The Air Textures compilation series is an intriguing one, for it contains little to no beats and hardly any tunes, but it is right up there with some of the best mood music you could hope to hear at the moment. That immediately sounds the warning bell that there might be some pretentious new age music on show, but again that's not the case – just two sets of dreamy, almost weightless shifts of sound that blend in to each other. Loscil chooses the first, which features his own 'Else', a series ...

In 2011 we've discovered The Only Way Is Essex, we've torn up our own high streets in the name of something or other, and we've planted the seeds for divorce from Europe. Yet out of hard times comes good music - so while 2011 can hardly claim to have been a great year for the UK, it's been a pretty storming affair for electronic music. So how about something cheery for once? How about 10 albums and 10 compilations that made 2011 a better place? Choosing them wasn't easy - but from a shortlist of several hundred covered by DMC over the year - and a couple that slipped through the reviewing net - we have the following for your listening pleasure:

This is a fascinating pair of sets from bvdub and Andrew Thomas - mainly because you'd be hard pressed to hear a single drum in two hours' worth of music, so ambient are the selections. The clue is in the title, of course - for this is all about ambient textures, slowly shifting units of sound that move naturally rather than being constricted by rhythm. In bvdub's mix one of the standout tracks is his own 'Tried So Hard', which offers distant tremolo guitars and warm drifts of synthesized sound,...