Hats off to Pluto Junkies, who are Ernestas Sadau, Rapha and PRZ. With Contact they made Pinkman’s Mindri imprint one of the most interesting labels of the year (the 12″ from The Hacker aslo ended up on this list) and it’s also been a joy to hear Afra dj this year.
This is a list of our favourite 15 albums, compilations or longish releases from artists and producers within techno, electro, trance, EBM and beyond. It’s hard to say what makes an album these days, but many physical releases come with so many digital bonus tracks that sometimes that feels enough to call it an album. Like Truthspeaker’s 12″ on Post-Hoc, or indeed the Pluto Junkies LP. Aslo, some releases are just a bunch of tracks from various times strung together on one bandcamp page.
The Club Noid tape e.g. consists of old tracks but as far as I know they’ve never actually been released before. Filmmaker had a good year again and it was hard to pick one release out of so many, but Machinations was the one that made the cut in the end.
Top 15 releases
- Pluto Junkies – Contact (Mindri)
- Cardopusher – Immaculate Poison (Evar)
- Club Noid – Club Noid (Snake Eyes & Sevens)
- Bergsonist – Bergsonist (BizaarBazaar)
- Gutkein – Supermodels Enter Rehab (N/A)
- Zanias – Chrysalis (Fleisch)
- V/A – Steel Genesis (Magdalena’s Apathy)
- Rebel Yell – Desolation (Dinosaur City)
- Filmmaker – Machinations (Wave Tension)
- Truthspeaker – Es vedra memory engram (Post Hoc)
- V/A – LI$34 (Low Income $quad)
- Erin Hopes – Lucid Dreaming (Lost Domain)
- KRSSV – Disco Bandido (Píldoras)
- V/A – Take a Chance (No Borders)
- V/A – Synthetic Pleasures II (Synthetic Pleasures)
Of course we’ve had plenty more favourites than these, so if you want to dig into some more great electronic releases from 2023 we’ve put together this playlist with 100 tracks for you:
