Best of 2013: 11 EPs

It’s normal to round up the year’s best albums and tracks, but here at White Noise we like to pay a little attention to the EP format as well. While lacking the depth of a long-player, an EP can still offer a striking mission statement, and a platform for more than a simple collection of dance tracks. The best EPs work like miniatures, exploring a single idea from several angles or allowing a producer to flex their creative muscles over a series of different styles. Here we’ve collected the EPs that really stood out to us over the year, by either offering something a bit different or showing an artist at the very top of their game.

There were so many excellent releases this year, and the cruel selection process meant that many couldn’t make the list: superb outings from Big Doint, Innershades, Motor City Drum Ensemble and Palms Trax offered some of the year’s best house tunes, while DJ Rashad, Call Super, and White Material returned with a vengeance on a series of ace records. The EPs on the list gave us just a little bit more, and while some came out almost a year ago, the following vinyls are still on regular repeat here at White Noise HQ.

If you want to read more, click on the title of any release to read the full WN review.

11: Mix Mup – After The Job [Hinge Finger]

After The Job

Mix Mup broke away from Kassem Mosse’s shadow on this fantastic outing for Will Bankhead and Joy O’s Hinge Finger, plying a pitch-perfect brand of lofi house and techno. Doomed and Copa Jams were menacing rollers with a strong undercurrent of funk, while closer Bungalow was a radical left-turn into glistening beatless territory. It was on the title track, however, where Mix Mup really hit the mark, a warped collision of Tina Turner, clicking percussion and an unholy bassline.

10: Martyn – Newspeak [Dolly Dubs]

Oceania

Martyn proved why he’s still one of the best in the game with this expert three-tracker, with glistening bass music backed by two retro-house bumpers on the b-side. Oceania was a beautiful trip, but it was on the low-slung grooves of Newspeak and What Is Room 101 that Martyn really got his jack on. It’s rare to get an EP where every tune is a highlight, but you can trust a producer like Martyn to really nail it.

9: Laurel Halo – Behind The Green Door [Hyperdub]

Throw

Hyperdub’s Laurel Halo was responsible for two of the year’s best releases: this EP and her Chance Of Rain album, and it’s a credit to her remarkable talent that the two couldn’t have been more different. While the LP saw Halo toying with icy, autumnal textures, Green Door was a masterclass in machine-fed funk, from Throw’s beautiful piano to Sexmission’s suffocated techno.

8: Visionist – Snakes [Leisure System]

Snakebite

Logos may have secured the year’s best grime album, but this year’s 12” crown belongs to Visionist. The restless producer let out a slew of lethal productions across the year, but it was on Snakes for Leisure System that he conjured a high-def psychedelia which sounded like nothing else.

7: June – Don’t Be Seen With Me [June]

Face This (Deep House Mix)

We’d be the first to admit that there’s a lot of hardware-driven retro house going round, but none hit that sweet spot of past and future like June did this year. Don’t Be Seen With Me was a masterclass in mood, offsetting glistening melodies with taut drum machine workouts and the occasional foray into acid and new age territory.

6: Romare – Love Songs Part 1 [Black Acre]

Taste Of Honey (From The City)

After topping this list last year, Romare once again scored a winner on his second EP for Black Acre. His collage of samples and genres is executed with a fascinating socio-historical bent, making Love Songs a feast for the mind as well as the feet.

5: Levon Vincent – Rainstorm II [Novel Sound]

???

After a blistering mix for Fabric, Mr Vincent returned to our decks on the superb NS08, where he plied his unique brand of warehouse stomp. Rainstorm saw a return of the untreated synths we loved in Impressions... and Man or Mistress, while the gargantuan ??? saw Vincent aim squarely for the dancefloor, all thanks to the year’s most distinctive bassline.

4: Dopplereffekt – Tetrahymena [Leisure System]

Gene Silencing

Leisure System’s second coup of the year was beckoning Gerald Donald back into the dance game, where he issued an update of his singular scifi funk under the storied Dopplereffekt moniker. Doppler’s hi-def electro has never sounded better than on the propulsive Tetrahymena, or in the tunnelling bassline that reinforced Gene Silencing’s slo-mo menace.

3: Tessela – Nancy’s Pantry [R&S]

Horizon

Not content with issuing what might be the year’s best single, Tessela took to R&S in the Autumn to expand his staccato experiments with breakbeat dynamics. This is techno at its most visceral, from the searing test tones of Nancy’s Pantry to the giddy abandon of the rave-indebted Horizon. Tessela’s palette couldn’t be more current or more vital, even allowing for patience in the simmering threat of Gateway.

2: Anthony Naples – Ill Still [Rubadub]

Faceless

P O T, El Portal, Moscato: Anthony Naples released a lot of brilliant music this year, but for us it was Ill Still that had them all beat. Taking a smoother approach than on other releases, Naples allowed his melodies to shine on these addictive grooves, and all three were superb in their own right. The simplicity of these tracks was addictive: the whirring synthline and straightforward drum programming of Ill Still, or the ghosted vocals and shimmering melodic haze of Faceless: both made for two of our most played tracks. On I Don’t See Them Naples turned a little psychedelic with effortless style, a throaty bassline complimenting a sifting soup of synths and atmospheric detail.

1: A Made Up Sound – Ahead / Endgame [A Made Up Sound]

Ahead

Perhaps more a single than an EP, Dave Huisman’s staggeringly strange single was undoubtedly the most futuristic music we heard all year. Ahead throws dance convention out of the window: no comfortable beat pattern, no melodic hooks to latch onto. Huismans takes a stuttered beat pattern and guts it, splicing in jagged funk samples and splintering percussion. It’s wildly unpredictable and jarringly, brilliantly broken, and we wanted to keep returning just to see if we could manage to make some sort of sense of it all.

Endgame is straighter but by no means simple: a crushed melody split open across an epileptic beat pattern, eventually allowed to morph into sputtering warehouse techno for a searing finale. It’s difficult, perplexing music, and perhaps not aimed explicitly for the dancefloor: but no record left us more dazzled this year.

Best of 2013:

* Best Labels of 2013

* Best EPs of 2013
* Best Tracks: 85-26
* Best Tracks: 25-1

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A Made Up Sound - After Hours / What Preset

Label: A Made Up Sound

In a landscape populated by quick ascents to fame and even quicker declines, the consistently innovative producer is a rare beast indeed. Dutch artist Dave Huismans has always been a producer worthy of special interest, from his early skewed dubstep to more recent tricky techno concoctions, yet his work has become impressively characterised as much for relentlessly breaking the mould as for its persistently top-notch quality. Recent releases such as the mind-boggling (-ly brilliant) Ahead / Endgame and the desolate ritualism of Air Jordan (under his 2562 alias) have brought Huismans close to genius-level production, and so each release on his eponymous imprint comes as something of an event.

That Huisman’s latest should come as a curveball will surprise no one, but after a series of increasingly terse, hare-brained electronic excursions, After Hours / What Preset at first glance veers closer to techno convention. Two lengthy semi-live jams occupy either side of the record, meandering structurally while fogging the ears with a paranoid ambience built to unsettle. The quality of these productions is top-notch: the lilting rhythm of After Hours never quite settles down, underpinning nervy synth gestures and a dialogue (from the Scorsese film of the same name) turned monstrously disconcerting by the cloying atmospherics. The track’s twelve-minute runtime is perhaps not wholly justified but as a sinister mood-piece it remains striking, held together by a satisfying live quality to its slowly evolving elements. 

What Preset offers a more definitive direction in its opening minutes, gargantuan kicks tearing through the intricate percussive fabric and promising a growling, eyes-down roller for the darkest hours. However, in a typically unpredictable moment, the track’s halfway point gives onto a series of gossamer chords which offer the EP’s first rays of light. Yet this light is filtered, gauzy, gently washing away the track’s pent-up aggression and bringing it to a brave, uncertain close. As the listener emerges, eyes blinking, from another Huismans assault on the senses, it would be easy to compare this tracks to his previous productions. They’re not as dancey, as high-concept, as mind-blowingly weird as some of his past releases – this is all true. Yet from where we stand in the electronic landscape, no one sounds quite like Dave Huismans. As long as we have producers like him around, preconceptions and expectations better watch their backs.

7.5/10

February Roundup 2013

It's been a bumper month, here's White Noise's selection of Feburary's best dance singles.

Remember to follow White Noise on Facebook and Twitter to get daily doses of great tunes, old and new.

Tracklist:

Motor City Drum Ensemble - Send A Prayer Pt. 1

Leon Vynehall - Untitled 017 [EP Review]

Kyodai - The Scene [Single Review]

Garage $ale - Bump N Grind (Waze & Odyssey Mix)

Artifact - The Way It Do [EP Review]

Benjamin Damage - 010x [Album Review]

Call Super - Threshing Floor [EP Review]

Boddika & Joy Orbison - Mercy (Boddika's VIP)

Moiré - Lose It feat. Heidi Vogel [EP Review]

Powell - A Band

A Made Up Sound - Ahead [Single Review]

KH - The Track I've Been Playing...

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And here are a few other essentials we couldn't find on Youtube:

∆ ∆ - You [EP Review]

Youandewan - Disarray [EP Review]

Spare - Spare Room Offence

Jus Now - Tun Up

Enjoy!

A Made Up Sound – Ahead / Endgame

Label: A Made Up Sound

A producer known as much for his ability to confound and perplex as for the top-notch quality of his tunes, Dave Huismans kicks off the new year with an astonishing return to form. Don’t get us wrong, the Dutch dubstep-cum-techno producer (a path many have travelled but few with such inspiring results) never lost it, but last years output, the whiplash desert rhythms of Air Jordan under his 2562 guise and a few stray singles, were comparatively straight-edged compared to previous work. At his best, Huismans’ expert sound manipulations had the power to not only innovate dance music but to actively interrogate it: Take The Plunge conjured a locked groove out of the whirring rhythms of malfunctioning technology, while Winamp Melodrama on the excellent Fever LP brought the artificiality of contemporary music production into the open, exposing the software lurking beneath in a move as sonically innovative as it was thought-provoking.

On Ahead, Huismans returns to Fever’s sample-heavy approach but takes it a step further, conjuring a stuttered beat pattern and then gutting it, splicing in jagged funk samples and splintered percussive accents. It’s hard to imagine whether this tune would set fire to a dancefloor or empty it out, but it’s sure to prompt an extreme reaction. Regardless of its dance capabilities, Ahead is a dazzling piece of production and a credit to Huismans’ abilities – one could argue that it takes a true artisan to make music this brilliantly broken. On the flipside we have the straighter but no less brilliant Endgame, where the same staccato dynamic is applied to a dangerous acid bassline, excellent sample work and an epileptic beat pattern. By the close the listener is rewarded by a couple of minutes of a straight-up techno banger, a memory of how great Huismans can be when he’s conventional, and a juxtaposition that serves as a stark reminder of how stunning the results are when he’s not.

9/10

Guest Mix: Dark and Dirty

Moth comes round with another guest mix for White Noise. Tracklist on this one is killer, featuring a lot of our favourite bass, techno and house bangers.

Tracklist

Akkord – The Drums

Tom Demac – Critical Distance Pt. 2

Midland & Pariah – Untitled 2

A Made Up Sound – Take The Plunge (Beat Mix)

Trikk – Jointly

Blawan – Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?

Benjamin Damage – Swarm

Head High – Rave (Dirt Mix)

Boddika & Joy O – Dun Dun

Breach – Fatherless VIP

Darling Farah – Bruised

Pangaea – Hex

Sully – The Loot

Bok Bok – Silo Pass

Ghost – The Club

Genius – Waiting

Visionist – Come In

Dusk + Blackdown + – High Road