Today brings the official announcement of the the first half of Decibel Festival's 2012 line-up, following yesterday's unauthorized and disavowed leak. Sharp readers will note several similarities between the two, although today's official announcement leaves a lot of slots, including one headlining artist, unaccounted for. One might speculate that those question marks will be filled in with names floated yesterday, but officially that remains to be seen. In the meantime, plenty to chew on in today's announcement. Some highlights: Carl Craig, John Talabot, Fennesz, Matthew Dear, Actress, Dixon. (I remain entirely unpleased about Kimbra and Ariel Pink.)

Oh, and this is cute: This year on their website, you can count down to the festival--happening September 26th - 30th--in beats per minute. At a tasteful 120 BPM, it's 26,716,080 beats to go as of this moment.

The press release from Decibel after the jump.

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Seattle electronic music and arts festival Decibel may have just blown a bit of it's 2012 roll-out strategy today, when an initial line-up went live on their site and started making the social network rounds before being promptly taken down moments ago. It's not on their site now, but screen-shots never die. The big news: ORBITAL!!! The pioneering UK electronic duo have made an incredibly strong comeback with this year's new album Wonky (their first since 2004), and their live sets are the stuff of legend. (Check out this video of them playing live at the BBC recently for a bit of an idea, only with a polite studio audience.)

The other big get is mysterious Barcelona producer John Talabot, whose excellent album of slow-mo disco, moody techno, and spooked-out house, ƒIN, is one of the year's best so far. Also check out his A+ mix for FACT Magazine.

Plenty of time to talk about this before the official roll-out, let alone the festival, but briefly, let me be the first to say: Ariel Pink and Kimbra are totally wack, wildly inappropriate indie grabs. More PLUR, less KEXP, imo.

UPDATE: Just off the phone with the fine people at Decibel, who say that this leaked image "was a place-holder we had on our website that doesn't accurately reflect the line-up we'll be announcing tomorrow at 8am. It is not a preliminary line-up." So: No Orbital? No Ariel? Won't somebody think of the PLUR vibes?!

Long story short: You can speculate in the meantime, but tune in tomorrow at 8am for the official Decibel 2012 line-up announcement.

Decibel Festival's Sean Horton

Another Decibel Festival has come and gone (reviews here, here, and here), and if you're anything like me you're probably still reeling slightly from the long weekend. Somewhere out there, festival founder Sean Horton is hopefully taking a well-deserved break (this year's fest landed the same week as his birthday and wedding anniversary as if it weren't enough all ready), but he got in touch to share some quick thoughts about how this year's 8th edition of the Northwest's premiere festival of electronic music and arts went down.

"2011 was without question our most successful edition to date in terms of overall attendance," says Horton. "[We] hit capacity on 21 out of 30 showcases. For me personally, it was also the most rewarding program from a curatorial standpoint. As for the festival operations, we've never had such a solid team and overall plan of attack. Given all the circumstances, it really couldn't have gone any better."

Well, Motor City Drum Ensemble could've gotten that visa--then again, Horton and the Decibel crew always need something to book during the off-season...

Miracles Club: great even if you're straight...yeah

Like any respectable music festival, Decibel neither encourages nor condones drug use. And, like at any respectable music festival, people are going to do drugs anyway. My last couple reports from Decibel have examined some of electronic music's defining myths and true characteristics--the notion that that it isn't real live music (handily debunked by Shigeto, AraabMuzik, and others); its fundamental tension between the body-moving functionalism of "tracks" and audio/visual FX versus more traditionally structured pop songcraft (nicely illustrated by Amon Tobin and Ladytron). But probably no impression of "rave" culture is as widespread as the notion that it's also at its core a drug culture.

Of course, this is true and it isn't. I've known straight-edge or teetotaling ravers (on both sides of the decks) since I was in high school, and you don't have to be high to enjoy electronic music any more than performing the stuff is just pushing a button. (Decibel and Seattle's homegrown electronic scene can seem especially sober sometimes, more the domain of fastidious off-duty Microsoft programmers than of drug-fueled revelers.)

On the other hand...

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Amon Tobin ISAM (he's inside the biggest cube there)

If Decibel's opening night was a compelling proof that electronic music can be as "real" and live as any other, last night illustrated one of electronic music's fundamental tensions: state-of-the-art technical innovation versus good old-fashioned songcraft. Technological innovations have driven popular electronic music since the beginning--from Kraftwerk's Klingklang Studio to acid house's discovery of the latent possibilities of the Roland TB-303 bass synth to the rise of sampling and software sequencing throughout the '90s and '00s. So too, electronic music has always been animated by the divide between recognizable songs--with choruses or discrete movements--and more functional tracks, built with the DJ in mind, patterned around builds and releases and auditory effects rather than traditional song structures. Last night, two of Decibel's headliners provided a handy illustration of that divide: Amon Tobin, with his dazzling audio/visual demonstration ISAM, and Ladytron, with their more traditional, but highly effective electro pop.

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The madly prolific AtomTM.

If there was one common thread running through the better performances at Decibel Festival's opening night last night, it was the way they made the case for electronic music's legitimacy as "real" music, live music, played by real musicians. From Shigeto's adroit and jazzy live drumming to the camera trained close-up on AraabMuzik's blindingly fast sampler-pad-tapping fingers to the full-screen visual readout showing Atom TM's computer control parameters in real time, last night felt like a concerted effort to disprove the notion that "all these guys do is get on stage and press play." Except for Zomby, of course, but we'll get to that later.

The first thing I caught last night was Shigeto at Neumos--actually, the first thing I caught was a waft of patchouli upon walking into Neumos, but I'm willing to let that slide. Shigeto (aka Ghostly International artist Zach Saginaw) split his time between manning a laptop and some controls and sitting behind a drum kit, seeming to slightly favor the kit. His laptop loops ranged from dubby, liquid grooves to pretty electric piano melodies to, later, more beat-heavy material, but what was most impressive was how easily he just dropped into the drum kit and kept perfect time with them, without any visible earpiece or headphones to listen to a click track, just playing live to a monitor. At one point, he was keeping the beat on a cymbal with one hand and leaning over to manipulate a knob on his laptop controller with the other. He ended his set promptly at 11, asked the crowd if they were ready for AraabMuzik (they were), then conferred with someone in the wings and announced, "I guess I'm gonna keep going." AraabMuzik was AWOL.

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