The hip hop music of California has always been deeply stoned, and the wave of instrumental beats that have emerged from LA in recent years have taken this to quite some extreme. The scene around the Brainfeeder collective and Low End Theory club have, in fact, produced some of the most deeply psychedelic music of the 21st century, and Sam Baker aka Samiyam is one of the key figures within that.

In the video made to accompany “One Half”, Julianna Barwick meets her inner goddess in a deserted multi-storey car park. When she closes her eyes, everything that is ordinary melts away and is replaced by a landscape that is as colourful as the previous scene is monochrome.

Various Artists: Saint Etienne Present Songs for a Central Park Picnic

If anyone in British music still deserves that rinsed-to-death term "maverick" it is Battersea-born "Dr" Alex Paterson. From roadie for postpunk industrialists Killing Joke in the early Eighties, he went on to work as an A&R then - originally collaborating with The KLF's Jimmy Cauty - formed The Orb in the heat of the acid house explosion to bring the world "ambient house". 

Some 20 years ago, a series of albums called Artificial Intelligence on WARP Records aimed to promote techno as home-listening music. They made up a frequently sublime collection, but unfortunately the word “intelligence” in their title was picked up by a movement through the 1990s that became known, horrendously, as “intelligent dance music” (IDM) and tended to the belief that intricacy and awkwardness made music somehow superior to that made with more sensuous or hedonistic aims in mind.

We're pleased to announce The Arts Desk is a media partner of the Denovali Swingfest London on 20 and 21 April at London's The Scala. It's a good match, as Swingfest and the Denovali label, like The Arts Desk refuse to acknowledge artificial boundaries between “high” culture, the avant-garde and grassroots electronic and club music.

The last proper Ulrich Schnauss album – there have been collaborations and pseudonymous outings since – was going to be hard to top. Goodbye, released in 2007, breathtakingly took shoegazing further out than ever before: although gossamer, its sonic depth inexorably pulled you in. Now, with A Long Way to Fall, the Berlin producer and remixer has finally returned, solo, under his own name. He’s moved on, but is as assured as before.

Brian Eno’s latest is the musical equivalent of slow food: something to savour in a state of quietude and away from the stresses of accelerated time. The ambient genre of which he was a pioneer has, in other hands, drifted into a kind of quality Muzak, background music to soothe the nerves of restless devotees of speed. With a subtle palette of soft-edged keyboard and string sounds, laden with reverb, Eno manages to stop time, avoiding the inevitably predictable tropes of narrative development, and gently drawing the listener into the presence of the here and now.

“Post-classical” the FatCat label call it, and well they might. All three of the acts who played at the Barbican last night in one way or another used the instrumentation of the classical concert hall but in a way that was completely dislodged from tradition – not raging against it, nor fighting to escape it in the sense of high modernism, nor reviving it, but rather looking back on it as something other, something of a different era.

Londoner Yemi Olagbaiye is the model of a new generation musician for whom the dissolution of genre categories means not homogenisation but an opportunity for greater individuality.