Laurent Garnier has performed live before, but 2009 was perhaps his biggest test yet, taking out a live band to perform the hugely varied batch of songs that found their way onto Tales of a Kleptomaniac. RA's Matt Anniss described the full-length as "dubstep-influenced hip-hop and politically-aware dance floor jazz workouts [mixed] with slick techno, raucous drum & bass and dubwise downtempo flavours." Yet Garnier somehow pulled it off, bringing together his merry band like a conductor and performing fire-breathing renditions of the new material, while hauling out old chestnuts and making them sound new.

Modeselektor performed just as much as part of Moderat in 2009, but that just made the shows they did under their own name seem to count even more. Fans who found Moderat to be just a tad too self-serious for its own good, welcomed the return of the boys late in the year with open arms. Slightly more unhinged, slightly messier and slightly more vodka were the recipe, and Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary (and visual genius Pfadfinderei) followed it to perfection, reminding us all why we loved the original so much in the first place.

You couldn't go many places in the world this year as a techno traveler and not run into Mathew Jonson. Whether he was performing as himself, as part of Cobblestone Jazz, as part of The Modern Deep Left Quartet or even doing a one-off with Dandy Jack, he was nigh on inescapable. That's a good thing: Jonson's laudable approach to performing live is close to that of a DJ, separating out his sounds so that he can mix them into new forms, and hopefully creating something that resembles one of his signature tunes, but in a way that you've never heard it before.

Despite the fact that he was part of a new live conglomeration over the past 18 months—A Critical Mass—RA users couldn't get enough of Henrik Schwarz. And who can blame them? The man's jazz-infused deep house set has been honed for maximum enjoyment, a masterful example of how to build an hour to a boil. Schwarz's hasn't changed much in the past 12 months, but it's always new: His devotion to improvisation means that the elements may remain the same, but that the outcome is different each time—a little bit, in fact, like the jazz masters he admires so much.

Booka Shade didn't perform all that much on the live circuit this year, preferring to focus upon their new album. But the shows that they did play had an obvious impact. Maybe, as Arno Kammermeier put it in an interview with RA earlier this year, it was their big balls? More likely, though, it was the fact that the duo have succeeded in finding a way to perform songs that are largely constructed with synths in a way that is visually compelling and—for lack of a better work—rocks pretty hard. Then again, the balls did light up.

Mysterious, mystical, thrilling. There was no shortage of adjectives used to describe Fever Ray's live show in 2009. Taking its cues from Karin Dreijer Andersson's other group, The Knife, Fever Ray performances were heavy on atmosphere, perfectly encapsulating the sense of dread and unease of the music that her band unleashed each night on stage. As Andersson put it, the show was like a moving exhibition of masks from Papua New Guinea or Africa. Whatever it was, it left us grasping for single words. Mysterious, mystical, thrilling and much, much more.

Frank Heinrich may have had a live set in 2008. But he certainly didn't have a live set like the one he had this year. Armed with a sure thing of a closer in "Caminando," as well as plenty of tracks that bridged stylistic boundaries, Heinrich's performances were a rejoinder to the idea that live sets needed to have a similar sound palette to succeed. While there was an obvious current of southern German bounce to the proceedings, Heinrich keeps things interesting by bringing in plenty of groove boxes and synths along in a nod to some of his heroes: Alter Ego and Der Dritte Raum.