past couple of years.

August 10, 2012 – Next week, Smalltown Supersound unleashes the second single off Lindstrøm's third LP, Six Cups of Rebel, released back in February. The Norwegian producer has tossed out some curveballs before — this year, he and Prins Thomas reworked Roxy Music's "Avalon," and he gave Todd Rundgren free reign to poke and prog his own "Quiet Place to Live" — but the new EP is wild even by Lindstrøm's elliptical standards. Oneohtrix Point Never turns the sparkling Pachinko-parlor disco of "Call Me Anytime" into a beatless spray of vowel tones that sounds not unlike that version of Justin Bieber's "U Smile" that was slowed 800%. It might not sound terribly unusual for OPN, but it's certainly not what you'd expect from a remix of Lindstrøm. The opposite holds true for a remix of the Norwegian producer's "De Javu" by Emeralds' Mark McGuire.

August 9, 2012 – Listeners who haven't encountered the Knocks before may experience a flash of cognitive dissonance the first time they hear the New York duo's work. Their name may suggest the rock'n'roll lineage that brought us bands like the Strokes and the Kooks, but, quite to the contrary, the Knocks fall firmly in a tradition of sparkly, pop-infused, sing-along-friendly dance music that stretches through Daft Punk, Alan Braxe, and Fred Falke. Small surprise, then, that the duo of DJ B-Roc (Ben Ruttner) and JPatt (James Patterson) recently hooked up with Falke for the single "Geronimo," for Kitsuné. Now, just in time for Labor Day, the Knocks bring us an irresistible summer anthem that's equal parts amped up and blissed out: Just the thing to turn around a summer that's been marked by endless thunder storms and festival cancellations.

August 8, 2012 – Who: Cooly G is Merissa Campbell, a London native whose early singles balanced the staccato rhythms of U.K. funky — a percussive, Caribbean-influenced strain of house music — with an abstracted take on electronic soul. Her debut album, Playin Me, takes a hard left (or maybe that's a soft left) away from the toughness of her early work, favoring downy electronic textures and wispy vocal melodies. "When I make tunes, people want to know what type of person I am, and they think you're a certain type of person with a certain type of sound," says Campbell. "With [earlier singles] 'Phat Si' or 'Narst,' guys were, like, scared of me. But this album is a bit more laid-back and a bit more the smooth side of me — more feminine, I should say."Sounds Like: Various styles come together on Playin Me — jungle, 2-step, deep house, broken beat — all swirled together in diffuse, amorphous shapes.

August 8, 2012 – Brodinski (Louis Rogé) has been bubbling up in the French electronic-music scene since 2007, and in the beginning, his career path seemed pretty typical. He remixed artists like Bonde Do Role, Tiga, and Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya (remember her?), and he turned up on buzzing labels like Kitsuné and Boysnoize. Early on, he remixed his friend DJ Mehdi for Ed Banger, and he recently returned to the label to rework Justice's "On 'n' On." But, even early on, there were signs that Brodinski didn't really fit the French electro mold. You can hear his intention to leap borders with a 2010 co-production with Mumdance called "Eurostarr": Named in homage to the train that connects France and the U.K., it has as much in common with the tribal, percussive sound of U.K. funky as it does classic French techno.

August 7, 2012 – MTV's Video Music Awards were first broadcast in 1984 — the same year that Cybotron's "Techno City" put a name to the electronic-music movement that had been bubbling up in Detroit since 1981, when Cybotron's "Alleys of Your Mind" and A Number of Names' "Sharevari" came out within weeks of one another. (Coincidentally, 1981 also marked the launch of MTV.) Somehow, though, it took 28 years for the VMAs to get around to adding the category of "Best Electronic Dance Music Video." The timing is hardly surprising: As you may have heard, electronic dance music, or EDM, as many of its American fans have branded it, is kind of a big deal right now. And the nominees for "Best Electronic Dance Music Video" are nothing if not representative of the pop-rave sound reigning over American tastes right now.

August 6, 2012 – With the latest release from Club Mod, it seems almost like parent label Modular Recordings is trying to make up for the interminable delay in that long-rumored second album from the Avalanches. But apart from being signed to the same label, the Australian group doesn't have anything to do with Cécile & Refleksie, a Milan-based duo whose members have previously recorded as Esperanza. The Avalanches' influence, however, is all over Cécile & Refleksie's sunny, psychedelic take on dance music. In "First Sparkle," a chorus cribbed from 1950s easy-listening dapples disco breaks and a snaky acid bass line like sunlight penetrating the heart of the rain forest.