The legend goes that in 1993, when Stefan Betke, the mastering engineer for the Berlin techno label Basic Channel, accidentally dropped his favorite microphone, the Waldorf 4-Pole-Filter, he was shocked to hear that it made everything sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies: full of snaps, crackles, and pops. It also rendered any digital sound suddenly analog-sounding, as comforting as an old vinyl record and as warm and staticky as a wool blanket. In much the same way that mild-mannered men become superheroes, Mr. Betke took on the name of Pole and began to craft electronic music based on such noises.

Between 1998 and 2000, Matador Records released three of Pole’s spare yet spacious electronic albums (called “1,” “2,” and “3,” color-coded solid blue, red, and yellow, respectively), all of which were landmarks evoking the sounds of ghosts in machines, pre-Y2K tension, and what dub reggae might sound like were it created in a supercollider. Along with such countrymen as Markus Popp (who reworked skipping CDs as Oval) and Wolfgang Voigt (the prolific producer who recorded under at least 30 different aliases), Mr. Betke rose to take a place among the avant-garde, making music directly from the sounds of machines — scratched CDs, misaligned 0s and 1s on hard drives, or any other corruption of a digital device.

His telltale fizz and sputter having run its course, Mr. Betke reemerged in 2003 with a headscratching, glitch-free album that featured up-tempo skanky rhythms and, most mortifying of all, a guest rapper. Retaining that twitchy rubber-band machine funk, Pole’s latest, “Steingarten” (released this week under his own imprint) at least removes the rapper, allowing the uptight rhythms a bit more room to wiggle. Though nowhere near his iconic early works, tracks like “Warum” and “Düsseldorf” boing and ping, the crackle replaced by squeaks, chirps, and small shards of feedback, all resting atop beats reminiscent of fellow Germans Kraftwerk and Cluster. Of course, one can’t help but wonder if Mr. Betke should have taken the example of someone like Mr. Voigt and simply used a different moniker in straying far from the original Pole.

As Mr. Betke has eschewed his glitchy past, others have stepped into the void to re-imagine the context of such mechanical errors in musicmaking and to bring them back toward the pop music fold. Technical malfunctions and skipping CDs abound on the Field’s debut album, “From Here We Go Sublime,” one of the year’s best electronic records, released this week on the German imprint Kompakt.

The work of Swedish producer Axel Willner, “Sublime” buffs the serrated edges off those jarring sounds, proving that such turbulence can be a source of pleasure. Mr. Willner builds his 10 resplendent tracks out of small slivers of sound, suggesting at once Oval’s hiccups, the ambient drifts of Mr. Voigt, the prolonged ecstasy of early acid house, as well as the blissedout smears of My Bloody Valentine’s epochal “Loveless.”

In the middle of the shimmering “Sun & Ice,” Mr. Willner lets his heavenly choirs and ceaseless kickdrum suddenly sputter and go dead, only to return to their previous peak, which is stretched out into a sustained plateau. Perceptive ears can also pick out snippets of chanting monks, rave anthem sound effects, Lionel Ritchie, and, on the closing title track, the Flamingos’ 1959 doo-wop hit “I Only Have Eyes for You.” But the album works best when the building blocks blur, allowing listeners simply to follow the title’s invective and “go sublime.”

Far from the realms of European techno, the third album from Panda Bear (né Noah Lennox) suggests that he too was reared on that golden, glitchy era of German techno. Also a member of the Brooklynbased Animal Collective, Panda Bear recently released “Person Pitch,” a collection of his disparate single sides and split 12-inches released in the past few years. The liner notes contain a laundry list of Mr. Lennox’s influences, ranging from George Michael and the Everly Brothers to Basic Channel and Mr. Voigt. Away from his brethren in Animal Collective, Mr. Lennox’s singing voice remains the same: sleepy, boyish, as somnambulant as “Nemo in Slumberland.”

Rather than using the acoustic guitar and piano that demarked his previous album, the austere and astringent “Young Prayer,” Mr. Lennox has chosen to use a sampler to build his backing music. Densely layered yet light and effervescent, “Person Pitch” reveals subtle sounds like the crying of Mr. Lennox’s newborn daughter, the coos of pigeons, the sounds of public transportation, as well as the occasional crackle and snap (all found in the 12-minute centerpiece, “Bros”). Also tucked in are snippets of African chants, tablas, Cat Stevens, and a cry that sounds suspiciously like the disposed King of Pop, Michael Jackson — suggesting that glitch and pop music can co-exist a decade on.