Last year, we said goodbye to 2018 with a playlist of one hundred tracks. This year, we raised the bar: from the beginning of the year, we started to collect editorially all the twenty-first-century light machine-music we thought was the best in three different playlists.
In our POPPING playlist, we’ve sorted out the more receptive, yet forward-looking, meaningful songs, from Jenny Hval’s avant-garde fairy world to Jai Paul’s surprise return to Shygirl’s cybernetically cool future rap.
Our CLUBBING playlist includes items that could glow the ground under our feet or also functioned well as a warmup at Friday nights this year, be it Four Tet’s teenage bird song, Special Request’s rave renaissance, VTSS’ breathtaking slicing, Mall Grab’s biting tone ,the rusty grunt of the Dutch favorite Identified Patients or the exotic-tropical fractures of Flora FM.
And the XPERIMENTING playlist is all about playing with the frames stretched: experimental electronics, striking acid breaks, crazy techno, time-traveled house from 2039, tribal marches of leftfield, uncategorizable UFO music from Fennes to DJ Overdose, from Amon Tobin to Giant Swan. In our own humble opinion, these overgrown music went the biggest this year, but that was only to be expected due to its nature. This is what we play in the editorial office most often.