Listen: YouTube plus YouTube equals The Range's Copper Wire

Here's a YouTuber singing.

And here's a lad rapping.

Now here are those two filtered through the expansive EDM of The Range.



There's something so electric in the air with The Range, and his ability to plunge into YouTube for his samples is quite something.

Have another one. Here's a couple of guys bustin' some bars in Hyde Park.

And here is The Range bustin' that all apart for Five Four. Have a dip into The Range's YouTube channel, and hat doff to video director Daniel Kaufman.

Listen: Nosaj Thing's N R 2

I'll let Nosaj Thing himself explain his new EP No Reality.

"Most of these songs are new and were written within the last two months. I wrote one of the songs all on my iPad, and arranged and mixed three of the songs the morning it was due [for]mastering."

In other words, he just flapped his hand over some buttons and made this. Without thinking. Dammit. Shimmery synths, paddy bossdrum, disco bassline, total win.

Radio Skotvoid's Ikea Crimejazz and a flashback to 1992

My favourite kind of envelope is one with "Fat Roland" on. The lettering really complements the autumnal brown.

This particular package was mailed to me from US skweee-merchants Radio Skotvoid because I happen to like the way they twiddle their knobs. They sent me their Ikea Crimejazz 7" singles full of scuzzed bleeps and low-slung funk.

I also got a glowing green cassette of echoing interplanetary soundtrackism by On Solar Winds. And a badge. A flipping badge!

Thank you, Skotchums, for sending me stuff. It pleases my ears.

As I clutched the vinyl and cassette possessively like a hipster gollum, it reminded me of the time I bought Faith No More's Angel Dust on record, with its majestic beautiful gatefold sleeve design, alongside a cassette tape of The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. The two formats were my world back then. It must have been 1992. I played that Orb album to death on my walkman. Although that leads me to wonder: back in 1992 did I really (a) still have a cassette walkman and (b) not yet have a CD player? Really?

Anyhoo, here comes Roland's Revenge from Ikea Crimejazz Vol 2. It's lovely to see the 8-bit aesthetic used with such attitude - and that vocal sample kills.

Listen: Photay's Monday (warning: potential earworm)

Have a bit of Spring cheer with Monday, the lead track off Photay's Sadie EP. The track features himself on vocals, which he's probably not done before, hence the strange "Photay featuring Photay" attribution. I'd be more into this as an instrumental, but it's a cute earworm that may well stay with you throughout the Summer.

Big beat's gonna work it out, maybe, perhaps not

From grunge to g-funk, from trip hop to Brit pop, there’s one thing you can be sure of about the 1990s: the one forgotten genre might be big beat.

Everyone knows the artists. The Chemical (Dust) Brothers blasted the roof off the place with Brother’s Gonna Work It Out, Fatboy Slim had a party in his head with Gangster Trippin and even if people don’t know the band name, they may well recognise Bentley Rhythm Ace (pictured).

But as a name, I reckon there’ll be a lot of younger people who don’t know “big beat”. The label kinda got swallowed up by the cool Britannia thing. Or perhaps it shed its identity when it went massively mainstream: see the Prodigy’s Firestarter or The Propellorheads’ History Repeating.

Maybe it just became known as video game music. Maybe, as Acid Ted suggests, it just got a bit embarrassing.

Not that labels matter that much, but big beat acted as a useful curatorial guide when picking tracks in my early DJing days. For example, there was a great block rockin’ underground in the shape of Brassic Beats and Heavenly Social, with the likes of Req, Cut La Roc, Monkey Mafia and the Skint Records founder Midfield General.

There’s a longer piece in this, and I may well pen something for Electronic Sound. In the meantime, to test my theory, I’m going to be shaking teenagers by the shoulders until they name all the 1990s music styles.

Who knew “let go of me, Fats, you idiot” was a genre?

Listen: Andy Stott's New Romantic (which doesn't have Too Many Voices (see what I did there))

Ah, the desolate sound of drizzly Manchester.

Shut up, it's quite nice here.

Anyhoo, here's a local artist by the name of Andy Stott, who you may remember from having the best electronic album of 2012. His latest long-player on Manchester's Modern Love is Too Many Voices, and here's a distorted slice of beatery cut called New Romantic - with exactly the right number of voices. Have a listen.

I'm going to stop writing #choon at the end of these short pieces because it looks a bit nobbish. Just click on the "new music" tag below or the big green box at the top of the page. IF YOU CAN SEE IT THROUGH ALL THE DRIZZLE.

Someone get Lone on the phone

When Lone released a phone number for you to call in order to hear his new single, it reminded me of the halcyon days of rave when the phone network was the best way to find out which sound system was dropping which repetitive beats in which remote woods.

Now you can listen to that single without picking up a phone. Listen to Back Tail Was Heavy here - it's out on R&S. I love it: it's done little to dispel my opinion that Lone is an absolute king of modern music twiddling.

Although I won't be fully satisfied before I'm consuming all my new music via pager. Yeah, Pager. Get with the programme, Lone. #choon

Akira again: Bwana's Capsule’s Pride is already one of the best electronic releases of 2016

Akira was kinda the coolest thing when I was a teenager. Shut up, I was definitely a teenager. And here I am, aged seven hundred and ninety two, and someone has released a brilliant rendering of the 1988 movie's soundtrack.

Bwana's Capsule’s Pride is already one of my favourite releases of 2016. Check the fancy-pants website by LuckyMe or, even better, scroll down that site to download it free. Yep, free. Proper labour of love, this one.

Here's one of the tracks to add to my #choon playlist.