The music of Hype Williams is the definition of an acquired taste. It sounds ramshackle, thrown together, deliberately awkward – either deeply contrarian or the work of very, very messed-up people just playing around with archaic home recording equipment. But immersion in it reveals all kinds of layers of strangeness, and particularly a rich and emotionally resonant sense of melody that weaves through all the clashing rhythms and crackly recordings. Even the arrangements, it becomes apparent, are not random, but show real complexity – although what is deliberate and what not is hard to pick apart. It slowly becomes apparent why a label as respected and aesthetically rigorous as Hyperdub might have picked them up as they have recently.

Record Store Day this Saturday, 16 April, will give vinyl a small boost. Many artists are creating special limited editions. Bands love all that. It reminds them of when people cared about music as more than "content". The Fall was originally available as a Gorllaz fan-club download last December and will be available on CD imminently but king Gorilla, Damon Albarn, wanted it first and foremost as celebratory Record Store Day vinyl - which is how I'm listening to it.

For weeks there have been rumours that the new Metronomy release would be electronica that would appeal to people who don’t really listen to it. The last bit, at least, is true. I don’t listen to much of that genre and yet every time I get to the end of The English Riviera I can’t resist hitting repeat. But here’s the thing - it’s not really that electronic. It’s what Metronomy man main, Joseph Mount, describes as “electronic music played using as many real instruments as possible”. And what that adds up to is a glorious mix of lo-fi, indie, pop and dance, with a fair few synths thrown in. And a whole lot of summer.

This month, what's on offer in theartsdesk's Singles and Downloads veers towards the fresh and new rather than the tried and tested. We'll always chew over whatever's out there and right now these nine tunes speak loudest. Starting with carefree New York electronic punk frollicking, we also take on violent grime, Sixties-style guitar pop, Brit-pop hip hop, uncategorisable grunge cabaret and multifarious flavours of dubstep. Dive in.

At its best, and most preposterous, John Cage's work can be a mind-cleanser. The overwhelmingly silly randomised conjunctions and ontological punning of the great Zen master of the 20th-century avant-garde can coax and trick you into letting go of categories and judgments, scale and expectation, and just letting yourself get swept along with the gloriously complex and profoundly nonsensical multidimensional parlour games. Where some artworks might make you feel like you're on drugs, or

This is the most gorgeous Finnish Krautrock album I've heard in ages. Yeah, I know, how wacky, how alternative, how off-piste – but bear with me. If you associate Krautrock with over-serious record collectors it might sound like damning with faint praise, but yes, this mostly instrumental record is made by a trio of demented Finns; yes, it is rooted in the psychedelic repetitions of mid-1970s German hairies; and yes, it is really, really gorgeous.

The name King Creosote conjures up an image of an old jazz player, lips cracked from cigarettes smoked and horns played. In actual fact it’s the stage name of Kenny Anderson, a prolific Scottish folk and indie singer with more than a passing resemblance to Bill Oddie.

The Sónar festival occupies a very special place in the New Music calendar – and is this year expanding outwards temporally and geographically, with new franchises in Tokyo and A Coruña, Galicia. Now into its 17th year, the parent festival in Barcelona serves as a vital meeting point for those of all stripes who refuse to acknowledge the polarisation of avant-garde and populism, or of club culture and the mainstream music industry. With 10 or more main stages and untold off-piste club events around the city, it would be impossible to condense even a single day and night of Sónar Barcelona into a standard gig-venue show, but that's what A Taste of Sónar tried to do last night.

Listening to The Human League’s Credo is a bit like listening to one of Ray Davies’s more recent outings – you know they’ve both said all they have to say years ago, but there is still something very pleasing about just hearing them do their thing. I use the word "say", however, in the loosest sense, as part of Credo’s charm is its extraordinarily prosaic lyrics, strong on storylines yet purposely piling banality on top of cliché, where “stranger” rhymes with “danger” and we learn things like “Yhere is a place the night people go/ There is a place that only night people know”.

In 1970, Annie Nightingale became Radio 1’s first female DJ. The appointment was made somewhat grudgingly - DJs, believe it or not (and we’re talking about the likes of Ed “Stewpot” Stewart and Tony Blackburn here), were perceived to be “husband substitutes” and it was generally accepted that a female voice would alienate the listeners. And yet 40 years later, Nightingale is the only DJ left from the original line-up.