Fantastic to hear Roachee's "Top 3 Selected" vocal. His voice has changed a little since the gruff days of the "When I'm Ere" and "All Day Long" (the latter perhaps the best Grime track ever): he's more dextrous, sounding almost like the stuttering diction of Ghetto. Lots of tough talk, but the lyrics about "jail didn't change me" are kind of melancholy too, recognising the pointlessness of being locked up with "a room full of thugs". Massive tune.

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...

Dancehall feeling> After Skepta was going on about watching Ninjaman Youtube clips, I determined to check him out properly, rather than just bits and pieces. On Move From Here from 1990, he sounds awesome. He's ridiculously off-key and loose melodically, but so lean it's hard as nails. The rhythms are virtually just a drum machine and couple of synths plugged into mixing desk. But this kind of directness, like Gussie Clarke's Hardcore Ragga is what either makes or breaks the MC, its so stiff they have to take its punches.

Tingling feelings > The Mole's "As High As The Sky". After recently digesting Theo Parrish anew, this live-feeling ouse album strikes a similar chord in terms of hypnotic dance music, almost the disco equivalent of motorik. This is considerably simpler than Parrish (a Michael Rother solo album rather than Neu! 2, you could argue), but the instrumental parts are deliciously inconsequential and interchangeable, its almost like a mix and match of luminous pastel colours. Almost edibly lovely.

Feeling > The Hub Boundary Layer
Surely one of the reissues of the year this, a bunch of Bay Area tech geeks in the 80s jerry rigging previously incompatible computers together and creating ad hoc.... improvisations? Compositions? Experiments? Who knows what they are. But the jagged, beepy, often funny, frequently weird and always unpredictable music is more fun than an army of laptoppers.

Probably feeling > Rhadoo "Dor Mit Oru" 2x12"
Really loved this to start with, more of Cadenza's sculpted minimal techno explorations. Really plastic-y, sculpted textures which seem to almost get stuck between your gums they're so chewy. Reviews haven't been all that positive, though, perhaps it's all getting too considered and discretely arranged to be proper banging, innit. But the thing it reminds me of most is DJ Krust's 12"s like Slow Motion and Genetic Manipulation, super elongated drum 'n' melody scapes which suggest nothing so much as the fabric of spacetime being distorted.

Really feeling > Der Zyklus "Cherenkov-Radiation" 12"
Slammingly immediate tracks from Gerald Donald, aka Dopplereffekt. Echo-y tech electro which sounds like its recorded in a gasometer with a self-destruct timer counting down.

Marcello Carlin's track by track cultural commentary on the Portishead album - which I read with much admiration, and a certain amount of disagreement. I like the way Portishead are used as a lens through which to view political breakdown, spiritual loss and so on. But that's the thing with them which in the end is a slight weakness- they've always been a blank screen on which anyone can project their (usually downcast) emotions.

Jazzi B is doing a bunch of interviews, it being 20 years (20!) since Soul 2 Soul sprung to prominence. Crucial doesn't even come close to describing their work, so I won't attempt to describe it here. However, one moment from their career has particularly stayed with me through the years: the video to "Get A Life", one of the very few positivist moments from the hiphop continuum that really rings true, and also one of the best uses of a kids choir in pop ever. Their "what's the meaning? what's the meaning of life?" send shivers down my mind, it's everything "Another Brick In The Wall" tried to be and only half-managed. Anyway, the moment in particular is when a camera pans down through sun dappled trees to kids singing and playing on grass below. The combination of the sun and the panning camera, highly reminiscent of Spike Lee, and thus by extension, masters of American melodrama such as Douglas Sirk. The movement, the ease of the camera suggests this was one of the first times UK urban music felt at ease with itself, felt in that overused phrase.... real.

Nothing has given me as much pleasure recently as listening to Cypress Hill's self-titled 1989 album. The keyword for Mugg's productions will forever be "woozy", as if the beats themselves are polluted with bong-smoke. There's some truth in that, but what's key for me is how lean they feel. Tracks recycle beats and themes frequently (just as they recycle their own lyrical themes on Black Sunday) and of course, no B-Real lyric is complete without Sen Dog repeating the same line in his deranged, cartoonish vocals.

It's not the kind of almost painful, malnourished leanness which Portishead nailed a few years later on. Perhaps that LA heat has a kind of appetite suppressing effect, because Cypress Hill has the kind of wired, cerebral crackle, a kind of psychological tinnitus, that you can get from the combination of drugs, time to kill, forgetting to eat proper meals and endless daylight.

With THC, the mind can feed of anything: anything becomes a potential source of humour, and your mind endless obstructs, questions and shrugs its shoulders at the logic of everyday life. In this context, any kind of sample material is fair game, and the sillier the better: fairground organs on the breakdown, half-snatches of rock guitar which have less funk than Eric Clapton. The more bizarre the better, really. It never feels fat, but that's why it works: like shuffling through your dad's record collection, trying desperately to find something with half an ounce of groove, the search for the (im)perfect beat is the fun.

The reason it appeals now: it's recession music. 1989, US inner cities had very little hope, and Cypress Hill's stoned, free-associational humour arguably reflected that material desperation way better than NWA's grand claims to "the power of street knowledge". Having something silly shit to laugh about, some scratched thrift shop vinyl to play on a fucked-up record player - this is what Cypress represented, and the more spidery and spindly the grooves, the better.

Feeling >

Trim, Soul Food Volume 3. For someone who seems to be in perpetual crisis about whether he should MC or not, his work is always fresh as a daisy. Perhaps that's the reason...

Flying Lotus album. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking the hype had got rather out of hand, but this is genuinely some inside-out hiphop shizznizz.

Theo Parrish's Sound Sculptures Volume 1. Nominally house music, but these never quite interlocking beats are almost like Timbaland on a tapesplice binge. Some of the weirdest, most extenuated grooves I've heard for a while.

Kind of feeling > Religious Knives' album. Not the usual noise-stuff from the No Fun label, but a nasty-er, more barbed version of the Velvet Underground circa White Light, with scaborous, caustic guitar drone distortion which sounds like plastic flakes are falling off the tape reel.

Really feeling > Thomas Brinkmann's work passim. The new album is entirely techno-less, sort of like Tom Waits doing an album with Suicide at points, given the prevalence of his gravelly vocals and primitive synth pulses. But rewind through his recent albums, and each of them is radically different. Klick Revolution is an extraordinary piece of degraded techno, which feels like the beats are falling apart- William Basinski eat your heart out. Lucky Hands is more Matthew Dear-ish, with lots of vocals and hooks that tear into your skin. Techno's arch conceptualist, Brinkmann's work sets a different agenda for himself and techno as a whole at every turn.

Not really feeling > The couple of recent sets I've caught with The Bug. OK, his MCs are pretty rocking, but its somehow a little sad to hear Flo Dan and Warrior Queen's old lyrics represented over new beats, which for my money lose some of the quirky freshness of, say, those Roll Deep and Sunship productions which these two used to rhyme over. If feels like a repackaging.

As I grow older, the question of exactly WHY I like particular musics gets increasingly important – sort of a mid-life crisis, but I really see it in a positive light, a re-evaluation of values kind of thing. It makes me wonder why I like minimal techno quite so much- is it more than just fascination with textures, a kind of textural play not so different from electroacoustic music?

Minimal techno is not really an expressive or representational art. With its lack of vocals, and heavily processed nature, it feels like a plastic artform: the sound is malleable, but also varies only within certain limits, where much of the sounds are in the same ballpark. The thrill of something like Villalobos's mix of "Blood On My Hands" by Shackleton is the way it overlaps itself, folds itself up. It seeks to stretch the forms of perception, really, to disrupt the sense of time: it becomes techno operating on a formal level, rather than a simply textural one.

The minimalist impulse is often the fascination with the purely plastic nature of an artform. But there's another side to minimalism: a kind of ideology, an intellectual cleanliness, a wish to avoid clutter and waste. This makes sense with architecture, but rarely with music, when there's not the same issue of scarcity in the first place. On the contrary, minimalism in music often feels like a conceit: think of all those laptoppers with minimalist tones, a music genre which is perhaps the preserve of those with money and perfectly formed lifestyles. There's nothing gambled by making/consuming minimal techno, there's nothing at stake. Sound is too plentiful for the minimalism to constitute a real choice.

And yet, the beauty of it can something be a statement of sorts. The way it creates a self contained world, with very little sense of jazziness, very little of the swing of the human touch, just the feeling of the circuits playing themselves. Its sense of space is often exhilarating. The sounds are like an abstract tableaux one can appreciate at close up or from far away: it's a scaleable music, it can immerse you, make you loose your bearings (and thus doesn't really seem minimal at all). This sense of loosing your bearings, of being consumed, one rarely achieves with music, and is one reason minimal techno is special.

The beauty of all genuinely good rock music is that, despite it's assertive origins, it manages to sublimate itself into something of extraordinary gracefulness, even femininity. Are there any counterexample to this rule?

How typical of Wylie that, after a typically unfocused album and subsequent bust up with his record company, his most urgent track in ages is just a throwaway freestyle on a Myspace page (although the lyrics suggest it might be on his 10 Pound An Hour mixtape). Check out Maniac's Myspace page: Wylie's vocal on a nerve-shredding Maniac violin based rhythm is his best in ages, the urgency is there, as if, once again, the realisation has kicked in that he needs to keep his name on the air in order to keep popular. His voice is as thin and taut as the violin sample; lyrics like "walk to the dome across the Thames/watch me walk across water" and "Kids know my song like Away In A Manger" suggest he has something of a messiah complex, and yet perhaps the wonder is, like a deeply rootical reggae vocalist, he actually seems to believe in the semi-mystic realm he describes: "watch your spirit leave the vehicle". If Dizzee described grimey London in all it's grid-locked detail, Wiley hints that he could transcend it. Yet, it's only when he's in the gutter that he can see the stars (frustratingly).

As an aside, why is it that string samples in hiphop and grime are so addictive? I guess that, for all rap's pretentions of grandeur, these brief snatches of classicism actually conceal real pathos, like a glimpse of a string quartet through a briefly-open door. More importantly, the interaction of the acoustic and the electronic concentrates the intensity, where an unrepeatably sublime string phrase is trapped looped like a butterfly caught in a net.

Feeling>

Demons Evocation- a grimy synth dual between a Wolf Eyes member and another dude, echoed to infinity, that recalls the weightless space-tracing of Dopplereffekt's recent work. Except, it's so dark and hard it gradually seems to exert it's own gravitational pull.

Autistic Daughters Uneasy Flowers- post Low explorations with miserabalist vocals, but something about the cinematic drift of the instrumental work, as if the group are slowling coallesing round a single idea, makes this really memorable.

The Black Dog Flood- they're back, and it's weird and knotty and edgy. It's not immediately wonderful, but there's something about the way they're grappling with those dark tones which is pretty admirable.

Really feeling>

Strategy Pacific Agenca- the most imaginative house music out there, I reckon. There are so many concealed hooks and rhythms that you can dance to this in almost any manner, and yet still a sense of effortless glide. So clever, so immediate. To paraphrase David Stubbs, this is as fun as serious gets, and as serious as fun gets.

Some of my recent musings about Techno have been about how it's no longer a "futurist" genre, that it no longer tries to "push forward", instead it seems to have found it's own sonic space (as an aside, we can mention that Minimal Techno isn't about minimalism at all, but a precise sense of sonic balance and weight). However, the notion of "pushing forward" and searching out new territories is the kind of thing one tends to fantasise when one is younger: it's a kind of libido-driven desire for new thrills that I think young music junkies are prone to. After all, when one is young, and the slate is blank, all you want is the promise of new lands, new horizons. For each new day to bring something new; that's enough. So, perhaps my own observations about Techno's ambitions were filtered through my own horizons of what music means for me.

Having said that, I do think there's something holistic rather than thrusting about Minimal Techno these days: the way it tries to fill the sonic spectrum rather than blast it out of the water. Just listening to the new Cadenza record by Schneider, Galluzi and Schirmacher, and while the drum beat of "Nora P" is straightforward, the echoing, meandering synth line (not so far away from Carl Craig's seminal "Neurotic Behaviour") is as warm and endlessly inventive - fertile - as a saxophone solo.

As an aside, you can tell the emphasis is on sonic detail of each individual track with Minimal Techno, because (thankfully) they make it obvious which track on the 12" is which. Thank god! Remember the days where one side was at 33, the other at 45, and you had to try and work out which track was which was more likely to be called "Jazz Moment"?

TIME FOR SOME ACTON or AIN'T GOIN BACK TO GREENFORD

Two weeks ago, I spent two hours walking around Greenford, on London's West Coast, on a sunday morning, looking for a football (=soccer) match I was meant to play in. Despite the name, Greenford is as grey as could be, and I spent the time trudging over wet grass with my map turning to papier mache, feeling like I was in a Morrissey song.

Anyway, I was kept warm by Turf Talk's bay area album West Coast Vaccine (The Cure), which is surely my hiphop album of the year. So many extraordinary things about it. The beats are smooth and effortless to the degree where, like a big gas-guzzling American car, you're not sure quite what speed it's moving at; like The Neptunes, there's something radically decentred about the beats, where it's not the masculine thrust of the kickdrum which pushes it forward, it's got a more spacious soundfield where snares, handclaps and all sorts zoom in and out in parallax (handclaps are fascinating, aren't they. Is there any sound so compact, so full of energy, which contains low, middle and high frequencies all together? The amount of sonic energy in the mix is amazing). Also, the flows, which are more like sprays, so gaseous and light are they. Syllables come out in quick bursts, as if they're tumbling out in a torrent. Also again, the voices, which are generally so high and squeaky (surely Eminem influenced) they're almost de-sexualised. Is this lack of testosterone a case of "I'm so hard, I don't even have to sound like I am" (there's a big history of rappers, reggae artists and soulboys singing in a high voice about how tough they are). Or is it one of those rare examples of a non-sexual music, ie it's got a forcefulness which isn't libido based?

Also also, the slang, which is silly in just the right degree. Refering to money as "chips"; refering to people as "mates". Although journalistic talk of "delight in the creative process" can be rather cliched, there's a sense here that there having lots of laughs, and this sense of fun definitely feeds the immediate, impulsive sonic fizz of the album.

Someone recently remarked that Sam Shackleton sounds a bit like plasticine northener Wallace from the Wallace and Gromit cartoons. The comparison to an eccentric inventor is somewhat appropriate, because most cliches about "bass science" are absent from his live set: there's no hard edges, physical overload, or dizzying drops or asymmetries. Instead there is an organic, intuitive quality on a human scale that feels familiar, as if it comes from inside rather than out.

It's still dark and evocative, but it's more a dark, familiar intimacy (quite appropriate for the atmosphere of Plastic People in London, where you're so close that you stand next to people you know for 5 minutes without noticing it) being alone but with a sense of warmth inside. For the whole of his set tonight, the bass is in a sense of liquid suspension- there's no brutal bass drops, just warm convection currents within the room. This vibrations feel much more inner than outer.

"Organic" bass can be overplayed, though, and getting a sense of constant dynamics in such a warm set is hard. Shackleton manages it, though, despite the lack of edges; basslines double and detach, there's a constant sense of symmetry and development, like single celled beings duplicating themselves. In terms of development, this gives the music a gliding feel, duplicating with the ease of fractal patterns.

Later in the mix, Shackleton plays a re-fixed verision of Can's "Mother Sky", which is very appropriate; Can's famed musical democracy between the four players gave a sense of multi-directional freedom, and there's the same gliding, rarefied feel to Shackleton's live set-up.

Tempo is dance music is been a subject that's increasingly interested me over the last couple of years.We seem to "understand" it better recently, so that exact microdistances between 124bpm and 128bpm (numbers provided are for illustration only) define whole nanogenres of dance musics. On the other hand, hiphop is no longer so dance-able, in my subjective opinion- Missy Elliot probably representing it's last stand of freaky dancing- and of course jungle's Jackson Pollock-style play with rhythm is over. Thus, the spread of tempos, from high to low, that can be considered dance music has narrowed: tempos are more honed, but more narrowly spread.

I wonder if the renewed interest over the last 7-8 years in disco coincides with this narrowing process. The slower tempos of Disco in many ways seems like the paradigm dance music, multi-gender, multi-sexualised, multi-racial. Perhaps the general narrowing of tempoes has been a return to the source, dance music wise.

Some of these thoughts came to a head watching Strategy this weekend as part of The Wire's 25th Birthday events. Stategy, aka Portland, Oregon's Paul Dickow, played a fantastic set of multi-layered kinda disco house- steady horizontal tempo with a vertical spectrum of rainbow textural hues. Perhaps the key to the kind of disco tempo he works at is that, dance wise, you can easily miss a beat as you're grooving away, unlike the faster pace of techno, which compels you to submit to each and every beat (to be more specific, disco gives the space to move fluidly between the beats, whereas the rigours of techno demand more muscular movements). The more ergonomic tempo of disco enables a push and pull on the dancefloor, as opposed to the straightforward thrust of techno.

It's hard not to read a gender aspect to this push and pull- it enables flirtation, interchange, fluidity, different roles for men and women. And of course, it's tempo draws people "out" (in both senses of the word!), whereas the slower tempos of hiphop enable men to retain their macho cool.

It makes me wonder, furthermore, about the point at which disco became house. There's such a crossover between the influences of the two, and they run at the same tempo, that perhaps they should be seen as a continuum. Nevertheless, the thought occurs: maybe the house resolution was more psychological than a straightforward musical progression: ecstacy made dancers more focused on their own experience, hence psycho-claustrophobia such as Adonis's "No Way Back" and Phuture's "Your Only Friend".

There are quite a few reasons for Grime's continued non-success (lack of investment by record companies, substandard albums, the album 'form' being unnatural for what's essentially a track based genre). Discussions of language have generally, though, focused on how Americans Just Don't Get It. As with so many US/UK things, the two countries are divided by a common language.

Thinking about it recently, though, it strikes me that most middle class Londoners distate for Grime suggests there's a similar case of a shared language with radically different (and mutually antagonistic) dialects in the capital itself. Young black Londoners speak a mish mash of hiphop lingo, yard patois and working class cockney-isms, all dialects which are tinged with an inner city defiance of sorts. Yet if you live a comfortable middle class existence- something I've been seeing a lot of recently through flat-hunting- you can go weeks without having to encounter young black kids. Middle class and working class neighbourhoods are often radically different, despite in many cases existing just down the road from each other. Middle classes ride the tube; working classes the bus. Add to this the fact that the media is always going to be middle class, and you realise Grime-type dialects become more sidelined in London all the time. However it's only just struck me that many of Grime's defining attributes- relentless positivity, boasting as self-expression, visceral humour- are traits which are usually considered un-English. The language is shared, but the emphasis is 'foreign'.

Still kinda absorbing the MIA album; it never really seems to sink in, somehow. The drawls, the yelps, they fill out the sound, but do strike me as a kind of facade, the kind of tics one resorts to out of nervousness. Overall the thing which has been really bugging me about it is how, despite it's incredible [nervous] energy, to me it feels hardly ethnic in any way, much less so than the previous album.

For me, there are three central contridictions that put me off the record. The more MIA works with other musicians, the more their individual styles are subsumed and flattened into a fairly one-dimensional sound; despite the global travelling, her sound has actually become less 'ethnic'; and although MIA decries globalisation, this anti-globalisation is her very own global brand.