Feeling >

Yo Majesty – lesbian hiphop duo from Tampa. Sort of a feminist spin on crunk, where bellowing sexual menace becomes sly, seductive patter, all fast-rapped innuendo in a kind of polari. It's not narcissistic, it's demonstrative – it actually feels sexual, urgent, breaking boundaries, pansexual. Good tunes, too, some almost bassline house moments in there.

Venetian Snares Detrimentalist! – this tribute to jungle (especially ragga tinged) circa 94-95 is sonically fearsome, where it's as if the whole rhythm track has been timestretched so much the very wrinkles of the space continuum have become embedded in it. Funny, too, but it's not just dumb gags – it's all in the timing.

Retro feeling >

Arabian Prince Innovative Life – stupid fresh electro with a touch of Prince's shapeshifting persona.

Nitty Gritty Turbo Charged + King King Trouble Again – both reissued just as Dave Stelfox's highly enjoyable Digital Dancehall appears in The Wire. There's an argument to be made that this was the real roots music of the mid-80s. Rather than lavishly fashioned studio riddims, made with great musicians and occasionally in great studios (when major labels were involved), these off the cuff digital tracks have a more tangible connection to the street and the means of production. They feel slim and hungry, kind of recession music, really, but really urgent, as if you're plugged into the computer.

Retro really feeling >

The Prodigy The Prodigy Experience – "Charly" is a track so cheerfully illogical. It's both simpler and more complex than almost all classic pop music. The sound palette is limited yet bizarre – a brassy riff, a dirty, jumbled breakbeat, an out of tune bassline, some spluttering vocal tics and sparklingly dextrous keyboards – like a Ready Steady Cook of rave music. Rather than attempting to gel the elements together, the track emphasises their disparity, shuffling the elements suddenly (the bassline ducking in and out, the vocal ticks spluttering in at odd moments, lots of drop outs). There's a playful hide and seek beginning, and a sudden, cranky ending.

Mark Fisher has mentioned the fairground feel to their work, and that of a lot of rave. I wonder if this metaphor could be extended in certain ways – there's something of the showman to Liam Howlett's work here, building the track up, whipping away the rhythm or changing the key suddenly. It's like a magician whipping away a tablecloth while keeping the table decorations, or a human pyramid miraculously disassembling itself in seconds.

Usually, pop music works with the listener's expectations, nurturing them, then playing with them subtly with melody etc. "Charly" is not exactly funny, but its irreverence is the motor which keeps it going. It doesn't deal with physical tension but psychological attention, defeating listener expectations. Although it was made on virtually a single keyboard (the Roland W30, it's music as a party trick, and a music of spectacle. Forget the circus, raves with this kind of music going off must have been the greatest show on Earth..

The Ragga Twins The Ragga Twins Step Out – another rave type title (is it a coincidence that both this and the above have rather showman-esque titles, including the group name in the title?). I've reviewed this in The Wire 294, and it feels like a really serious work, even if it was all ad hoc at the time. All of society's tensions in the early 90s worked their way into these tracks.

Feeling intrigued >

Jakob Ullman – not exactly modern classical, more a sort of ultra experimental ambience which exists right on the verge of auditory perception. Elements drift in and out in wonderfully subtle ways, as if soft velvet curtains are occasionally being pulled slightly back to allow minimal touches of instrumentation through

Feeling weird about >

Lil Wayne – it's overtly shoddy, this, isn't it? Weirdly, that's it's main strength, though, that feeling of decrepitness and urgency. It's occasionally really funny and/or funky. Not exactly golden age hiphop, but it's got a certain real-ness (even if that feels rather contrived, with Wayne rapping until his voice is hoarse).

Was tired and lethargic after a day of picking through CDs at work a month or two back, and I found that Monolake was the perfect solution - the crystalline forms and powerdery elements feel so weightless it was as if mental and physical aches and pains almost disolved. It's the sort of impact that only this kind of post-Chain Reaction music can create....

Audio diary of a bleak mid-week in Blackpool:

Sitting in the mirror-lined, fading wallpapered lounge of a beach front hotel. Total quiet except for the shuffling soft shoes of the elderly guests, and the hotel's Barry White CD glitching again and again, halting its forward momentuum. This must be what limbo is like.

The AM radio of the woman who cleans the rooms, phasing organically and spitting out pops and splutters like hot oil. You can hardly hear the music, but the character of the radio - gently chaotic, unpredictable but recurring, like the eddie pools in a flowing river - defines the listening experience. Likewise, you wonder if the sound quality of mobile phones is part of the listening experience for kids on a bus. It's penetrative, resonant, plastic, even if it's veracity is poor. The way it dominates space and hangs in the air gives it a kind of enduing, non-degradable toughness.

Hanging around in the Blackpool Tower waiting to go to the pop, and who should be playing there but bloody Menswear/Menswe@r? In terms of its muzak selections, Blackpool Tower must be operating close to the bottom of the food chain, picking up the scraps of second division 90s indie bands. It's like those tapes you used to find at service stations, of old revue bands with makeshift line-ups. It's as if economic scarcity imbues the very music itself with a kind of sociocultural resonance...