Shawn Reynaldo is a Barcelona-based writer and editor who specializes in electronic music. His First Floor newsletter often zeroes in on developments in the genre’s corresponding industry and culture, but the Second Floor column is designed to spotlight the music itself, examining trends, recommending releases, and keeping tabs on what’s happening both on and off the dancefloor.

List season is upon us. Looking around the internet during the past few weeks, it’s often felt like every single publication and platform on the planet is offering up its own version of 2024’s “best” music. Rifling through all of this year-end content can be fun—even if you’re just looking to see how someone else’s picks lined up with your own—but after a while, it does get hard to ignore all of the overlap. The same handful of artists and albums seem to get picked again and again—music is not immune to groupthink—and what makes it worse is that most outlets don’t bother to go any deeper. I don’t mean with their literal picks (although that would be nice); it’s more that when the whole of music is boiled down to rankings of the best tracks and releases, large swaths of the culture are essentially being left out of the story. Clubs, festivals, record stores, magazines, websites, trends, memes, social media—there's so much more to the musical ecosystem than its consumer end products, yet when the time comes to sum up the year gone by, the conversation rarely goes beyond what records we liked the most.

Rectifying that can’t be accomplished in the space of a single column, but in the interest of providing a slightly more holistic look at electronic music in 2024, this edition of Second Floor is dedicated to labels. To be clear, it’s not a list of the year’s “best” labels, and the selections here have nothing to do with popularity either. All of these imprints occupy a unique space in the electronic music landscape, and while releasing great records is certainly a substantial part of what they do, these labels all offer something more than savvy A&R and effective marketing campaigns. Some take a unique approach to curation. Others serve as a kind of community hub, or stand out by steadfastly refusing to conform to prevailing trends. Most importantly though, they all have a distinct point of view, and that means a lot during a time when even independent music circles are increasingly oriented toward algorithms and analytics.

Want to know the story of electronic music in 2024? These eight labels were all instrumental in telling it.

Fixed Rhythms

What are the most important cities in dance music? London, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and … Oklahoma City? Okay, it may be a reach to include OKC on that list, but the city’s Fixed Rhythms label does quietly stand as one of the finest house and techno outposts in the US. Even as Europe continues to dominate the dance music conversation, a new generation of North American producers has bubbled up in recent years, and a good number of them are encouragingly more interested in building upon the legacy of Midwestern dance music than trying to mimic whatever happens to be fashionable in Berlin at the moment. Fixed Rhythms has become a crucial hub for these artists, championing a music-first approach while releasing records from Jackson Ryland (a.k.a. JR2k), Ali Berger, DJ Hockey, Decoder, 1morning, and a litany of other young talents. It’s a no-frills operation—label co-founder Jack McKenzie has a day job teaching high school—but the DIY aesthetic and general lack of ego is a welcome throwback to the days when independent music was rife with crucial labels operating out of cities most tastemakers had never set foot in.

enmossed

Ambient is one of those genres that seems to permanently be in the midst of a revival, to a point where there’s now a legitimate glut of labels churning out pastoral soundscapes, static-strewn chaos, and all points in between. Some might try to lump enmossed into that cohort, but the label—founded in 2017 and run out of the backwoods of North Carolina by artist Glyn Maier—transcends trends. Through its creative and business practices, it transcends music as well, committing to the creation of hand-constructed releases, the use of recycled materials (as much as possible), and the donation of all proceeds to what they refer to as “positive endeavors,” which in recent months have taken the form of hurricane relief in North Carolina, medical aid for Palestine, and environmental organizations. Physical releases are beautifully designed and released in limited editions. Digital versions are offered up as name-your-price downloads. And musically? Recent enmossed releases include Florian T M Zeisig’s Enya permutations, Jake Muir’s alien atmospheres, Expugnantis’ fathoms-deep dub experiments, taupe set xl’s swampy siren calls and so much more, including releases from experimental standouts exael, Broshuda, Felisha Ledesma, Mark Templeton, and Maier himself. 

CloudCore

In a digital music world, is scarcity even possible? What about community? CloudCore is determined to find out, and also seems determined to subvert today’s passive, lean-back music culture in the process. Active since 2022, this boisterous and very online label mainly trafficks in high-energy, candy-coated club sounds, pulling liberally from both the hardcore continuum and the PC Music canon. (Although Two Shell isn’t affiliated with CloudCore, there’s a lot of stylistic crossover between the two.) Many of the artists making those sounds are relative unknowns, but what’s more intriguing is how their music is released to the public, as the label generally drops a new digital single each Friday, and leaves it on sale for exactly one week only. After that, the song can still be streamed, but the actual song file is squirreled away in the archives, where only the most devoted CloudCore fans (i.e. the ones who spend tons of time in the label’s hyperactive Discord servers and collect what are called CloudKeys) can hope to potentially snag a copy. Climbing into those rabbit holes won’t interest everyone, but that’s the point. The hurdles are part of the fun, and if you really want to be a CloudCore devotee, you have to earn it.

Fever AM

It’s an odd time to be a techno fan. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the zoomer crowd has taken careening into dizzyingly fast tempos and Eurotrance revivalism, and while more traditional techno variants still being made, it can be hard to get excited when so much of it sounds like Detroit cosplay or the stale thump of a night out in Tulum. For those who prefer innovation to imitation, there aren’t necessarily a lot of great techno options at the moment, but the output of Berlin imprint Fever AM does provide a glimmer of hope. Headed up by Mor Elian and Rhyw, the label straddles the line between techno and the wider bass continuum, and does so without the stone-faced solemnity that so often plagues those genres. It’s not a jokey operation—in fact, Fever AM’s commitment to mind-bending sound design is deadly serious—but there’s an obvious looseness to the music on offer, and a clear affinity for rubbery rhythms and bouncy basslines. With tracks from Karenn, Peder Mannerfelt, Lurka, Sister Zo, and others, this year’s It’s Elastic compilation almost felt like a manifesto, advocating for future-facing club sounds that are fun but never stupid, and technical without being tedious. Fever AM isn’t alone in this—imprints like Voam, TraTraTrax, re:lax, and Peder Mannerfelt Produktion are all swimming in similar waters—but it’s a key player in what looks like an emergent new techno axis.

Future Retro London

Regardless of how you feel about the term “new-school jungle”—it’s arguably one of dance music’s most obvious misnomers—there’s no question that Tim Reaper and his Future Retro London imprint are at the center of the action. The UK artist is a veritable jungle encyclopedia, and a lover of the genre’s 90s golden era, which is perhaps why the label has such a classic feel. It helps that the catalog includes contributions from proper vets like Harmony, Equinox, ASC, and Loxy & Resound, but most Future Retro London records are from new jacks, and Reaper makes a point to go beyond the usual scenes and suspects, whether he’s platforming Oakland duo Soulox & Soeneido or dropping a surprise jungle EP from Swedish psych rockers Dungen. The label puts out a lot of music, with remarkably little fanfare. (There’s that old-school mentality again.) The records sell themselves, and as the total number of releases creeps toward triple digits, Future Retro London’s standing as jungle’s most essential outpost becomes all but undeniable.

STROOM

The success of STROOM can largely be boiled down to one things: founder Nosedrip’s incredible ears. Since 2016, the Belgian imprint has been releasing one delicious record after another, most of them by artists that even the most clued-in heads are unlikely to be familiar with. And while there are some broad curatorial through lines—the catalog does contain a lot of intimate, electronic-tinged pop and intrepid treks into the avant-garde, many of them from decades gone by—STROOM’s output remains thrillingly unpredictable. Its 2024 offerings included cosmic soundscapes from Florian T M Zeisig, unearthed 90s floor fillers from Belgian rave legend CJ Bolland, trippy gamelan experiments from Anton Friisgaard, and the gauzy pop songcraft of Milan W.—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. STROOM somehow manages to release something new every few weeks. For most labels, being this prolific, this odd, and this stylistically omnivorous would be a recipe for ruin, but Nosedrip has cultivated something that transcends the usual risks of running an independent imprint: a community that trusts him.

YUKU

The term “bass music” has been in wide circulation for more than a decade now, and it’s still not clear exactly what it means. Is it anything that’s not house and techno? Is it simply another way of referring to the hardcore continuum? Does it include jungle and drum & bass? How do hip-hop, dub, and dancehall fit in? And what about all of the low end-heavy sounds from Latin America, Africa, and Asia? The possibilities are endless, and while labels tend to focus on one particular corner of the bass-centric universe, YUKU is the rare outpost that seems determined to celebrate them all. Located in Prague and active since 2020, the label puts a premium on hybridity and sound design, thriving in the undefined spaces where traditional genre tags are all but irrelevant. In doing that, it puts a staggering amount of music into the world. This year alone, the label tallied nearly 40 releases from artists all around the globe. With post-shaabi explosions from Egypt’s Jana, the jagged wobble of Ukrainian producer Hidden Element, jittery rhythms from Indian talent I7HVN, and meditative dub collaborations between Polish duo JANKA and Japanese artist CRZKNY, YUKU is assembling something akin to a snapshot of contemporary bass music, one in which geography is a lot less important than whether or not a track is capable of rattling a speaker stack. 

Somewhere Press

There’s no shortage of ambient labels these days, but Somewhere Press—a Glasgow imprint that’s barely more than two years old—has already secured its place in the genre’s top tier. How? By ensuring that among its ethereal expanses and hazy abstraction, a sparkle of humanity always remains. More than anything, what connects releases from the likes of Chantal Michelle, Slowfoam, doris dana, Man Rei, NEY, and Alliyah Enyo is the beguiling presence of the voice. Sometimes those voices are whispered, other times they’re soaring and downright angelic—the influence of Enya looms particularly large—and even when they’re completely disembodied, they cut to the core of whoever happens to be listening. This is music for connection; there are no “lo-fi beats to study/relax to,” and though the songs on offer are often hushed, they’re far too potent and emotionally expressive to blithely fade in the background. In an era of music-as-content, Somewhere Press reminds us that music can still be something more—something sacred.