Harold Heath
Harold is a music journalist, DJ, producer, music-tech tutor and all round smartass.
Harold Heath looks back at some of 2025's best electronic music albums, including Night Blooming Cereus by Maurice Fulton (as "Boof"), serving up spiky, angular, post-punk synth wave, tech-soul synth wig outs, shimmering, chiming, silvery techno, edgy, anxious, wonky-ish alt-disco-house jams, dubby, squelching, bleep-bleep murk-house.
Harold Heath looks back at some of 2025's best electronic music albums, starting with French artist rRoxymore’s "Juggling Dualities."
The fifth installment of the "La Torre Ibiza" compilation series continues to document the Balearic sounds championed at Hostel La Torre, lovingly selected and carefully programmed by DJ Pete Gooding and DJ/producer Mark Barrott
From the excellent Vicious Charm label comes a typically bold musical statement from Richard "DJ Parrot" Barratt aka Crooked Man in the form of a mid-tempo dark, distorted, deep house remake of disco classic "Don't Leave Me This Way."
Black Logic is producer Alex Arnout's live deep house band, with Arnout's beats and electronics backed with live instrumentation (bass, guitar, sax) and a selection of vocalists, and Breathe More is his first release on Music For Freaks.
If you're a soul purist and you want to walk away now I'd understand; but I'm every bit as much of a soul music snob as you and I've got to say, these remakes do a pretty good job of updating things.
The lead track from Kirk Degiorgio's Elate EP on Cyphon is a proper dancefloor record, with the low-end funk for your body and that cerebral dreaminess to transport your mind.
Spencer Parker makes a quality return to Rekids on Better Days featuring Tee Amara and an utterly danceable Radio Slave remix.
Covering the years before his breakthrough into the mainstream, Moby's witty, funny and provocative Porcelain is one of music's best memoirs.
I'm a big fan of Franck Rogers' crispy, club-friendly house grooves and he's done a good job here with this collaboration with NYC house vocalist Arnold Jarvis, the pads and drums of which have a distinctly '90s house old-school flavour.
A quality mid-tempo room-lifter on Rare Wiri finds Manolo's sophisto-cosmic-disco workout "Amalfi Drive" remixed by Manuel Costela.
The third installment of "Down To The Sea and Back" collects a set of obscure tunes that are united only by their rarity and by whatever indescribable, indefinable quality qualifies them as "Balearic."
There's a comedy show in the UK called Peep Show, and at some point in season one, a character in an electronic music duo writes a bassline so good that he apparently couldn't turn it off. This is one of those.
Nu Northern Soul drops a mini-album of "re-interpretations" of fusion maestro Chick Corea tracks by DJ Maarten Goetheer featuring Thai power-house drummer Pong Nakornchai.
The two volumes of this compilation chart yet another chapter in the evolution of dance music, another set of DJs and producers who lurked in the background innovating their own little niche - in this case, tech house.
Smooth soft-focus jazz-tinged disco and a tasty bruk-ish Inkswell remix make up this package from DJ/producer Ed Temple.
25 years after its debut Techno Rebels still shines as a love letter to techno and the city of Detroit where it was born.
Two tracks taken from the debut album of Nicaraguan producer Alfonso Lovo and re-worked by Brian Jackson (of Gil Scott Heron and Brian Jackson fame) brings '70s Latin psychedelic magic for your dance floor.
Proof that house music makes everything better here in this stellar Primal Scream remix release. Ready To Go Home and Love Insurrection get taken to the dancefloor by a house music remix dream team of Terry Farley and Wade Teo, Hardway Bros, and Black Science Orchestra.
Expertly crafted house grooves from Bushwacka, the kind of tunes that are a pleasure to play and likely to stay in your record box/usb for the foreseeable future.
MUST READ!
Ardalan: Inside the New 5 Mag
5 Mag profile of Ardalan, plus LOVEFOXY cover mix and interview, Oliver Dollar album of the month, Richard Earnshaw's new bag and more inside 5 Mag Issue 223.
