Bored at Rustie, tapey-fingered whingers and stuffed lycra

Hello, December, you snowbag of Christmas fun, you.

Here are some things you may have missed recently, mainly because my Twitter account has shrivelled and died and so your premier source of electronica information has stopped. In fact, you've probably been so bereft without me tweeting, you're no doubt huddled in a corner shivering and dribbling.

- Rustie has dropped a bomb in the shape of a Crookers' No Security remix. Legendardy squawkbox Kelis has sassed herself all over this track, and her vocals work well with his computer-game take on the track. Having said that, it's the first thing Rustie has done that has bored me a little. (Crookers pictured above.)

- The Grauniad has been musing on the death of hip hop. Writer Simon Reynolds places it around the time of Nas' Hip Hop Is Dead, or maybe when Timbaland declared his love for tapey-finger stadium whingers Coldplay. He wins points for slagging off auto-tune, but loses points for using the dismal contraction 'slanguage' (surely, 'slang' would do?).He says:

"I still hear quite a lot of bump and skitter in street rap but there's a pedestrian familiarity to the beats: they do the job solidly enough but they're the rhythmic equivalent of comfort food, reflexively tugging at your hips and shoulders but never approaching the stark strangeness of early Noughties productions like Ludacris's What's Your Fantasy or J-Kwon's Tipsy."

I think he's got a point, although there's a danger in judging the healthiness of a scene based on what's in the charts. If you took that as a bellwether, most techno genres have supposedly never existed.

Still, I think there's a wider malaise: we haven't had a true musical revolution since rave. The Beatles made music fab, punk stuck a safety pin in that bubble, while rave danced all over the eighties' grave. What since? Drippy guitar geeks? Videos stuffed with girls in tight lycra? Susan Boyllocks?

- Finally, Eclectic Hermit has come back into the light, smothering us with some Ninja Tune scrumptiousness. Welcome back.

Two Fingers drops seven shades of gangsta

Hip hop experimentalist Two Fingers has "dropped" a "phat" one.

As I explained in this post in January, Two Fingers is blunted beat bossman Amon Tobin and fellow Brazilian beat-botherer Doubleclick. Their debut album, also called Two Fingers, hit the "streets" in April.

And it's a right cracking listen. Er... I mean... it's a "sick" record.

The presence of MC Sway (pictured above with Doubleclick and Tobin) and grimesters like Durrty Goodz leads you to think this could be a two dimensional hip hop offering. In the hands of the Tobin, however, that was never going to happen.

Instead, among the lightning rhymes, the Two Fingers album is a glistening techno monster that tunnels to the scuzzy depths of synth buggery (on Keman Rhythm and Bad Girl, for example) and claws its way to the hilly heights of progressive big beat (on That Girl) and ketamine-drenched Timbalandia* (on Not Perfect).

It feels like we've got back the Amon Tobin of old, apart from two inescapable factoids.

Factoid A: Amon never went away. Factoid B: it's not old Tobin at all. Thanks to Doubleclick, this album is truly modern, gloriously harsh and beautifully experimental. Or, in the dialect of the "hood", it's somewhat "brap", seven shades of "gangsta" and it most certainly has got "da goods".

Innit.

* noun. In the style of producer Timbaland.

I'd rather have graah than um although I'm also partial to a hizzle phizzle lizzle

After years of fiddling with the minutae of voice manipulation and techno doo-dah-dery, Bjork (pictured) is back with what could only be described as a "choon".

That's the kind of "choon" that must, by law, be accompanied by a gurning grin and random air chops, possibly even throwing a T shape across the room to a confused but amiable grandmother.

With Timbaland on production, Bjork's Earth Intruders is the Icelandic chantause in tribal animal skin ripping apart the bones of Gary Numan's cars and spitting them out at anyone who dares come near. It's a progressive, aggressive pop song with sharp, nasty, bitey teeth, graar graar.

So Bjork is back - and how. Expect new album Volta to go stratospheric from next week and look our for her first tour since the prehistoric ages.

Also worth a lizzle through your hizzle phizzle (listen, head, phones) is the perverted Bee Gee squeal of Battles' latest single Atlas. I imagine this is the sound a startled alien would make when suddenly confronted by Stephen Hawking doing wheelies on the moon. A work of astonishing originality and definitely a Marmite moment if message boards are anything to go by.

If you fancy your electronica a bit more, um, commercial, try Boom Bip's Sacchrilege EP.

Less blippy and more electro than previous Boom Bip, this is gorgeous intensity with a classic techno vein running through its, um, commercial heart.

The only thing, it's just a little, um, commercial.

Um...