Hana Vu writes pop songs from her bedroom in Los Angeles. She signed to Ghostly International in 2021, leading to the announcement of her full-length debut, Public Storage.

Vu's relationship with music began when she picked up a guitar her dad had lying around and taught herself to play. She'd wake up every day and listen to LA's ALT 98.7, home to '90s and '00s alternative rock; later in high school, she found the local DIY scene. She remembers, "A lot of my peer musicians were surf rock/punk type bands and so I tried to fit into that when I was gigging around. But what I was listening to at that time [St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens] was very different from what I performed."

In 2014, at age 14, she started keeping a journal of bedroom pop experiments on Bandcamp. Her sound — brooding, melodic pop driven by guitar and Vu's distinctive contralto — developed across a series of self-releases, including a low-key Willow Smith collaboration and covers of The Cure and Phil Collins. Her 2018 single "Crying on the Subway" caught the ear of Gorilla vs. Bear, who released Vu's self-produced debut EP, How Many Times Have You Driven By, on their Luminelle Recordings imprint. Early coverage came from Pitchfork, NME, and The Fader, the latter playfully declaring, "the seventeen-year-old is cooler than you and me." She followed it up with a double EP in 2019 on Luminelle titled Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway.

As a live performer, Vu has supported the likes of Soccer Mommy, Sales, Nilufer Yanya, Wet, Kilo Kish, and Phantogram. 2021 LP Public Storage marks her first release with Ghostly and her first time working with a co-producer, Jackson Phillips (Day Wave).

Brijean is the collaboration of Brijean Murphy and Doug Stuart. Murphy, an accomplished DJ, session and live player in Oakland’s diverse music scene has emerged as one of indie’s most in-demand percussionists (Poolside, Toro Y Moi, U.S. Girls). In 2018, she began recording songs with multi-instrumentalist and producer Stuart, who shares a background in jazz and pop in bands such as Bells Atlas, Meernaa, and Luke Temple.

Eventually dubbed Brijean, the project grew out of marathon sessions at their intimate home-studio, wedged between touring schedules that rarely-overlapped. Their first effort, Walkie Talkie (released by Native Cat Recordings in 2019), found Murphy taking the mic for the first time to deliver dreamy dance tracks that felt home-cooked and effortlessly chic. Her layered percussion and hypnotic, expressive vocals coupled with Stuart’s production and harmonic palette evoked shades of disco, ‘90s house, and a sly pop sensibility. ​”A smooth, sumptuous, and soulful record,” said Bandcamp, who helped propel the group’s early following.

Murphy’s musical talents are family heirlooms: her father, percussionist and engineer Patrick Murphy, taught Brijean her first patterns on a pair of congas that she inherited from the late Trinidadian steel drum legend Vince Charles (of Neil Diamond). Growing up in LA’s Glassell Park, Murphy was raised by a cadre of honorary aunts and uncles – a deep bench of jazz, latin and soul musicians in their own rites. This meant she grew up regaled by musical lore – larger than life tales of jazz luminaries, psychedelic trips and obscure cultural enclaves – sampling some of those family stories and weaving them into her work.

Growing up outside of Chicago, Stuart found his way into jazz clubs and festivals as a teenager, frequently going to hear Jeff Parker, Fred Anderson, and other members of the AACM. While attending the University of Michigan, he studied under Detroit jazz royalty, Robert Hurst and Geri Allen. After college, Stuart became intrigued by the music of J Dilla and Moodymann, and began learning production and exploring the connections between jazz, house, and hip hop.

Originally inspired by the dembow rhythms emanating from souped-up Honda Civics during his teenage years in Miami, Piñeyro's first forays into electronic music production were influenced by reggaeton. Already well-versed in house, IDM, dnb/jungle and downtempo, Piñeyro came up with a dreamier dembow varietal that was softer around the edges, integrating the headspace and soulful atmospherics of ambient and deep house.

While Piñeyro had already made beloved records under other aliases—like "Song For Masahiro," under his house guise, DJ Wey, or Dreamt Takes, his IDM-flavoured 12-inch as Luis—DJ Python's "deep reggaeton" quickly found a wider audience, especially following the release of his 2017 debut album, Dulce Compañia, on Anthony Naples and Jenny Slattery's Incienso label. tracks like "Todo Era Azul (Versiòn Afuera)" became subtle dancefloor anthems—low-slung, ethereal and sexy.

Meanwhile, Python's all-tempo DJ style, honed in New York City’s network of dance bars, became an underground phenomenon. Piñeyro would follow his debut album with the deft, melodic Derretirse 12-inch for Dekmantel, as well as DJ gigs and live PAs at Sustain-Release, Unsound, Dekmantel, Tokyo's Contact club and Printworks to name a few. At home in New York, he holds down a residency at Nowadays in Queens and frequently plays with friends around the city.

With that momentum, Piñeyro prepared for the spring 2020 release of the second DJ Python album, Mas Amable. Then the world stopped. Yet somehow, the album—both a 45-minute piece and an eight-track LP, an ambient composition and a modern club record—was exactly what people needed to hear amidst the uncertainty of lockdown. Gauzy atmospherics stretched over hypnotic, beats like a blanket, spoken word sections by NYC poet LA Warman were listless yet prescient. An ambient house record for a new generation, Mas Amable came in at #1 on Boomkat and Resident Advisor's list of the best albums of 2020. Other accolades for Mas Amable came from Pitchfork (30 Best Electronic Releases Of 2020, 22 Best Songs By Latinx Artists in 2020, The 100 Best Songs Of 2020), The Quietus, Crack, NPR and many more.

As C418, Austin-based German composer and producer Daniel Rosenfeld is best known for his original soundtracks to Minecraft, the single best-selling video game of all time, which has earned him accolades that reference artists like Erik Satie and Brian Eno.

Beyond his pixelated output, he’s developed a diverse discography over the last decade that we're so excited to be representing both sides on for synch licensing. His output covers a huge amount of ground and includes vocal electronic pop patterns, tense EDM barn-burners, neo-classical dreamscapes, and sparse ambient motifs.

Canadian producer Jamison Izaak has explored a spectrum of synth-pop, soft house, and romantic electronic modes across a decade of activity but the emotional vision threading them together remains constant: “Teen Daze is dream fulfillment.”

Nowhere is this more vividly embodied than on his latest and lushest creation, Interior. Inspired by early youth memories of discovering Daft Punk and the heady limitless horizons of dance music, the album’s eight songs swoon, spiral, and bump, a swirl of flashing lights and vaporous neon, electric futures glimpsed in ecstatic heights: “Like what the teenagers in Akira might be listening to.” It’s music of skylines, escape, and sensual energy, forever cresting through nights that never end.

Khotin is the recording project of Edmonton-based electronic artist Dylan Khotin-Foote. Since his first album as Khotin, 2014’s Hello World — a breezy set of soft-hued acid and effervescent hybrid house released on 1080p — he’s moved freely between genre experiments, every move linked by distinct melodic sensibility. He’s released a stream of talked-about 12”s and remixes on labels such as 4AD, DFA, Pacific Rhythm, Public Release as well as his own self-release imprints Khotin Industries and Waterpark. His dance-minded output, marked by years of involvement in Vancouver’s underground landscape, is both offset and informed by a deep interest in downtempo sound, the mood of stillness, the melancholy after the club.

Bryndon Cook, who records as Starchild & the New Romantic, describes his music as “Champion Music for the Heartbroken.” Drawing equally on electro and R&B, with silky sheets of synth cascading over rubbery bass lines, each song spikes lithe vocal melodies with an undeniable twinge of sadness.

Growing up in Prince Georges County, Maryland, Starchild was in the center of decades of music history. Growing up in the D.C./Maryland/Virginia area, you can harness a great depth of music—Go-Go, Soul, Hip Hop, R&B, Jazz and especially, Gospel. My roots, he says. Its the birthplace of everyone from Duke Ellington and Marvin Gaye to Mya, Dru Hill and D’Angelo. Starchilds name came from his time in the DMV—I grew up across the street from the NASA Headquarters on Copernicus Drive in Greenbelt, he explains. Thats one of the reasons I adopted the Starchild moniker. The other is George Clinton. 

Dabrye (an alias of Ann Arbor’s Tadd Mullinix) is best known for creating head-nodding beats with saw-tooth bass lines and a keen eye to forward-thinking production. With support from both the hip-hop underground and the electronic music press, he has earned a place in URB’s Next 100 and XLR8R’s Top 100 albums, among other accolades. Dabrye’s trilogy began with One/Three in2001, which was followed by the Instrmntl mini-album for Scott Herren’s (Prefuse 73) Eastern Developments label. Both releases earned glowing reviews for their handmade rhythmic style and minimalist execution. 2006’s Two/Three LP steps up the beatmaking ingenuity and spotlights Mullinix’s favorite underground MCs, including Doom, J Dilla, Vast Aire, and Wildchild to create a major statement for the new Hip-Hop sound of Detroit.

Mary Lattimore is a harpist living in Los Angeles. She experiments with her Lyon and Healy Concert Grand harp and effects. Her solo debut, The Withdrawing Room, was released in 2013 on Desire Path Recordings.

Mary also writes harp parts for songs and recordings, performing and recording with such great artists as Meg Baird, Thurston Moore, Sharon Van Etten, Jarvis Cocker, Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Ed Askew and Fursaxa.

Kllo is a collaboration between Melbourne cousins Chloe Kaul and Simon Lam. They first emerged in 2014 with a sound beyond their years; fully formed, fusing elements of R&B, UK garage, and 2-step with modern sensibilities and wide-eyed sincerity

Depending on whom you ask, Matthew Dear is a DJ, a dance-music producer, an experimental pop artist, a bandleader. He co-founded both Ghostly International and its dancefloor offshoot, Spectral Sound. Hes had remixes commissioned by The XX, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Spoon, Hot Chip, The Postal Service, and Chemical Brothers; hes made mixes for Get Physicals Body Language and Fabric mix series. He maintains four aliases (Audion, False, Jabberjaw, and Matthew Dear), each with its own style and distinct visual identity. He straddles multiple musical worlds and belongs to noneand hes just hitting his stride.

As Tycho, Scott Hansen blends swirling melodies into vaguely triumphant arcs that crisscross between stuttering beats and vocal samples, creating rolling sonic landscapes that extend into the horizon. Known in the design world as ISO50, the San Francisco-based artist is famed for his warm, textured design style, which serves as a backdrop and mirror for his musical output.

Brooklyn duo Beacon explore the dark side of sweet melody with a sound thats as seductive as it is subtly discomfiting. The duo Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett met at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where they were studying sculpture and painting respectively. They fuse the deceptively sweet melodies of R&B with an intoxicating undercurrent of darkness, drawing on influence as disparate as Warps back catalogue and Underworld.

The music of Zach Saginaw, who records as Shigeto, has always cross-wired of a host of different musical influences. His EPs Semi-Circle and What We Held Onto explored his grandmothers experience from a US internment camp through ambient, beat-driven tracks, using samples of his grandmothers voice. His debut album Full Circle was a culmination of these EPs, employing obsessive field recording and meticulous percussion to create sumptuous instrumental hip-hop. 2012s sophomore album Lineage was a musical journey through his heritage set to the sounds of jazz, hip-hop, funk and folk. And 2012’s No Better Time Than Now was an album about living in the moment, with songs that seemed to be harbingers of change and immediacy (“First Saturn Return,” “Soul Searching”)

Xeno & Oaklander are a minimal electronics girl/boy duo, and they are based in Brooklyn, NY. They began writing music and soundtracks in 2004. Liz Wendelbo is French / Norwegian and Sean McBride is from Maryland. They record their songs live in their Brooklyn studio and play analogue synthesizers and instruments exclusively. 

Steve Hauschildt is an American electronic musician and artist who resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a member of the seminal band Emeralds from 2006-2013. A veteran of the experimental music community, Steve's compositions have utilized synthesizers, computers and digital processing to transform established norms and genres. To date he has released three full-length albums on Kranky as well an anthology of his work on Editions Mego.

Ask Will Wiesenfeld to contrast Baths with the music made under his Geotic alias, and you’ll get a simple response: Baths is active listening, Geotic is passive listening. But behind this straightforward duality exists two projects that are equally poignant yet starkly distinct, reflective of the emotional complexities of its creator.

Don’t mistake “passive listening” for anything remotely resembling apathy. Released on Ghostly International, Geotic’s Abysma might be dance music created for at-home listening, but it’s replete with a quiet beauty and private communion that can rival anything made to command the totality of your attention span. In a world riven by noise and distraction, Abysma is as subtle as Sunday morning ritual, a tender epiphany in a bombastic fireworks show.

Com Truise is one of the many personas of producer and designer Seth Haley, born and raised in upstate New York and operating out of a 12’-overrun apartment in Princeton, New Jersey. An admitted synth obsessive, Com Truise is the maker of an experimental and bottom heavy style he calls “mid-fi synth-wave, slow-motion funk”.

Michal Jacaszek talks about his music in a very self-assured way. He lists clear moods, behaviors, and feelings (nostalgia, misery, classical music, and contemporary ambient electronic artists such as Tim Hecker) that influence the way he works. This is noteworthy for two reasons—first, because the Polish artist is explaining all of this very clearly in English, and second because the subsuming, amorphous pastiches of noise, samples, and tones he is known for aren’t easily put into words, let alone a second language.

he first song Chester Raj Anand, better known as Lord RAJA, ever produced was for his brother. When he was six years old, RAJAs brother taught him how to use ACID and Fruity Loops, and RAJA would compose beats for his older sibling to rap over. We listened to hip-hop growing up, RAJA explains. Hes 5 years older than me, and he definitely introduced me to a lot of music. But when he left for college, I started establishing my own sound.

Working from his love of really raw, scary Aphex Twin as well as his background in piano, keyboard and jazz percussion, RAJA composed songs in his basement on a custom computer, eventually releasing Intonations: Music for Primordial Recollection under the name InfinitiRock on Asthmatic Kitty in 2011. He took on the name RAJA while studying at SUNY Purchase, and released a series of songs leading up to Halloween. I wanted to make songs that sound like visuals, he says. Help take people somewhere bigger than their standard headspace.

Heathered Pearls is Polish-born Brooklynite Jakub Alexander, whose career in music was deeply rooted before ever releasing his own. Curator for Tycho’s ISO50 blog, co-founder of the Moodgadget label, and A&R at Ghostly International, Alexander has been entrenched in the industry since 2002. He was first introduced to the power of ambient music by his mother at an early age, discovered techno as a teenager living in the Detroit area, and gradually learned to create his own vision of the genres.

The late 1990s was a fertile time in the American electronic underground. A growing body of artists, spread around the nation, were engaging in the latest round of a decades-long transatlantic musical conversation. At the convergence of hip-hop, electronic, and soul music, these artists sought to carve out their own lane. In September 2001, New Orleans’ Telefon Tel Aviv, high school friends Joshua Eustis and the late Charles Cooper, joined the conversation with their debut album, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, released by Hefty Records. A labour of love, Fahrenheit was an attempt by the pair “to contribute something meaningful” Eustis says today, “something definitely American, and kinda southern too.” On the fifteenth anniversary of its release, Ghostly International is reissuing Fahrenheit Fair Enough with a vinyl edition and bonus digital material

TRK sound like a comedown, a bad trip, a hip romance, “a motel room, a tyre print in the rain, an alibi” (plan B). 808 beats, evocative basslines, texture on texture. Jonnine’s wry, androgynous slur melts on top – sliding the masculine into the feminine. People say it sounds like Suicide and Swans, but more beautiful.

HTRK’s vision is mainly about emotion – having just the right amount of expression versus restraint. They could unleash a sonic nightmare – how they temper their power is what makes them unique.

Jeff McIlwain has been producing his diverse, melodic strain of abstract electronic music as Lusine for a decade-and-a-half. Originally a Texas native, McIlwain moved to the West Coast in the late 90s to study electronic music and sound design at CalArts. It was during this time in L.A. that he would meet Shad T. Scott, who subsequently put out Lusines self-titled debut on his Isophlux imprint. McIlwain relocated to his current home of Seattle in late 2002 and began steadily releasing his music on Ghostly International. He has also contributed tracks to various compilations and remix releases from Mute, !K7, Kompakt, Asthmatic Kitty, and Shitkatapult.

Growing up in both New York and Miami, Michna (real name: Adrian Yin Michna) is that unique breed of artist that draws from both the urban and the tropical. As a youngster, Adrian started DJing parties with cassettes and playing trombone in a band on the NYC bar circuit including the infamous Lions Den and CBGBs.

After moving to Miami in the mid-90s, he co-founded the pioneering Secret Frequency Crew, who deftly mixed instrumental hip-hop and electronic into a coherent whole. Adrian later found his stride as a solo artist by bringing together his myriad influences into a succinct sonic persona. In 2007, he flew to Brazil to work with Diplo and Bonde Do Role producing the song Quero Te Amar. A year later, he signed to Ghostly International to release his debut LP Magic Monday.

Grammy-nominated guitarist and producer Christopher Willits occupies a unique corner of the music universe hovering above the intersection of electronic productions nuts and bolts and a wide-open creative mind. His tireless activity has produced over 25 albums in the last 15 years—solo and in collaboration with artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tycho, and Taylor Deupree—and an organic, minimal sound that expands like the vines of an electro-acoustic kudzu plant. Willits is the co-founder of spatial audio / 3D sound platform Envelop as well as the creative collective Overlap, a teacher of music and mediation in San Francisco, a tech geek, a visual/new media artist, and virtuosic musician in one. Throughout, he strives to create space in which to illuminate creativity and catalyze inner change.

Currently residing in Denver by way of Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, and Minnesota, Brian Lindgren's project is an amalgam of hip-hop, filtered thru a decidedly electronic lens. An avid gamer, incurable doodler, and fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Minecraft, he's a self-professed nerd, but a nerd with an ear to know how to turn a room into a party, and a set of beats into a symphony. Sounds about right.

San Francisco-born Avalon Emerson grew up in Arizona, where she taught herself to write, produce and engineer music by playing in and recording her friends’ bands. After high school, she returned to the City by the Bay and started to throw and DJ at all-night underground warehouse parities in San Francisco before she even reached America’s legal drinking age. 

By the end of 2014 she had logged two more 12-inches on San Francisco imprint, SpringTheory, and once she moved to Berlin in 2015 she got involved in the German scene with an outing on Dresden-based label Shtum and a debut at Berlin’s Panorama Bar. Soon she started to gain international recognition as a rising producer and DJ with a highly-regarded EP for Whities in early 2016 and regular appearances at top clubs like Berghains Panorama Bar and Amsterdam’s multipurpose venue De School. Avalon’s sets are unique thanks to her combination of banging jams with her own original and unreleased cybernedits, DJ tool reworks and oddball re-edits that you can only hear on the dance floor while she’s playing. Emersons latest EP and Spectral debut, Narcissus In Retrograde, explores four different styles that shape her distinct voice as a producer and songwriter, from symphonic showstoppers to broken acid.

Black Marble formed in 2012 as an artistic extension of Chris Stewarts collection of songs and ideas. The name Black Marble took some time to arrive upon and is more than fitting. As a literal description of a material used to sculpt and build, its the fleeting notion of a one-time symbol of taste and affluence, frozen in a moment, slightly dusty and showing every smudge and mark. Started in a recording space in Bushwick, NY, Black Marble made their first EP, Weight Against the Door (Hardly Art) followed quickly by their chillingly moody and atmospheric debut full-length, A Different Arrangement (Hardly Art).

With both early releases the band followed a familiar path stomped down by synth wave pioneers whose hand assembled sounds and DIY ethics paved the way for likeminded artists. While taking inspiration from late 70’s and early 80’s projects like Silicon Teens, Iron Curtain, Lives of Angels, and Solid Space, Black Marble dialed in on a clear understanding of its own specific sound

Like many classically trained musicians, Logan Takahashi didn’t take the techniques he learned at Oberlin Conservatory as gospel. He bent them until they broke, then reshaped all those errant rhythms, melodies, and timbres into an entirely new language while developing widescreen dance tracks in the Brooklyn duo Teengirl Fantasy. Over the past seven years, Takahashi and his former college-mate/fellow producer (Nick Weiss) have released acclaimed records on such respected labels as True Panther Sounds and R&S, collaborated with Kelela, Laurel Halo, and Panda Bear, and scored a Blade Runner-inspired Fashion Week collection for Opening Ceremony.

Since their inception in 2007, Will Sessions has established themselves as one of Detroit’s must-see live bands, with a work ethic and varied musical output that reflects their city’s roots.

After cutting their teeth as the house band for the Motor City Funk Night parties, and working as session musicians in and around the city, the 8-piece band began releasing original music on Funk Night Records in the form of 7” singles.

In 2011, Will Sessions collaborated with Elzhi (formerly of Slum Village) with the release of Elmatic, an LP that pays tribute to Nas’s classic album Illmatic, earning Will Sessions critical acclaim and marking the beginning of their working relationship with the record label Fat Beats. Elmatic was regarded as one of the best hip hop albums of 2011, while an instrumental version of the project is equally revered. In the same year, Will Sessions joined forces with Motown Funk Brother Dennis Coffey and toured the US performing songs from Dennis’s catalogue with notable performances at SXSW and Bonnaroo.

Throughout the following years, the band stayed busy with projects such as Mixtakes (a series of live performances covering some of the band’s favorite and most influential tracks, all filmed in real time and released on Fat Beats), more singles released via Funk Night Records, as well as continuing to build a reputation as one of Detroit’s premiere live bands.

In 2017, Will Sessions launched their own record label, Sessions Sounds, as an outlet for the band to release material on their own terms. During the first year, Sessions Sounds yielded five well-received releases including “Lost Without You” b/w “Seven Mile” featuring Amp Fiddler (Parliament/Funkadelic, Was Not Was, Mahogani Music), “Knowledge of 12th” featuring Elzhi, “Kindred” featuring Wendell Harrison (Tribe Records) b/w “Polyester People” featuring Jeremy Ellis (The Roots, Ubiquity), and Deluxe featuring Allan Barnes (The Blackbyrds) and Florida’s ‘King of Funk’ Rickey Calloway.

The first project of 2018 from Sessions Sounds is The One, a full-length collaboration with Amp Fiddler featuring the 3-piece vocal ensemble, Dames Brown. The album is Will Sessions’ most cohesive and fully realized original work to date, with roots that go deep into late 70’s progressive funk, soul and boogie.

In the past few years, the band has headlined shows and performed at festivals in Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Europe. In addition to their own work, the band is known for their studio sessions and collaborations with Mayer Hawthorne, Slum Village, Black Milk, Phat Kat, Guilty Simpson, Eminem and Slaughter House, KRS-One, Danny Brown, Dj Dez/Andres, McKinley Jackson, Griz, and Toots & the Maytals.

TOBACCO has proven throughout the years to be an enigma choosing to shroud his personal life in mystery in order to keep a deeper level of focus on the music. That has all helped tremendously as there’s a lot to chew on from 2008’s debut FUCKED UP FRIENDS to 2010’s MANIAC MEAT, all leading up and spilling into TOBACCO’s Ghostly debut, ULTIMA II MASSAGE.

Over the course of three LPs and a number of EPs, the Pennsylvania snake-synth-charmer has continuously depended his approach to aural depravity. Ultima II Massage brings the listener up to TOBACCO’s speed as he widens a jagged swath through his own weird catalog, each disparate track damaged to the point of contributing to some sort of greater, lurching Frankenstein-like state.

As one of America’s premier techno producers, Geoff White has amassed a catalogue of distinguished releases on labels such as Force Inc., Traum, Proptronix, Morris Audio, Cytrax and his own Edit Audio, most recently making the move to Ghostly International (where he explores guitar textures under his Aeroc moniker) and Spectral Sound (where he creates jacking dance tracks with live instruments under his birth name). A native of Columbus, OH, White relocated to Barcelona to continue his work in music. His first full-length album, Questions and Comments, was released on Force Inc. in 2001. The formation of the Edit Audio label followed shortly thereafter, with an emphasis on modern production techniques as well as dancefloor beats. In 2003, Geoff paired with Stewart Walker to produce the album Discord, released music under the alias Jackstone, and made an EP with Swiss duo Dialogue. White has also provided remixes for a variety of labels such as Leaf and Source. White now turns to Spectral for a series of micro-house EPs, which began with the icy Ince (2004) and continued with Etsche (2005).

One of the most intriguing and welcome developments in the world of music over the past few years has been the renaissance of house music. A new generation of producers are incorporating the signature tropes of classic Chicago house into a post-millennial reinvention of the genre, creating a wealth of new takes on one of the most influential sounds in the history of electronic music. Few producers, however, have done this quite so deftly as London-based producer Mike Greene, aka Fort Romeau.

Gold Panda’s journey has been a long and intermittently strange one. Initially, the Essex, UK artist spent his day-job time behind the counters of various houses of ill repute—adult bookstores, record shops—finding that the two were equally seedy. He spent the rest of his waking hours building up a library of original, dizzyingly eclectic electronic music incorporating a disparate mix of influences and source material. The results were gleaming instrumental hip-hop tracks saturated with bright colors and sublimely chopped-up vocal samples. Thus, Gold Panda was born.

Max Ravitz is an accomplished designer of sounds and a composer of murky, melodic electronic music designed to elicit movement in the body. For the past several years, Ravitz has been a fixture in New York’s punk-ish world of do-it-yourself house and techno, releasing a steady stream of records (under his own name or in duos Inhalants, Masks, or Pulpo, but most frequently under his own legerdemain-styled solo moniker, Patricia) on labels like Opal Tapes and L.I.E.S.

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he Sight Below is an alias of Rafael Anton Irisarri, an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, curator, producer and interdisciplinary artist based out of the Pacific Northwest.

The music of The Sight Below conjures half-remembered dreams and soft-focus sentiments with elegiac beauty; like blurred snippets of film recognizable only as organic objects: black-and-white amoebas milling about, or a sunset rendered in grayscale. The resulting textured Gaussian curves are pinned to deep, propulsive bass tones and achingly subtle electronics. These guide the listener across the gloom and towards the music’s hopeful center. The results seem as effortless as natural phenomena; in fact, they’re carefully played, head-nodding hymns to the artist’s secluded life.

In a city famed for its disparate and varied musical excellence, the alignment of feted electronic artist and producer Shigeto and Bruiser Brigade member ZelooperZ is an entirely natural thing. Introduced by mutual friends, the duo bonded quickly and began freeform collaborating without expectations or rules. Two years later they've shaped A Piece Of The Geto. The album presents new lanes and expanded peripheries for both artists: ZelooperZ, embracing his various artistic sides that he might not have shown before, and Zach Saginaw, aka Shigeto, shifting from solo performer to music producer for the first time alongside a vocalist

Sinuous ecometric rhythms and dense rain-blown tone sculptures shine and wind between electrified cotton-nodes, all careening, sliding, colliding across and through a synaptic panorama. Peninsula-based Kiln are Kevin Hayes on pulse, tump, tick with Kirk Marrison and Clark Rehberg III on hue, shape and spark. After a decade of genre spinning and attention spent fusing live organikas with binary tumbleweeds,

Kiln settles into a new neurologic with their upcoming release this spring on Ghostly. Not only for the headphone set, KILN’s recent intent has been on finding the intuitive fulcrum of gentle momentum invigoration and hyperacoustic digi-texture chromatics as suited for a wider listening environment. Kiln’s latest humanist gallery will appeal to any and all who lust for fine sound form.

Although Randolph Chabot’s music has always glowed with positivity, it took an adolescent epiphany to bring his alter-ego, Deastro, into the light of day. By age 17, Chabot says, “I’d written hundreds of songs already, but didn’t like any of them. I was praying, and then, it sounded like a space symphony – that’s the only thing I could call it – playing in my head, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. That initial sound has never left me. It’s always there, giving me enough hope to write.” Using whatever instruments he could find, Chabot began constructing the sound of his dreams: teenage anthems peopled by superheroes, aliens, lost souls, and star-crossed lovers. He’s been recording his space symphonies ever since, streaking the skies as his superhuman alter-ego, Deastro.

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he serene ambient compositions of Loscil come courtesy of Vancouver-based musician Scott Morgan. Taking his moniker from the “looping oscillator” function in the computer music language Csound, Morgan uses custom made Max/MSP sequencers and the occasional live instrument to build robust, droning soundscapes. Morgan cites influences including krautrock pioneers Cluster, minimalist composer Gavin Bryars, and a wealth of film music composers.

Twin Cities musician Psymun possesses an inimitable cross-genre style and deft human touch, together making him a deeply distinctive and subtle voice in contemporary production. He first picked up a guitar at age 5 but it wasnt until a stream of influence from Jimi Hendrix, The White Stripes and Aphex Twin that he re-entered a music-making space in early high school, learning chords and programming IDM-style productions on FL Studio. Noise and ambient would go on to inform his ear and practice until an obsession with hip-hop in his later teens led to sampling and beatmaking. While hes perhaps best known for his output in the latter format, its form is always as multi-dimensional and surprising as the range of sounds which brought him there.

Our Lego-sculpting, electron microscope owning, Japanese speaking uber-producer puts his joy of life, of making, assembling, breaking down, and re-assembling things into making his music. Todd fixes and flies planes, has fabricated a video game kiosk out of hospital equipment, and is at work on a hovercraft. MacGuyver? Perhaps. Musically, Todd has been championed across the board by the likes of Gilles Peterson and Aphex Twin, UR's Mad Mike to Warp's Flying Lotus. But such accolades should be taken lightly; after all, Todd just wants to have a little fun and get some time in on the dance floor. Like Todd, we should all get (more) busy.