Eleven Tigers - Clouds Are Mountains (2010)

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For fans of: Burial, James Blake, Scuba

These songs are packed with sound. When one beat begins to die, and you start to fall, there'll be another one waiting to catch you and guide your steps back into motion. It's all done with such grace, it has a great flow, and once I got into it, it never let go. One complaint would be that the sounds could have been produced a bit better, sometimes the mix sounds a bit flat, but if you can get into the variation that's here, it's one hell of a ride. It really explores the dubstep genre in a way few others have, expanding on the atmosphere that Burial introduced with fantastic rhythms that'll make any beat lover happy. Full of energy and innovation, this one should be quite a treat for all the craved dubstep fans. - Matthew Foster

"Breaking with nearly all tradition of its nominal peers, this album has a dramatic heft, an operatic rise and fall structure demanding front to back listening – with the surgical precision of some mythical perfect trance mix to keep everything on a consistently gasp inducing flow. Every time an exquisite groove is discovered and locked into, a new element arises to subtly shift context until a sudden left turn imperceptibly shuffles the entire journey onto yet another new level." - Optimistic Underground

Actress - Splazsh (2010)***

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For fans of: Basic Channel, Autechre, Ricardo Villalobos

Wowzzers! This is the very tip of what I could imagine of music in 2010. I like that microhouse is the top genre, these beats are filled. I've always thought of microhouse as music that uses the space between beats to inject melodies, samples, or mini-beats to create what could be thought of as frames between each beat. Akufen and Moritz von Oswald Trio come to mind. Actress seems to be doing that do a certain extent, but what makes me love this album so much is the way the beats seem to bounce off each other and build, like each beat is trying to one up the last. I could be way off in trying to describe these sweet sounds, but that's an attempt. Like Scuba's Triangulation, this is really proving to me that electronic music has so much more to offer and has me on the edge of my seat to here the next. - Matthew Foster