New York hasn't exactly had a healthy dance-music scene in a long time — shout out to Mayor Giuliani's embrace of archaic cabaret laws, rising rents, velvet ropes, and the bottle-service crowd that follows them. All that hasn't stopped one diasporic New York crew from turning out some of America's most visionary house and techno in recent years — a deep, burnished sound, equal parts UR and Basic Channel, as ruminative as it is muscular. Expat-in-Berlin Levon Vincent devotes his Fabric mix to a nameless band of brothers from the boroughs: himself, DJ Jus-Ed, DJ Qu, Joey Anderson, Anthony Parasole, Black Jazz Consortium, and JM De Frias. He feels less like a selector than a sculptor, massaging sleek, metallic passages into supple, rounded shapes; the texture of a given swath of reverb is as important as the snare that precedes it. Heard loud, the mix goes straight to the hips and the sternum; but at home, its graceful lines and muffled tones could almost qualify as ambient music — at least, for urban listeners, for whom the subway's rumble feels as natural as their own pulse. PHILIP SHERBURNE

In a year when minimal techno leaned conventional or hewed to a too-recent vintage, Voices From the Lake's Donato Dozzy and Neel sprang up from what we assume to be an Italian spacecave with a subtle, patient, arresting piece of work that transmogrified tropical Middle Earth sounds into a two-person ayahuasca dance party. Where the album does have its more traditional moments — the numbing 4/4 pulse on "Twins in Virgo," the driving boom of "Circe" — it's offset with a teetering apprehension, complicating the most recognizably "danceable" tracks on the record with wrenches in the vibe, no easy soundscapes to be had. They weren't trying to give you a bad trip, but they wanted you to think about all your senses. Tripping balls, but softly. JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

Since the dudes in Justice seem to have gotten their beards stuck in their prog-rock gatefolds, someone's got to keep the flag flying for good ol' electro-techno. The title of the third record from Berlin's Boys Noize is Out of the Black, and the subtitle could have been … And into the Red: Every sound on the record is so over-driven, it's a wonder that the LEDs on Alex Ridha's mixing board didn't melt. He's spent the past few years working with everyone from Gonzales to Scissor Sisters, but you'd never know it from the resolutely back-to-basics bangers here, each one thumping like a defibrillator connected by jumper cables to a pneumatic drill. Sawtooth buzz, acid squelch, heavy-metal crunch, more vocoders than roll call at a robot convention — Ridha pulled out all his favorite tricks, beefed 'em up, and hammered them home. The festival main stages hardly lacked for bombast this year, but no one else delivered it with such a spine-tingling sense of control. P.S.

Long before there was "EDM," there was "EBM" — Electronic Body Music — and its industrial-fringe purveyors like Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, and Skinny Puppy, artists who used repetitive synths and sociopolitical angst to jackhammer aggy dance fans into submission. But unlike most other older dance genres, the EBM revival has been thin or fused to other genres, producers lightening the load with techno and making the classic producers sound tougher than ever. Then there was Huoratron, the Finnish producer who's been experimenting with dark electronics for over a decade, landing a venom-soaked masterpiece in his first full-length: snarling, pure, grinding synths with a cogent sense of melody, the immediacy of post-dubstep rhythms, and a few Ministry-style Full Metal Jacket samples to boot. The hurt hasn't felt this good in ages. J.E.S.

The intertwined threads of London's electronic music sceme set a perfect backdrop for Maya Jane Coles' contribution to the DJ-Kicks series. She revels in newness but is not a trend-jumper, her mix heavily reliant on the accessible, uplifting melodies of deep house, the indie-pop inflected sounds of Caribou, and the subtler undercurrents of dubstep. Her own "Meant To Be" — created under the name Nocturnal Sunshine — is perhaps the best example of the DJ's light-hearted approach in action, a laid-back style found both in her production and mixing. A swelling, alarm-like pulse substitutes for bass and the track's dubstep-like propulsion instead unfolds into a soft clattering of 2-step while soulful vocals swim in and out of the shuffle. PUJA PATEL

Juju & Jordash, two Israeli jazzbo stoners based in Amsterdam, have all the right machines to make any bygone style of electronic music they want: Thumping Chicago house, silky Detroit techno, luxuriant Italo disco, incense-infused Krautrock, digital dub, you name it. And so they do, at least in fits and starts. However, they are incapable of ignoring their fondness for Teo Macero and Mahavishnu Orchestra, and then things get really interesting: Arpeggios pile up in uneasy heaps, drum patterns dissolve in fuzz, and dub delay tunnels through the fabric of time. Cobbled together out of hours-long jam sessions, the album plays out like a three-way collision between house-master Larry Heard, Miles Davis' On the Corner, and the '80s polyglot dub of the On-U Sound label. P.S.

While every dude and his bro decided to "reclaim" "trap" music for Tumblr twerkers, London bass-music totem Girl Unit unearthed his rap-centric roots (electro, Miami bass, techno) and imbued them with his own singular booty touch. Nothing on this EP was as immediately easy as 2010 trunk-thumper "Wut" — the second song he ever wrote — but that's what made Club Rez fantastic: Everyone else in his wheelhouse was still catching up to him in 2012, while he was serving a deconstructed version of Cajmere's "Percolator" with "Double Take," besting Rustie at his own effervescent synth game on "Rezday," and recalling DJ Magic Mike bass tests on the title track. London does Miami proud. J.E.S.

In a year where noise artists sold their distortion pedals and bought drum machines, why shouldn't New York's squirrelliest dance-music project brand itself as a noise outlet, even with RCA cables held firmly in cheek? There's plenty of crackle and hiss on this two-CD compilation, most of it sourced from limited-run 12-inches from the absurdly prolific two-year-old L.I.E.S. label. But there's no confusing American Noise with Kevin Drumm or Wolf Eyes; L.I.E.S. and its roster — sub rosa figures like Bookworms, Legowelt, and the appropriately named Unknown Artist — take the majority of their inspiration from the primitive house and techno of the late 1980s and early '90s. Fortunately, they're less interested in pitch-perfect pastiche than recreating the fuzzyheaded vibe of dance music's early, exploratory phase. The range is vast, from Beau Wanzer's chopped-and-screwed take on Raymond Scott to Delroy Edwards' smorgasborg of distorted beats and plucked metal; Torn Hawk channels Durutti Column through a wind tunnel; Steve Moore home-brews spells cribbed from Tangerine Dream's Sorcerer. But the whole thing has the whiff of basement genius: mold, hot solder, and shorted circuits. P.S.

Barcelona-based producer John Talabot has issues with calling his musical "tropical," though it's nearly impossible not to. "Deepak Ine" goes as far as to include samples of birds, frogs, and other jungle creatures that are eventually enveloped by Talabot's quiet layering of synths. His greatest strength is precisely this: creating a lush, quicksand-like swirl of disco-house wherein his hero of choice (warped vocals, knocking claves) has only a moment to rise up before being sucked back in. Met with a shimmery blend of faraway synths and fuzzy, yearning sirens, ƒIN is an album that’s as tempestuous and lovelorn as it is meditative. P.P.

Only 16 minutes in length, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice’s eponymous collaborative TNGHT debut was the year’s most efficiently curated case for "trap rave," a SoundCloud-fueled niche where Southern rap instrumentals and springy, electronic bass music work in head-knocking tandem. They’ll call them "hip-hop instrumentals," though, and the duo’s rap production know-how (HudMo had a hand in Kanye’s “Mercy," Lunice works with of-the-moment stars Azealia Banks and Angel Haze) helped make the EP an effortless pairing of experimental dance and hard-as-fuck hip-hop. In the span of five songs, TNGHT unleashes tinny laser-synths, abrasive kick-drum crashes, Lex Luger's signature snare rolls, ghostly wails, breaking glass, and no shortage of hooks in need of a hype-man. Something that may have started as an MC-baiting production portfolio ultimately turned into a perfectly abrasive mosh-pit all its own. P.P.

Footwork enters its fusion phase. Addison Groove's album plays something like a battle between Chicago's furiously fast juke rhythms and the groove of U.K.'s bass scene. Here, piercing rave synths and bright spurts of horns are complemented by quick, quarrelling basslines, plodding kick-drums, or tightly wound timpani. There are ventures into the worlds of minimal techno, garage, 2-step, and ghetto house with carefully plotted drum lines that are, surprisingly, just as groovy as they are tension-filled. Along the way, Spank Rock becomes an unexpected battle-conductor, spitting hooks — "Fuck that, Funk that" — with just enough old-school DJ Funk-style snarl. P.P.

Last year, Four Tet's Kieran Hebden dusted off Text, his underutilized, decade-old imprint, in rather startling fashion. He dropped a collab between himself, Thom Yorke, and Burial (unless you believe this guy) and then followed that up with a slew of exploratory 12-inches that were less for Four Tet fans and more for adventurous DJs. Pink corralled those rare vinyl sides into a singular listening experience. While one can always expect the spiritual-jazz ecstatic and garlands of gossamer folk to emanate from Hebden's laptop, it was Pink's embrace of twitchy U.K. 2-step ("Jupiters"), skipping techno minimalism ("Ocoras"), and tribal house ("Lions") that thrilled, turning a simple singles comp into something kaleidoscopic. ANDY BETA

While much of the United States seemed to experience collective amnesia as war in the Middle East waged on, Fatima Al Qadiri sought to remember. The Desert Strike EP was an attempt at reconciling her own experience as a nine-year-old growing up in Kuwait who obsessively played the Sega game Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf, only one year after Iraq invaded the country. Unearthing anxieties about video games desensitizing us to violence, Al Qadiri embodied the disconnect through a spiritually discursive narrative that combined celestial vocals and synth lines and cocked clips as hi-hats. It was eerily minimal and barren, the soundtrack to war in Second Life, and more socially relevant than any other electronic release this year. J.E.S.

Skrillex continued to catch heat for his maximalist approach to dubstep, but he also caught three Grammys this year, and continued to play the most interesting DJ sets on the big-tent EDM circuit. (Also: Fun!? 'Cause dance music is supposed to be that, right? So many killjoys in these streets.) Bangarang shushed the haters by showing how truly dynamic his approach to making tracks can be. He presaged "trap EDM," flossed his metal upbringing, swung by Dutch house, and sorta collaborated with the surviving members of the Doors, his hulking wub standing in handily for stoney Morrison. On "Summit," he paired with real-life girlfriend Ellie Goulding and her angelic vocals, chopping up syllables into a soaring, mid-set salve. Prince William and Kate Middleton are not the most important couple in the world. J.E.S.

U.K. producer Darren Cunningham, the leading man of Actress, built up his avant-electronic reputation across two albums by gutting and deconstructing funk, dubstep, and R&B. And for his third and best, he razes everything. Conceived as an aural trip through the underworld, R.I.P drifts through murky, beatless, purgatorial states. New Age and ambient tropes abound, all shimmering bells and harp-like glissandos, but are suffused with dread. When actual beats do emerge (on the menacing "Shadow from Tartarus" and "IWAAD") they turn into Dream Machine flickers, producing a maddening, disorienting strobe that defies comprehension. And like fellow producer Burial, Actress cloaks his bleak, despairing miniatures in just enough hiss, crackle, and static to stave off the chills as he takes listeners down the River Styx. A.B.

For a few years now, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm has ranked among the very few electronic producers to get props from rock aesthetes and disco purists alike; and in 2012, the Norwegian producer/multi-instrumentalist played magnificently to each camp. February's seven-track, 53-minute Six Cups of Rebel let his prog impulses run riot, referencing the eccentric excess of mid-'70s Todd Rundgren (who returned the favor by mixing a far more dramatic 12-inch version of "Quiet Place to Live"), ultimately resulting in music that recalled the climactic anime scene when the hero rides his robot victoriously through the heavens before the credits. Released in November, the six-track, 34-minute Smalhans served up roomier, leaner, shorter, krautier space disco mixed by his comparably lauded countryman Todd Terje. On both albums, Lindstrøm sets nearly everything at a similar, dancefloor-filling tempo; but it's his skill at star-scraping melodies and undulating rhythms that makes the repetition more than welcome. BARRY WALTERS

What began as an S.A.T. prompt for dubstep originator Mala and eclectic DJ Gilles Peterson — could we go to Cuba, return with a hard drive of local sounds, and make a real album? — turns out to be a mindful attempt at moving dubstep beyond its utilitarian role as U.S. and U.K. club music. Knowing titles like "The Tourist" and "Changuito" (named after the famed Cuban percussionist) convey an outsider's sense of respect for another culture, without sacrificing the beatfreak confidence necessary to just slice and dice someone else's music until it sounds hot. Samples are attentively tweaked (see the endless wave of horns on "Changuito") and the best moments bridge the gap between two disparate styles (like when manic wubs dance with polyrhythmic percussion on "The Tunnel"). Too mellow for rave-tent beatdrop addicts, too Putamayo comp for purists who pride themselves on good taste and restraint, Mala's deep, complex, low-end mutations are an affront to both sides of the dubstep culture war — and that's just what the polarizing genre needs right now. B.S.

Caribou mainman Dan Snaith explains the difference between his two principal projects: "Caribou records take a lot more time, and I'm a lot more meticulous and go back and really think about them. Daphni tracks…I just do." Appropriately, Jiaolong, the debut LP from his fledgling club alias, is all about spontaneity, both in the studio and on the dance floor. In part, that's because its tracks were originally intended simply as fodder for Snaith's own DJ sets — custom-made patchworks of Detroit-inspired techno, chopped-up Afrobeat, and discombobulated modular freakery. But what works wonders on the dance floor turns out to work just as well as an album-length statement, with rickety machine rhythms, skeletal melodies, and psychedelic bursts of color locking together in counterintuitive ways, creating their own logic at every unexpected turn. Snaith's stated goal as a DJ — "to totally blindside the room in a way that somehow makes sense" — comes across beautifully in nine humbly willful tracks. Maybe there's something to "dance like no one's watching," after all. P.S.

Chicago footwork has always been fundamentally about levitation. That's true of both its dance steps, which are like B-boying in zero gravity, and the music itself, held aloft by polyrhythmic sequences that spin like helicopter blades in a dizzyingly syncopated moiré of accents and offbeats. But "Footworkin on Air," the track that opens Da Mind of Traxman, goes way beyond pointing out the merely obvious: Its bubbling mbira, Reichian counterpoints, and Oneohtrix-style arpeggios float so weightlessly that they make Traxman's peers sound comparatively earthbound. If juke and footwork lifted house music aloft, Da Mind of Traxman strings balloons from the eaves and sends it soaring over the skyline.It's hardly all as downy-soft as that opening cut, though. Elsewhere, spring-loaded hi-hats put the mousetrap back into trap music and 808 kick drums roll out in pile-driving seismic volleys. But the album's most important contribution to footwork, particularly at a moment when the style risks being co-opted and codified by legions of hipsters reworking YouTube rips in Ableton, is to remind us of its essential malleability, as capable of turning AC/DC into a gospel call-and-response as it is of splicing MPC swing with free-jazz flux. Quoting and referencing Prince, Ronnie Laws, ghetto house, circus music, Blaxploitation flicks, and, obliquely, Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full" (via the Ofra Haza a cappella that Coldcut used for their remix), Da Mind does for footwork's culture of sample-flipping what DJ Shadow's Endtroducing… did for instrumental hip-hop. P.S.

Self-released and low-key, this overview of the Chicago juke/footwork/ghettotech alchemist's new label was one of the most quietly influential dance records of the year, sliding in at the beginning of summer and completely altering the way the underground crafted its beats. When Teklife dropped in June, footwork sounds were already de rigeur with non-Chicago trend-hoppers (on the good end, Machinedrum; on the bad end, everyone on Soundcloud who was doing moombahton three months before). But Teklife's subtle clamor and Rashad's sense of dance-music history (sampling Robbie Tronco's 1998 vogue-runway classic "Walk for Me," Maurice Joshua and Chantay Savage's scatting house single "I Gotta Hold on U" from '92, and, of course, Roy Ayers and Gil Scott Heron) were too refined to be approximated. For the rest of the year, you could hear Rashad's nimble, profound fingerprint in new incarnations of grime, #seapunk, house, drum'n'bass, and genres way beyond (producers such as Redlight, Ultrademon, Disclosure, French Fries, even an official remix of Ellie Goulding's Halcyon by Easy Girl). So many were inspired by his essence, yet no one could catch up to his spirit. J.E.S.