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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Dopplereffekt - Tetrahymena

Label: Leisure System

Few Detroit producers can be said to have created a sound as singular as Gerald Donald. An electro pioneer who has experimented relentlessly over his 18 years on the scene, Donald was instrumental in developing the frosty funk which now informs the electro and techno worlds; both under his own aliases such as Arpanet, Japanese Telecom and Z Therapy (to name a few), and in mysterious collaborative projects, notably with the late James Stinson as the scene-defining, auto-mythologising duo Drexciya.

Though little can match the powerful influence of the deep-sea dwellers, Donald’s shadowy Dopplereffekt project has yielded consistently challenging results over the years, most recently on the bleak Calubi Mau Space LP on Warp. That was six years ago, and after a half-decade out in the cold, Donald has brought Dopplereffekt seething back into motion on Berlin's Leisure System imprint. The least surprising thing about this release is how forward-thinking it still sounds, how dangerous and sensual Donald's sounds can feel at their very best. The results are unanimous, Tetrahymena provides some of the strongest electroid mutations you’re likely to hear all year.

Tetrahymena

Over three short tracks Dopplereffekt announce their return with savage bite, returning to the dancefloor with a suite of evocative retro-futurism, effortlessly blending notes of sacred technology with frosty, immersive dystopian atmospheres. The title track is upfront, its cool synth textures fed out over ricocheting drum patterns and insectoid chattering. The seething melodics turn the choral samples profane, adding thematic nuance to an otherwise hammering slice of blank-faced momentum. Next the ominously-titled Gene Silencing is more patiently paced, yet in terms of atmospheric power it can’t be beat. Here driving bass hits are chrome-plated with regular scifi clicks, punctuating the glistening arpeggio which runs the track’s course.

Closer Zygote is a subtler beast, as threatening futurist textures simmer under a bank of sounds drawn from the interior workings of some great machine. In this landscape the human is but a ghostly presence, traced by the disembodied vocals that punctuate the soundscape. It’s stirring material, bringing a stunning EP to a close which not only boasts Donald’s sonic mastery, but also his impressive aptitude for narrative flair.

8/10

Visionist - Snakes

Label: Leisure System

All hail the 4/4, the age of house and techno is upon us. Dubstep and garage have long lost their mojo, juke is too leftfield and ‘bass music’ has sold its soul to the pop machine. Excuse the hyperbole, but however irritatingly trendy house might be at the moment, its hard to argue with the fact that much of today’s most interesting dance music is anchored by a predictable kick drum. Yet as a nation who has always pushed dance music forward, this poses a problem: the UK has relatively little traction in the domains of house and techno. We can make it, we can even shift it up a notch, but genres like garage, grime and dubstep have British DNA flowing through their melodic veins, and a definitive UK sound is missing from today’s underground.

Enter Blackdown and Dusk’s reliable Keysound imprint alongside a slew of fresh producers who are bringing grime into this decade. After a few years in exile, consigned to the twin hells of commercialisation and creative stagnancy, the genre now seems poised to make an impressive comeback – just look at Keysound’s This Is How We Roll compilation for an anatomy of some of the most exhilarating, unpredictable dance music around. Riding the crest of this wave is London’s Visionist, who over the last year has risen from cookiecutter Swamp81 pretender to a genuine threat to your sanity, his ambition climactically validated in a stunning Rinse mix comprised entirely of his own tracks.

Snakebite

Now Visionist takes to Berlin’s Leisure System imprint with some of his best material to date, showing a playful, experimental streak writ large over three seductively off-kilter grime explorations. The EP is certainly a case of variations on a theme, but each effort is so beguilingly unpredictable that no one would criticise for a lack of variety. The grime nods are all over Snakes with its tough kicks and cocked-gun percussion, but Visionist quickly moves away from familiar territory when a seasick vocal and hi-def chimes turn the track into a woozy, unstable trip. Snakebite takes the percussive abstraction a step further, as a disorientating swirl of shots, clicks and colourful 8bit streaks are painted like treacle over a bed of softened bass hits.

Visionist ends the triptych with the most seductive number of the three, the Zomby-esque Poison, where the psychedelic blur of percussion plays second fiddle to a hypnotic system of crystalline synthlines and ghostly chipmunk vocals. While all three tracks approach the same sounds from a different angle, in his finest release to date Visionist has crafted something dangerously vital; a package of slippery future-grime just as likely to disorientate as it is to intoxicate.

8/10

Jets – Jets

Label: Leisure System

One of the most hotly anticipated collaborations of the year finally arrives as Jimmy Edgar (responsible for the funky sleaze odyssey Majenta) and Travis Stewart (aka Machinedrum producer of last year’s magnificent Room(s)), finally take their 12-year friendship to the next level on a collaborative release. The idea of two of dance music’s most distinctive voices teaming up may at first sound a little conceptually jarring, but the Jets project is assuredly greater than the sum of its parts, as the pair fuse their sounds into a breathless, colourful and contrasting four-track EP.

 

Lock Lock Key (clip)

It kicks off with the powerful mission statement In Her City; where colourful synth stabs bounce on a bed of clicking percussion, before the tune takes off with a breezy, iridescent synthline and expertly manipulated vocals. Recalling Edgar’s flirting with IDM and pretty much all of Machinedrum’s output, these tunes never sit still; there’s a restless energy that means each track is constantly shifting and mutating, individual elements and colours jostling for attention without it ever feeling cluttered. Second track Sin Love With You hits a little harder; Stewart’s established technique of call-and-response between big synths and clipped vocals reigns free for the first half before a funky synthline that is all Edgar emerges later in the track. It’s the distinctiveness of the producers’ voices that make this such an exciting collaboration; you can hear each artist’s sound but the audible conversation between styles creates a fluid whole.

 

Meu (clip)

The precision that both producers have brought to the table in previous releases is present here but is never stifling, as these four cuts deftly tread the line between complex and spontaneous, giving out copious ear candy while always keeping a tight grip on those core grooves. Final cut Lock Lock Key is the most restless of the bunch, going through at least four distinct phases before finally settling into a warm, effortlessly classy and chilled final stretch. While these three tracks feel like the quality output of two distinct producers, its on the pacing standout Meu where we get a glimpse of a more exciting cohesion. Here the duo turn down the brightness for a kinetic workout that trades jukey rhythms with tight vocal-work and the late emergence of a showstopping synthline. The Jets EP is bright, explosive and consistently thrilling, and it should leave listeners hoping that this is only the beginning of this intensely fruitful collaboration

8.5/10