July 6, 2012 – Coming back from vacation means catching up on promos, collecting all the mail-order packages that arrived in my absence, and, why not, dropping whatever remaining cash I have in record shops around town. Serves me right for leaving town precisely when the summer release schedule is hitting its peak — not to mention Joy Orbison finally dropping "Ellipsis," one of the most eagerly awaited tunes of the past year. So, with no further ado, here are five of the records that jumped out of the pack. Joy Orbison "Ellipsis" (Hinge Finger) Orbison's 2009 single "Hyph Mngo" came out of nowhere and turned the bass-music scene upside down. Rumors of his new single "Ellipsis," on the other hand, have been swirling for a year and a half, making it one of the most anticipated tracks in the underground.

July 5, 2012 – The new mixtape from Portugal's DJ Marfox is called "Distortion Ass Mix," but take the title with a grain of salt. The gluteal bit is self-explanatory: Marfox plays kuduro, an Angolan-Portuguese style of dance music that moves with the hypnotic, rotary motion of a KitchenAid churning dough; it might be the waist-windingest music I've ever heard. ("Kuduro" apparently translates as "hard ass," in fact, presumably in reference to its effects upon muscle tone.) So, yeah, Marfox has the "Ass" part down pat. It's the "Distortion" that makes no sense. Because, for all its frenzied motion and sonic overload, kuduro is also some of the cleanest, most spine-tinglingly precise dance music there is.

July 5, 2012 – The electronic-music scene, perhaps startled by its recent, convulsive growth, finds itself taking stock. Two new compilations attempt to survey the tangled histories of electronic and dance music, to very different ends. EMI's Electrospective draws an undulating line from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Tangerine Dream through synth pop, Daft Punk and on to David Guetta and the Swedish House Mafia. Bleep, the retail arm of Warp Records, takes a more vanguardist view with its 55-track compilation A Guide to Electronic Music, making room for not just Oliver Messaien and John Cage but also Basic Channel, Wiley and Burial. Both collections (with their attendant web campaigns) have a different story to tell about the nature and evolution of electronic music. EMI's describes a process of streamlining, whereby once-alien sounds are assimilated into the Borg-like totality of pop music.

July 2, 2012 – Zombie Zombie pull their heads out of their synths and aim for the stars on their new single, "Rocket Number 9," a teaser for the duo's upcoming album, Rituals, due from Versatile in October. Last time we heard from the French duo of Cosmic Neman and Etienne Jaumet, they were refashioning John Carpenter's film music in their own retro-futurist style; this time they tackle Sun Ra's 1968 ode to intergalactic transit. In place of the original's Raymond-Scott-on-DMT vibes, Zombie Zombie dial into a buzzing Krautrock chug balanced between rock drumming and crisp 808s, and laced with hypnotic chants and Middle Eastern horns. Tigersushi founder Joakim, who produced the song, contributes an "Extended 808 Mix" that beefs up the drum machines and synth squeal, like Forbidden Planet gone acid house.

June 29, 2012 – Did the temperature of electronic dance music hit 92 degrees this week or something? Because people sure did get irritable. As usual, we can thank Deadmau5 for getting folks all riled up — this time, with a post entitled "We All Hit Play" which asserted that EDM's big-leaguers, himself included, aren't really doing that much onstage. He had some decent points, but any insight tended to be eclipsed by his penchant for schoolyard tussling, and he really missed the boat in his dismissal of the DJ's craft, as Create Digital Music's Peter Kirn pointed out. (Deadmau5: "'Beatmatching' isn't even a fucking skill as far as I'm concerned, anyway. So what, you can count to 4. Cool.

June 29, 2012 – After five years of virtual silence — punctuated only by 2009's "Back from Beyond," after which the band promptly disappeared back to the beyond — Arnaud Rebotini's Black Strobe returned earlier this year to put a fresh spin on its 2004 single "Italian Fireflies," commissioning new remixes from Munk, Richy Ahmed and others. Now, Rebotini and his band are back with the new single "Boogie in Zero Gravity," a teaser for an album planned for 2013. What has changed is right there in the title: a far cry from the chilly electro throb for which Black Strobe was once known, "Boogie in Zero Gravity" is a steamy, sweaty basement jam streaked with rivulets of disco-funk.

June 27, 2012 – Earlier this month, the media baron Robert F.X. Sillerman made waves in the electronic dance music scene when the New York Times reported his plans to spend $1 billion buying up local and regional dance-music promoters in the effort to create an entertainment behemoth to rival Live Nation, a company formed out of Sillerman's previous holdings. But he'd better act fast: Live Nation seems determined to snap up the goods first.

June 27, 2012 – Speaking affectionately here, but acid house might be something like the cockroach of dance music: You just can't kill it. Long after nukes have turned the earth's surface to glass, and/or the Cloud and our post-Singularity selves are wiped out by a sloppy bit of coding by the Tyrell Corporation, acid house's trademark gurgle and snap will just keep skittering along, mutant as ever. Despite electronic music's supposedly futurist bent, acid house revivals have been cropping up practically since the molten eruption of a TB-303 first hit the ground and began to cool, and they have kept recurring as regularly as 4/4 kick drums. Uwe Schmidt, a.k.a.

June 26, 2012 – One of the great things about Detroit techno is the way it has spawned sister-city scenes across the world. Berlin and Amsterdam are the most notable, but Vienna also has been an outpost for Motor City styles, especially when it comes to twitchy, live-wire electro. In the late 1990s, the cities felt connected as if by a transatlantic aquabahn, as Detroit labels like Adult.'s Ersatz Audio and Ectomorph's Interdimensional Transmissions traded artists and ideas with Vienna's Sabotage and Craft imprints. It was through that nexus that I discovered Austria's Epy, back around '97-'98, but I should hasten to add that Epy have never been strictly an electro-revivalist act.

June 25, 2012 – Signs of the EDMocalypse? Late Friday night, Deadmau5 opened up Pandora's Serato box with a Tumblr post entitled "We All Hit Play," in which he alleged that dance music's top-billed acts (himself included) do more pantomiming than actual performing onstage. The next day, Swedish House Mafia apparently called it quits, posting this message to their website: "Today we want to share with you, that the tour we are about to go on will be our last. We want to thank every single one of you that came with us on this journey. We came, we raved, we loved." Coincidence? Did the Mau5 get the Swedes' goat? After all, the Swedish House Mafia are favorite targets of EDM's skeptics, given the disproportionate balance between grandstanding and hands-on mixing that tends to characterize their sets.