The Qobuz Ideal Discography

The music associated with Chicago's juke/footwork scene is fast, frenetic, complex, and often highly aggressive, as it is typically intended to soundtrack dance battles. The tracks produced by Jlin, a steel mill worker from nearby Gary, Indiana named Jerrilynn Patton, use footwork as a venue to express frustration, anger, and depression. The screams and horror movie samples ("You don't want to hurt anyone," "But I do, and I'm sorry") on tracks such as "Guantanamo" and "Abnormal Restriction" sound downright evil, and are a far cry from the more hedonistic, drug-glorifying tracks by artists such as DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn. While those artists' tracks are heavily populated with recognizable soul and hip-hop samples, Jlin builds her music from scratch, constructing all the percussion sounds and bass tones herself. Her production style is intense and gripping, but it never sounds cluttered, and it never breaks out into all-out chaos. Tense, thrilling, and a bit frightening, Dark Energy is simply one of the most compelling debut albums of 2015. © Paul Simpson /TiVo

From the beginning of the first track "Dark & Long," Underworld's focus on production is clear, with songwriting coming in a distant second. The best tracks ("MMM Skyscraper I Love You," "Cowgirl") mesh Hyde's sultry songwriting with Emerson's beat-driven production, an innovative blend of classic acid house, techno, and dub that sounds different from much that preceded it. In a decade awash with stale fusion, Underworld are truly a multi-genre group. © John Bush /TiVo

25 years old, his third solo album and first masterpiece. In Spring 2003, Four Tet secured himself as one of the United Kingdom’s unmissable electronic producers with Rounds, an entirely instrumental album in which some 300 samples are used! The most famous, that of Winter by Tori Amos on Unspoken, has since been dropped due to rights issues – the track has now been reworked. For the rest, Kieran Hebden rummaged deeply though the record trays, to places where others wouldn’t dare venture. This pays off with the surprising and tenacious sample from French 70s folk group, Malicorne, where the scarcely retouched loop from Le Bouvier features on the remarkable As Serious As Your Life, and would go on to be the object of an equally splendid remix by Jay Dee with Guilty Simpson that same year. Known for laying the foundations for the folktronica genre, Rounds is, from end to end, a muddle of drums, percussion, brass, bells and strings. It’s a truly industrious work that gives a rarely equalled sense of unity, from the nursery-rhyme-like My Angel Rocks Back and Forth to the hip-hop Unspoken. A masterpiece that’ll make your ears curl like no other. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

On Visions, Claire Boucher turns the unmistakable sound she forged on Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, where songs hovered in space one moment and hit the dancefloor in the next, into a blueprint for forward-thinking pop in the 2010s. Though her wispy vocals and four-on-the-floor beats still define her third album, she adds more elements, more ambition, and frequently, more fun to her music; on sparkly tracks like "Eight," where she's shadowed by robotic backing vocals, she sounds like an alien princess. The way she combines and reimagines familiar sounds -- dream pop, synth pop, R&B, and house are just a few of the styles she touches on -- often dazzles. "Genesis" begins with what sounds like the ethereal atmospheres of old-school sounds of her label 4AD before coalescing into irresistibly bouncy pop. Boucher performs a similar trick on the brilliant "Oblivion," which sets lyrics inspired by a sexual assault to deceptively radiant synth pop buoyed by an insistent, instantly recognizable bass line. While Visions' songs are still largely free from obvious structures -- "Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)" segues into a minor-key passage like a dream turning dark -- Boucher has learned the values of space and control, as the intricate layers within "Infinite Love Without Fulfillment" and "Visiting Statue" attest. And though "Know the Way" and "Skin" spotlight Grimes' flair for ethereal sensuality, Visions' most kinetic songs are the most distinctive, and allow her to draw on many different influences and sounds. "Be a Body" boasts a surprisingly funky bass line; on "Circumambient," the song's shadowy R&B leanings are only heightened when Boucher busts out a super-soprano trill that would do Syreeta or Minnie Riperton proud. When she borrows from '80s pop, it never feels slavish, even when she uses frosty Casios on "Vowels = Space and Time" or lets "Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus)" ride on a beat that sounds borrowed from "When Doves Cry." Instead, these retro winks end up bringing out the darkly rhapsodic, kinetic heart of Boucher's music as much as the Asian-tinged melodies, harps, and operatic samples she uses elsewhere. Though little sounded like it when it was released, the impact of Visions' futuristic fantasies was felt, and heard, for years to come. © TiVo

The first masterpiece of what was only termed trip-hop much later, Blue Lines filtered American hip-hop through the lens of British club culture, a stylish, nocturnal sense of scene that encompassed music from rare groove to dub to dance. The album balances dark, diva-led club jams along the lines of Soul II Soul with some of the best British rap (vocals and production) heard up to that point, occasionally on the same track. The opener "Safe from Harm" is the best example, with diva vocalist Shara Nelson trading off lines with the group's own monotone (yet effective) rapping. Even more than hip-hop or dance, however, dub is the big touchstone on Blue Lines. Most of the productions aren't quite as earthy as you'd expect, but the influence is palpable in the atmospherics of the songs, like the faraway electric piano on "One Love" (with beautiful vocals from the near-legendary Horace Andy). One track, "Five Man Army," makes the dub inspiration explicit, with a clattering percussion line, moderate reverb on the guitar and drums, and Andy's exquisite falsetto flitting over the chorus. Blue Lines isn't all darkness, either -- "Be Thankful for What You've Got" is quite close to the smooth soul tune conjured by its title, and "Unfinished Sympathy" -- the group's first classic production -- is a tremendously moving fusion of up-tempo hip-hop and dancefloor jam with slow-moving, syrupy strings. Flaunting both their range and their tremendously evocative productions, Massive Attack recorded one of the best dance albums of all time. © John Bush /TiVo