August 3, 2012 – Recent mainstream coverage and exploitation of so-called "EDM" — like Forbes' list of the top-earning DJs; an accompanying featurette where the writer allegedly proves the ease of DJing; an apparent Smirnoff ad that's making the rounds on Twitter, in which the "DJ" is playing on a deck with no slipmat or cartridge — have me feeling like I'm close to my own Skyler White-style meltdown. (You know: "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!") So I thought I might be able to vent some spleen by writing a snarky piece on the devaluation of electronic music culture. Maybe get all Maureen Dowd on someone's ass. But the more I tried to write, the more disgusted I felt — not just with the state of the "scene," but with the fact that I paid it any mind at all. What the fuck does Forbes know about electronic music? Why the fuck should I care?

August 3, 2012 – Hard to believe, but it's been over a decade since Otto Von Schirach began channeling a childhood spent listening to "Miami Bass, Gore Grind, Gangsta Rap and Afro Cuban Noise" (per his biography) into some of the sickest — and funniest — platters in electronic music. Given his affiliations with labels like Schematic and Cock Rock Disco (and, briefly, Mike Patton's Ipecac), Von Schirach has generally been lumped in with the IDM, or "intelligent dance music," scene — a seeming miscategorization, until you realize that few artists in any genre have ever made music so stoopid feel so smart. Or, OK, in the case of tunes like "Cantaloupe Syphilis Gravy" and "Global Fisting (That's What I Do)," maybe not smart, exactly. But clever. As you might expect from a guy who has collaborated with Skinny Puppy, image is everything.

August 1, 2012 – Of all the adjectives used to describe Lana Del Rey, surely "moody" ranks near the top of the list. A quick scan of Google results confirms that suspicion: "Moody" + "Lana Del Rey" returns 3.5 million hits; "dulcet" + "Lana Del Rey," 926,000; "sultry" + "Lana Del Rey," 667,000. (For what it's worth, "gangster" and "gorgeous," when combined with the singer's name, each return somewhere in the neighborhood of 5.5 million hits.) Add a few more pages to the pile now that Detroit's Kenny Dixon Jr., a.k.a. Moodymann, has reworked the singer's "Born to Die" under his abbreviated alias, Moody. Sensibly titled "Born 2 Die," the cut is tucked away on the B2 of Moody's new Why Do U Feel EP, and it features sections of LDR's a cappella rearranged over an odd, fragmentary groove constructed from drum-machine snippets, breaths, yelps, and ambient crowd noise.

July 31, 2012 – Jay Ahern rides again. Over the past two decades, the American-born artist has roamed far and wide — London, Dublin, Berlin, and now Denver — and he's worn plenty of hats along the way. Back in the 1990s, he recorded deep, Detroit-styled techno as Aquarhythms and Hydroelectric. (Talk about a Midwestern rave flashback: Aquarhythms' 1997 release Greetings from Deepest America, on Astralwerks, featured remixes from Carl Craig, Morgan Geist, Deep Dish, and Rabbit in the Moon.) In the 2000s, working as Add Noise, he reconciled minimal techno with Minutemen references, forever cementing his cred with legions of ravers who grew up on hardcore punk. After that, Ahern and To Rococo Rot's Stefan Schneider cloaked themselves in the Hauntologists moniker to get at house music's spookier side — well before "witch house," mind you.

July 30, 2012 – Yesterday morning, after a late and, in the musician's words, "weird ass night," Deadmau5 logged on to Twitter, announced that he was taking a break from preparing his new live show, and settled in to work on music — all under the watchful eye of any fans that cared to track his progress via Deadmau5 Live, the live video stream from his studio. Throughout the course of the day, he progressed in fits and starts, tweeting at crucial junctures — "fuck. feel like starting something else instead"; "too shm for me," a reference to the Swedish House Mafia; "wow. fuck. all my shit does sound the same.

July 27, 2012 – Steve Reich's influence on electronic dance music runs deep. It goes back, at least, to the Orb's 1990 track "Little Fluffy Clouds," which laced a passage from Reich's "Electric Counterpoint" with acidic synths and breakbeats and samples of a Rickie Lee Jones interview to create a chill-out classic. But it's not just a question of samples: The essential pulse of Reich's contrapuntal tumble runs through stripped-down techno classics like Jeff Mills' "The Bells," while the loopy incantations of Reich's "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain" laid the foundations for footwork's hypnotic vocal manipulations.

July 26, 2012 – I've never been big on video games, but a new video for Slackk's "Blue Sleet" (Local Action) is challenging my indifference. Directed by Natalia Stuyk, a BAFTA New Talent Award winner whose credits include promos for the Mae Shi, Echo Lake and Colours, the clip positions the viewer behind a sleek, Concorde-like aircraft before whipping over snowy mountains, gleaming cities, mirrored deserts, and crystal-studded moonscapes, in an increasingly surreal succession of digitally rendered scenes. It's proof that low-budget videos can be just as effective as big-money, high-concept extravaganzas. The smeared pixels and slightly unsettling sheen of the visuals make the perfect complement to the London bass-music producer's own retro-manic, future-philic sound, which stakes out a position midway between classic grime bangers and Oneohtrix Point Never's Freon-fueled synthesizer epics.

July 25, 2012 – Caribou's Dan Snaith has spent the past year and a half indulging his clubbier tendencies under a new alias, Daphni, and it looks like he's setting up his Jiaolong label as a platform for likeminded musicians to do the same. The label's last release had the Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan doing his best Carl Craig impersonation with two tracks of throbbing analog techno; Jiaolong number four will come from Les Sins, better known as Toro Y Moi's Chaz Bundick. Bundick first stretched his dancing legs on 2010's "Lina"/"Youth Gone" (Carpark), his only other Les Sins release to date; far from the languorous, lysergic electro-pop of his main project, the songs dove with gusto into four-to-the-floor kicks and filtered disco licks, sounding like a hazier Daft Punk or Smith & Hack. The two songs on his upcoming Jiaolong single take an even more direct path to the dance floor.

July 25, 2012 – Matmos, the Baltimore-based duo of brainiac multi-taskers Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, are planning to release a new EP, The Ganzfeld, on a new label, Thrill Jockey, in October. And in typically high-minded Matmos fashion, the pair will base the music on experiments in psychic research and feature a remix from the mysterious Bay Area techno producer Rrose; an album, The Marriage of True Minds, will follow in early 2013. Their new home at Thrill Jockey, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, coincidentally marks a new chapter in the 20-year partnership of Daniel and Schmidt. Four years have passed since their last major album; in the intervening years, they have turned their efforts largely towards academic and art-world pursuits, and the new EP suggests an interest in wrapping up all of their disparate interests into sprawling, but pleasure-filled, art pop.

July 24, 2012 – Four Tet's Kieran Hebden has kept vinyl buyers busy over the past year with a steady stream of releases on his Text Records label. In just the past few months, he's put out two new Four Tet 12-inches, "Jupiters"/"Ocoras," "128 Harps," plus a third collaboration with Burial, the single-sided "Nova," which followed 2009's joint effort "Moth"/"Wolf Cub" and last year's "Ego"/"Mirror," featuring Burial and Thom Yorke. Today, Hebden unveiled the next Text release on his SoundCloud account: "Bird Songs," a percussive, broken-beat techno jam credited to an artist known simply as Percussions. Whoever Percussions is, all signs point to Hebden's involvement: Both the title and chirpy sound effects recall Four Tet's "Conference of the Birds" DJ mix from April, and the deconstructed tribal rhythms have Hebden's fingerprints all over them.