Silver Apples, The Luminaire

A pioneer of electronic music speaks to all the people

One doesn't want to be prejudiced about audiences, but when you go to see a show by a “pioneer of electronic music”, particularly one in his seventies, you most likely expect a crowd that are fairly male, fairly unfunky and tending towards the middle-aged. And to be fair, there were a good few paunches and beards in evidence at the Luminaire – but there were also a quite startling number of young, dressed-up, attractive and really rather groovy twenty-somethings of both (and indeterminate) genders milling about the place too.

Singles & Downloads 6

From Wiley to Kylie. the tastiest new downloads

Wiley, Electric Boogaloo (Back Yard)

Erratic and spiky where his old mucker Dizzee Rascal has been slick and unerring in his rise to the top, East Londoner Richard "Wiley" Cowie has managed several massive pop-dance hits while remaining thoroughly entangled in the edgier, more aggro grime music scene which he helped to invent. This is very much on the pop-dance side of his output, with every mid-1990s club-energising trick in the book thrown into the mix - but it is done with huge élan, and there is enough of Wiley's wildcard persona audible in his raps about getting stuck into the dancefloor rather than lurking by the bar like a celebrity, to raise it well above the generic.

Berlin Sounds: the not-so-new Bohemia

Another wave of electronic creativity from perpetually hip Berlin

“I'm moving to Berlin.” In artistic circles and especially those that include electronic musicians, over the past few years such a threat has become so commonplace as to be cliché. It's not without reason, though. For one, despite gentrification, Berlin has endless space (and empty industrial artistic “spaces”) and its cost of living is about a two-hundredth that of London. And just as importantly, it is more soaked in electronic music than anywhere else on the planet.

Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, BBC Four

The long, strange saga of Germany's avant-garde electronic pioneers

It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)

Wolfgang Voigt as Gas, Barbican

Frankfurter's audiovisual extravaganza unsettles mightily

It comes to something when the logic of a German act calling themselves “Gas” is the least troubling element of a perfomance. Not that Wolfgang Voigt's ambient music, or the slowly-evolving digital art of Petra Hollenbach projected on the Barbican's cinema screen, contained any obvious shock tactics – but the whole 80 minutes created just about as unsettling an experience as one could imagine from abstracted sound and image.

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