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source: Beatportal

Putting together a Top 10 singles of the year list reminds me of that old saying “opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.” And indeed, the Beatportal team debated long and hard about which tracks would make into our final Top 10 Singles list of 2008. We spent hours arguing over how the feature would take shape, like whether it would be the biggest club tracks of the year or the most influential electronic cuts of 2008.

In the end, we decided to put something of a personal touch to our list. These singles aren’t necessarily the biggest club bangers of the year or the biggest sellers (because popularity doesn’t necessarily equate to greatness), but rather they are tracks that shaped our year at Beatportal, from artists whom we felt did really great things in 2008. We hope you enjoy these records as much as we do, and please feel free to express your support or indeed your disgust of our choices, and don’t forget to add your own Top 10 in our comments section.

1. SIS ‘Nesrib’ [Cecille]

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What a year Turkish producer SIS has had. Having caused near riots on global dancefloors in the summer with the trumpet-led minimal house track ‘Trompeta’ on Ricardo Villalobos’ vinyl-only Sei Is Drum label, he followed up with the cataclysmic ‘Nesrib’ on Cecille. Sampling the 1988 pop song ‘The Right Stuff’ by Vanessa Williams, SIS twisted a snippet of the original vocal into an evolving multi-layered delight that had all the hallmarks of a dancefloor bomb - a recognizable vocal, a four and half minute DJ-friendly intro and a perfect tech house groove. SIS’ music was so forward thinking this year that on some forums people even suggested that it might be Ricardo Villalobos himself behind the productions, but it was in fact a little known Offenbach-based producer called Burak Sar, who to this day remains a difficult character to track down. The sad thing about ‘Nesrib’ is that it will never see the digital light of day because of a certain uncleared sample.

2. Johnny D ‘Orbitallife’ [Oslo]

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Back in March, Beatportal contributor Zack Rico said, “I haven’t heard a single record more exciting than ‘Orbitallife’ this year. Mark my words, Johnny D will be a star because of it.” Then in May, Luciano included ‘Orbitallife’ in his famed ‘Fabric 41’ mix CD for the London club. After that, ‘Orbitallife’ entered that strange freeze-thaw electronic music cycle where records hot up in Ibiza but get so overplayed in the summer that they cool down, almost to the point of being reviled. But there’s a reason that certain tracks reach a point of oversaturation, and the cause of the rise and fall of ‘Orbitallife’ was its rolling house groove that refused to let up for 12 minutes. It was the ultimate DJ tool. From its driving bongo loops to a stunning deep house breakdown and soulful vocals it epitomized the merging oceans of deep house and techno that we’ve been navigating this year. The exotic rhythms, clever arrangements and story-telling ability of Johnny D became famous with the release of ‘Orbitallife’, a reputation that was no doubt stratospheric to his profile.

3. Radioslave ‘Grindhouse feat. Danton Eeprom (Dubfire Terror Planet remix)’ [Rekids]

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Dubfire had a huge 2007, having successfully reinvented himself from a progressive house star player (Deep Dish) into a credible Minus-supported techno slayer who got away with comparative murder - remixing the untouchable Plastikman classic ‘Spastik’. This year, Dubfire continued that transformation with a number of heavy hitting techno throbbers that suggested the Israeli-born producer was carving himself out a sizeable niche and a recognizable Dubfire sound in the process. His remix of Radioslave and Danton Eeprom’s ‘Grindhouse’ symbolized Dubfire’s new found confidence probably more than any of the other records he dropped this year and it destroyed countless dancefloors. With its dark haunting techno chords, vicious blood-thirsty vocals and brutal FX, Dubfire’s Terror Planet Remix went well beyond improving the original and became one of the biggest techno tracks of the year. Controversy will no doubt continue to follow him into 2009, because for a community that likes to think of itself as forward thinking, the electronic music elite has a habit of criticizing artists who break out of the boxes they were forced into, but after having headlined Sonar Festival in Barcelona, Dubfire is letting his music and his escalating profile do the talking.

4. Sebo K ‘Diva’ [Mobilee]

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Humour this writer while he indulges in a little analogy. Imagine if you will, that electronic music is an oven with many shelves. On each of those shelves is a different musical pie that bubbles and falls independently depending on the hotness of each shelf. Because those pies are all cooking in the same oven, the smell and flavours of each pie mixes with those around it, in turn leading to new and exotic tastes. That is the evolving beauty of electronic music and the symbiotic influence of its sub-genres. Sebo K ‘Diva’ was perhaps the result of one such fusion. The cut had a deep house sapidity thanks to its perfectly crisp house beats and soulful female vocal, but there was a smidgen of repetitiveness in its loops that was unmistakably techno. It was held in a rigid minimal arrangement, which spread out all of its elements, and because of all of this it was the perfect embodiment of a techno and deep house soundclash. Almost every underground house and techno DJ worth his salt indulged in a bit of ‘Diva’ in 2008, and ultimate proof that ‘Diva’ was the bridge between genres is the fact that both US deep house supremo Dennis Ferrer and minimal and tech house spinner Loco Dice included the track in their recent Essential Mixes for BBC Radio 1.

5. Sasha Funke ‘Mango Cookie’ (DJ Koze Remix) [Bpitch Control]

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The pure emotion and euphoric rush that DJ Koze managed to squeeze out of Sascha Funke’s melodic epic ‘Mango’ was overwhelming in symphony and cinematic in quality. The feelings that the Hamburg-based producer interwove through layers of stressed out electronic sounds, haunting pads, a flowing 12-minute arrangement, and male vocals that included the line Dream on dreamer ‘cos you did the best that you could, you’re dying slow, but way much quicker than you should were so powerfully contradictory that you weren’t sure whether to feel happiness or its opposite. It was the part where the hero died amid a hail of bullets whilst attempting to save his brothers from a burning building, or the scene where the couple sailed off into the sunset but as they watched the land slowly disappear over the horizon, they arrived on the shores of loneliness. It was the regret one felt upon walking through a door that closed afterwards, and the sadness of seeing a face gradually age in the mirror. It was the sound of inevitability. ‘Mango Cookie’ told its own story, through your imagination. And that’s the power behind music.

6. Christian Smith & John Selway ‘Total Departure’ [Drumcode]

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Christian Smith and John Selway’s approach to big room noise is borderline simplistic, but that is the genius behind ‘Total Departure’. Based around the realisation that DJs use records mainly as a tool to instill an instant dancefloor reaction, the duo proved resoundingly that the only way was up. They added an incessant rising synth to driving techno beats, took the kick drum out for a breakdown and added a large amount of white noise and FX. The result? One of the most devastatingly brilliant peak-time destroyers of 2008.

7. Lee Jones ‘Aria’ (Tiger Stripes Remix) [Aus Music]

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Tiger Stripes and Lee Jones both had successful 2008s in their own right, but it was their joint effort on Simple Records that really paved the road to that glory (particularly Tiger’s reputation as a remixer du jour). Jones’ catchy bell melody on ‘Aria’ had all the hallmarks of being an anthem anyway, and Tiger Stripes recognized this by leaving the cute main melody in tact completely. But by gently injecting some oomph through a tech house syringe, the heart of ‘Aria’ became a bright pumping star, one that shined over Miami throughout the annual Winter Music Conference in March. Each year, the prospect of finding one track that defines WMC and the subsequent summer months that follow is slim, but Tiger Stripes’ effort certainly made ‘Aria’ one for 2008.

8. Afefe lku ‘Mirror Dance’ [Yoruba Records]

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The Osunlade protégé outdid his own master on ‘Mirror Dance’ with a sublime chunky house record dripping with African rhythms and exotic flavours that one might find on Afefe Iku’s home island of Manda, near Kenya’s coast. ‘Mirror Dance’ fitted perfectly with Yoruba Recordings’ globally-influenced approach to house music, and through the wave of deep house mania that swept across the scene in 2008 this song emerged as an unlikely weapon for underground techno and house DJs alike.

9. EQD ‘Equalized #001’ [Equalized]

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Somebody in Berlin (possibly one of the guys at Hard Wax Records) made this stupendous EP, but it’s hard to say who created it as no artist information came with the record and it was put out on a mysterious white label. The Basic Channel style dub techno of the ‘A’ side started setting dancefloors alight in the techno clubs of Germany’s capital city early on in the year, but it was the ‘B’ side that confirmed ‘Equalized #001’ as one of the most stylistically flawless techno records of the last 12 months. Unashamedly repetitive and loop centric, ‘B’ effortlessly took control of minds and internal tempo settings with the ease a pro wrestler might have whilst picking up a young child with one finger. The swinging hypnotism of the main synth and its mirroring bass clause caused a strange confusion to the ears, and for 8:05 minutes it was a struggle to keep pace with the record which felt like it was constantly speeding up. That ‘feeling’ of being stuck, locked into a moving-train type groove that’s impossible to keep up with could only have come from a techno veteran, a perceptive individual who understood that, at the core of techno was only a will and a need for constant movement.

10. Milton Jackson ‘Ghosts In My Machine’ [Freerange Records]

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Every year in electronic music there are a few records that never quite reach the upper echelons of mainstream exposure, but are nonetheless reliable when you call upon them, like a good German Shepherd. That kind of DJ-friendly reliability is at the heart of Milton Jackson’s ‘Ghosts In My Machine’, a record that was released in February but remained in DJs’ boxes for many subsequent months. The secret of ‘Ghosts In My Machine’ is in its amnesiac lead synth loop that is difficult to recall, yet instantly recognizable when played. In an electronic music world that is becoming increasingly disposable, Milton Jackson’s understated tech house slow burner proved that there are still producers out there capable of creating excellent dance music that doesn’t lose impact with each play.