Videos by VICE
5 QUEEN OF JAPAN
Two German dudes and a lead singer girl in a neon wig whose gimmick is that they do covers that “electrify and sexify” pop/rock classics like Kiss’ “I Was Made for Loving You” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical.” Their latest album, Nightlife in Tokyo (on the Viennese label Angelicka Koehlermann), includes awesome electro covers of Frank Zappa’s “Bobby Brown,” The Who’s “Acid Queen,” and Laid Back’s disco staple “White Horse,” which is so wild and screamy it makes women wearing high-heeled sandals over anklet socks with little red hearts on them climb up on the bar and grind like a slut.
6 DMX KREW
London’s Ed Upton is the DMX Krew. Don’t be fooled by the band of pretty-boy longhairs on the sleeve of the full-length CD, We Are DMX – they’re all Ed. He records for the Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label as well as running his own imprint, the exemplarily electro Breakin’ Records. DMX Krew’s sound veers from nihilistic and glammy (“The Glass Room”) to Duran Duran-y (“Street Boys”). All in all, though, it’s not just retro. It’s forward-thinking, sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful, and always kind of dark.
7 TRACY + THE PLASTICS
Cold, badass, and danceable. From the pissy Northwest (Olympia, WA) comes Wynne Greenwood, a.k.a Tracy + The Plastics. What’s billed on paper as a three-girl band is really just Wynne and some videocassettes. She performs as Tracy with the other members broadcast on screens and TVs behind her. It seems a little corny and artsy but the music on the CD, A Muscler’s Guide to Videonics, makes up for it. It’s hard and minimal drum programming, bass-y squelches, and creepy Videdrome female vocals.
8 PIXELTAN
Incredibly compelling and aggressive dance music. A Pixeltan is the soft blue tinge your skin gets when you spend 23 hours a day in front of a computer. Brooklyn’s Pixeltan, the band, is the soft blue bruise on the arm of today’s electro scene. A “group” by definition (guitar, drums, vocals), Pixeltan is in a direct lineage from ESG and Liquid Liquid, but also P.I.L. and Throbbing Gristle. Hisham from Black Dice plays drums, so you know the beat is inescapable. The vocalist works the Arthur Janov school of expression – yelps, screams, utterances. In fact, Pixeltan’s sound is all about relentlessness.
9 JOHN SELWAY
New York’s John Selway is probably the only DJ in the bunch here – which is to say that he’s the only one in this group that gets hired to play at 10 000-people raves all over Europe and the US. He’s been doing it for more than 10 years but he’s been producing for more. His output in the last few years has been prolific, including remixes for people like Fischerspooner, Detroit Grand Pubahs and Japanese Telecom. Now he’s got a full-length of his own, Edge of Now, that we like to call electrohouse. His first full-length, it alternates hard techno on shit like “New People” with haute electro and stylish vocoded lyrics on tracks like “Digitalemotion.”
10 MISS KITTIN & THE HACKER
Miss Kittin is a Frenchie named Caroline Herve. Her new collab with Felix Da Housecat is super, but she’ll always be known for her massive dance hit “Frank Sinatra” (on Miss Kittin & The Hacker’s Champagne ep on Gigolo Records) which is the most perfect dance song ever. She speak-sings the notorious lyrics with perfect ice-queen sexiness, and the lyrics are a perfect poem which need to be memorized RIGHT NOW!
11 STEREO TOTALE
Brezel and Francoise are multilingual Europeans who live in Berlin and make Stereolab sound like Serge Gainsbourg but with more beats. Momus calls them the best band in the world and their new hit “L’Amour à trois” about the merits of a ménage à trois is so fucking good we had to stop the presses to get them on this list. Though one of the least electro-ish bands on this list, they often do stray from their garage roots, and when they do it is, as the British press would say, “truly life-affirming.”
12 PRIMA DONNAS
Though the album may wear a teeny bit thin after a while, The Prima Donnas are the modern day Duran Duran but with more keyboards. When you hear the new Prima Donnas CD Drugs, Sex and Discotheques, you’ll see what we mean. There can be no doubt that if the Prima Donnas hadn’t fled a Sussex, UK orphanage to move to Texas (or so they say), they would be so huge right now the malls would be full of 13-year-olds with “Prima Donnas Forever” scrunchies in their hair.
13 CRÈME BLUSH
Longtime New York hipsters led by Nicole Pinto on bass and Satski Ohtaké who plays synth-driven electro punk like someone shot crystal meth into her hands. Pinto’s voice sounds like a cross between Patti Smith and The Slits and when you hear their cover of Giorgio Moroder’s “Midnight Express” (one of the hardest songs to master on the keyboard in the world) you understand why Satski needs thick black lace gloves to hide the blisters on her fingers.
14 MR. VELCRO FASTENER
Two Finnish guys, both named Tatu, are collectively known as Mr. Velcro Fastener. This is one of the most unabashedly retro acts in the electroclash scene. They make music primarily using analogue equipment that was already outdated around the time of the first boom of Velcro. The 1999 full-length, Lucky Bastards Living Up North, is the release to get. An inordinate ratio of songs about robots (“Real Robots Don’t Die”, “Robots 4 Life,” etc.) and a decidedly minimalist approach to b-boy-meets-Kraftwerk tracks make it a must-have for any self-respecting music enthusiast with an asymmetrical T-shirt and Flock of Seagulls hair.
15 MONO TRONA
Some say she hails from outer space, some say Korean television, and some say Brooklyn. We know one thing for sure: Mono Trona puts on the most hilarious (and probably the only) act of synthesizer music/performance art/songs about fighting low-tech robots and ancient evils that we’ve ever seen. She used to do kids’ shows and when we saw her play an art gallery last year, she was wearing a leotard and screaming, “Aliens, destroy!” so loud we were gasping for air. Her enthusiasm and fearlessness as a performer is totally infectious and can reduce crowds of hipsters to slack-jawed awe.
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