Long Reads

OnDeadWaves is a fascinating collaboration between Mute artists Polly Scattergood and MAPS, also known as James Chapman. Their self-titled album is one of the most melancholic records you’ll hear all year, but they insist there are nuggets of hope sparkling in the sadness

We all know him as Robert Moog, the godfather of the synthesiser, a man whose role in the history of electronic sound cannot be overStated. But to Michelle Moog-Koussa, he was plain old Dad, who helped her with her piano lessons, chopped wood for the fire, and liked gardening and canoeing and star gazing. Ahead of a new documentary about Bob Moog that Michelle is putting together for release next year, we get a fascinating and highly personal insight into the everyday life of a legend

From Detroit techno legend – a key member of Underground Resistance, no less – to Alabama church preacher, Robert Hood is a man on a mission. Now he’s teaming up with his daughter Lyric Hood under the name Floorplan and the result is wholly exhilarating

Home to a bunch of upcoming young gun composers working to blur the lines between electronic and classical music, 130701 Records celebrates itS 15th anniversary this month. Whatever happened to Max Richter, Hauskcha and Jóhann Jóhannsson, eh? Dave Howell, the man at the controls, tells the label’s tale

From Robert Moog and Donald Buchla to Peter Zinovieff and Alan Pearlman, the ’Bright Sparks’ album and film celebrate the pioneers of analogue synthesis with obsessive aplomb

One of them is French and best known as half of Air. The other is Icelandic and made a name for himself with Bang Gang. Together they are Starwalker and they’re lighting up the night sky with their twinkling electropop songs

Arty new wave outsiders who became unlikely pop stars, The Associates shook the 80s firmly by its lacy lapels. Three decades on, bandmates Alan Rankine and Michael Dempsey try to make some sense of it all…

There was no single unifying event for the formative UK electronica scene, no point when something suddenly clicked, no precise year zero moment. But there was a bunch of like-minded souls beavering away in what they thought was their own little void, unaware there were others just like them all over the country. We talk to seven of the artists featured on the ’Close To The Noise Floor’ box set and get their big bang stories

Take Japanese noiseniks-turned-minimalists Nisennenmondai. Add a big dollop of On-U production wizard Adrian Sherwood. The result is ‘#N/A’, an album where human frailty meets precision engineering

Welcome to the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, a gobsmacking collection of synths that is plugging Australia’s electronic music scene into the grid. Don't touch that dial!