The playlist: electronic – Carl Craig, Lena Willikens, the return of Sueño Latino and more

From Carl Craig’s classical excursions to Lena Willikens’s Dusseldorf eclecticism and Juju and Jordash’s ballsy improv: it’s the electronic playlist

Carl Craig plays at the Movement festival in Detroit

Carl Craig and Francesco Tristano

Premiering exclusively on the Guardian is a live improvisation between disgustingly handsome pianist Francesco Tristano and Detroit techno master Carl Craig. Recorded for a Boiler Room session in Germany sponsored by Ballantine’s whisky (whose imagery you might well notice throughout) it comes as part of their Stay True Journeys series. Techno is naturally po-faced, so can seem awfully haughty when it actually tries to be serious and edge its way into the conservatoire. But whether its Villalobos and Loderbauer mining the ECM archives, or Craig and Moritz Von Oswald turning Ravel into dub techno, the worlds of classical music and techno can potentially dovetail beautifully. So it (mostly) proves here as Craig sends acid arpeggios on skewed axes, before Tristano returns with full-blooded house chords. Piano sounds are usually approximated in dance music, often beautifully and strangely, but it’s satisfying to hear the grand piano put to use in the unbecoming business of a fist-pumping anthem. You see can more from the same Boiler Room series here.

Lena Willikens

Another Guardian premiere here, from the debut EP of Cologne producer Lena Willikens, out next week on Matias Aguayo’s Comeme label. Willikens made a name for herself as an artist with immaculate taste: She’s hosted the likes of Hieroglyphic Being and Theo Parrish at her Dusseldorf club residency, and her brilliant podcast, Sentimental Flashback, showcases her crate-digging – one week will be her favourite bass guitar lines, the next, cold war-era German pop, the next a tour through global polyrhythms. All of this cosmopolitanism is poured into her tracks, which have the chilled jugular beat of minimal wave, the scrunched electronics of IDM, the wit of electroclash and the phantasmagoric camp of gothic pop. On lead track Howlin Lupus, Willikens breathes and howls like a wolf, tapping into the dark sexuality at the heart of werewolf myths, while the bassline scurries with maniacal intent. Club promoters – you have your first no-brainer booking of the year.

Galcher Lustwerk

While acknowledging his punkish credentials, part of me really wants underground producer Galcher Lustwerk to bring out an artist album and blow away the dance mainstream – one-offs like Chillin in the Booth have been as spectacular as his 2013 Blowing Up the Workshop mix, where he lays his steady enigmatic flow over peerless deep-house production. For now, we can happily make do with a new batch of re-edits, featuring lazy G-funk, ambient and the addictive riddim of Lumidee’s Never Leave You flecked with workout sweat. Best of all is this rework of rap crew OGC’s track Hurricane Strang, which has a gorgeous tension between the pert pulsations of Lustwerk’s beat, and the vocal line dragging its heels just behind it.

Juju and Jordash

Gal Aner and Jordan Czamanski are Israelis who moved to Amsterdam and immersed themselves in the playful, puckish house style of the city – and also added their own flavour, building their tracks from lengthy improvisations until a groove is smoothly carved. They ballsily use this technique when playing live in their trio with Move D, Magic Mountain High, but they’re skilled arrangers too, using the studio without sucking away the serendipity of improv. Their new album, Clean-Cut, is their best yet. Ambitious in its clean mulch of krautrock and jacking house, and channelling high-gloss 80s weirdos like David Sylvian and Laurie Anderson, the pair manage to nail it, and the title track is as good a place as any to start. The strutting bedrock could have been made by Moderat or Todd Terje, but then the kitsch panpipe melody begins, and is joined by sounds seemingly from a cheap instructional cassette for ayurvedic medicine. Pristine, yes, but definitely perverted.

Sueño Latino

Finally, clearing away the January blues is the turquoise flourish of Sueño Latino, reissued this week on vinyl following its original release in 1989. Perma-gurning crusties will insist that the second Summer of Love was ecstatic social emancipation on a par with the fall of apartheid, but when you hear tracks like this you can imagine the pharmacologically-assisted bliss must have been pretty significant. Built around Manuel Göttsching’s astral classic E2-E4 the Italian group fed a solid bass drum underneath, dotted tropical birdcalls and house pianos throughout, and added some almost comically sensual vocals from Carolina Damas. The canonical version is the Paradise Mix, but other remixes included here are equally strong. On Derrick May’s revisit from 1992 he revs up the bpm, adds extra melodic lines, and sluices mild acid over it all. Equally beautiful, though in a much more elegant way, is the Agua Version, which mutes the bass kick to keep everything flitting around in the mid-range and Gottsching himself turns up on the pounding Winter Version. Buy it, turn the central heating up, and spin around your living room wearing a flower garland for late-80s Ibiza on the cheap.