There’s a wolf howl and Yxng Bane (pronounced Young Bane) jumps off a block on stage and his furry hooded coat flies open and the arena erupts in screams. The pit is filled almost exclusively with seventeen year old girls, excellently contoured and sporting chunky trainers and crop tops like it’s the early 2000s all over again, and he’s wearing nothing underneath except many hours at the gym.

Having long been immersed in folk and world music and acoustically-oriented singer-songwriters, it’s a surprise to be given a CD of music by someone who’s never crossed your radar, especially when the artist concerned turns out to have sold some 14 million albums, though mostly in Europe and N

Writing in 1980, the musician and musical theorist Chris Cutler said that “without the support and patronage of the culture-establishment, The Residents were able to exist, continue to exist, grow, find their public, hold that public – and expand it – until the pop establishment was forced to take notice.” He contended that as they were neither musicians or part of music sub-culture they “exemplified a new type [of development], specialising in nothing, turning their hands to anything: a type whose aims were no longer conceived in terms of music, theatre, film, writing or the visual arts, b

In one of the award-winning club’s forays from its Camden Town home, Green Note welcomed International Women’s Day with a special one-off concert exploring and celebrating the many ages and stages of being a woman. Three generations of musicians were on stage at North London’s JW3.

As collaborations go, it’s a doozy. Karen O’s signature vocals over Danger Mouse’s production – it was always going to pique interest. And Lux Prima does much to meet expectations, gorgeous cinematic soundscapes that flit between haunting and defiant. At its best, its damn near mesmerising. But for those expecting a genre-defying, structure-blowing new horizon, it falls just short.

There’s jazz, and there’s transcendent jazz. Kamasi Washington and his band are the latter. His group — who hail from Los Angeles and have played together since childhood, made waves in 2015 when they released The Epic, a three-hour concept album, followed up by Heaven and Earth, which similarly explored esoteric conceptions and abstruse riffs.

Massive Attack have travelled a long way from the Dugout, the Bristol bar where the collective first tried their hand at spinning discs for a crowd whose cultural mix reflected the constant ferment of one of Britain’s most vibrant cities.

Laura Gibson’s songwriting was always that of a storyteller but her newest album, Goners, ups the ante still further. Her first album to be made after completing an MFA in creative writing, the album explores weighty themes like grief and the persistent march of time with a spellbinding elegance.

Although American, Sparks’ initial commercial breakthrough was in the UK where their rococo art-rock chimed with ears attuned to, say, Roxy Music. Their sensibility has always been more European than American. In 2009 they issued an album titled The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman. Its theme was a flight of fancy which took the Swedish director to Hollywood. Later, in 2015, Sparks and Franz Ferdinand collaborated as FFS. As ever, Sparks were a bridge between Europe and the USA.

“If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure,” observed Dave van Ronk, the late folk musician known as “the Mayor of MacDougal Street” in Greenwich Village.