You haven't lived until you've witnessed Viennese maverick H(einz) K(arl) Gruber – 75 today (3 January, publication day) – speech-singing, conducting and kazooing his way through his self-styled "pandemonium" Frankenstein!!. Composed for chansonnier and chamber ensemble or large orchestra, it's a contemporary classic nearly 40 years young.

Reading the line-up for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival can be a bit of a //+DiGit<ijjjjjjjjjjjjj.ggiiigggggH1-RMXn4000// experience (and no, I haven’t invented those). There are flashing light warnings. Ear defenders are routinely handed out. The message is clear: prepare for a sonic assault course.

Robin Rimbaud, AKA Scanner, has been releasing music for over two decades. There was a point in the mid-Nineties when he was a media “thing” due to the way he sampled sounds plucked from the airwaves. Shockingly, this included phone calls because cordless home phones are as accessible as any other radio signals. He has long operated on the art-intellectual spectrum, bridging electronic, industrial and avant-classical, collaborating with everyone from Wire to Michael Nyman.

So to Fibolae, titled for a word that came to him in a dream, and his first album in eight years. Giving background to this release on his website, Rimbaud says “I lost my entire family and left the comfort of a familiar city, London, to live in a former textile factory to re-invent my life.” The album opens, then, with “Inhale”, a melee of ansaphone messages from his late family, as well as John Balance of Coil and others, all passed. This leads into a furious drum barrage which, in turn, settles to a mournful synth’n’strings arrangement, rage giving way to grief. It sums up the atmosphere. Furious tracks such as the enjoyably ballistic, seven-minute closer “Savage Is Savage”, the album’s juiciest cut, rely on dense percussion to express passion, but always backed by carefully chosen melodic tones.

Much of the album, however, is about mood rather than attack, and that mood is gloomy, albeit tuneful and often ear-engaging. “Nothing Happens Because of a Single Thing”, for instance, has a drum & bass feel to it, but is more like a film soundtrack than a dance number, while “Spirit Cluster” skitters and glitches but is laden with sad strings, coming on like a goth Moby.

Scanner, at his best, is playful, mischievous and accessible, as well as thought-provoking. Fibolae is a personal album, perhaps not the best entry point to the work of this once-prolific artist (this writer would recommend 1997’s accessible, oddly poppy and spooked Delivery). It is, however, an emotional outpouring that’s darkly worthwhile for those disposed towards a suite of crunchy, electronic melancholy.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Spirit Cluster"

The myth of Modigliani, the archetypal tortured artist, was set in train while he was still alive and remains potent almost a century after his death. Every so often a few game academics try to put things straight, and now Tate Modern’s exhibition reappraises his considerable output not through the broken lens of his addiction, but in the sober daylight of his influences and milieu.

An underground American star since 2010’s Strange Cacti EP, Angel Olsen’s distinctive brand of indie folk-rock was propelled to new heights in both Burn Your Fire For No Witness (2014) and then last year with MY WOMAN.

An encounter with Homer Flynn is disconcerting as the extent of his involvement in The Residents is unclear. He acknowledges that he speaks for the eyeball-headed quartet whose identities are unknown. As he talks, it's clear he has intimate knowledge of their creative process, their motivations and what they think. He discusses them as “they”. Occasionally the word “we” is used.

If only a modest fuss is being made about the rare and prestigious loan currently residing in Trafalgar Square, it could be that the National Gallery is keen to forget the role of its former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, in a row about art transportation that centred on the very collection to which these objects belong.

One of the stranger things about popular music is how unwilling most are to crossbreed and experiment. Surely that’s where the real kicks are? Most seem to prefer ploughing ruts that were overfamiliar 10, 20, 30, even 40 years ago. Either that or slavishly imitating contemporary cheese. Why’s there not more avant-salsa? Where’s the ambient country scene? Who’s into Teutonic electro-ska? The career of New Jersey three-piece Dälek hints at the answer to such questions. Consistently firing out an absorbing and original fusion of hip hop and feedback-laden space-rock/noise, they’re no nearer the Billboard 200 than when they began nearly 20 years ago.

Their latest album, their eighth (and second after a four-year sabbatical), continues their journey. Cuts such as “The Son of Immigrants” mix Public Image and Public Enemy, via the swirling soundscapes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the like. They have an underlying, narcotised appeal, melodies flecking amid a jangling mist of controlled cacophony. Dälek make music that has dark power, riding chugging, industrial breakbeats, but, in the end, they’re a dish better tasted than served as a meal.

Endangered Philosophies runs the gamut from the psychedelic noise-assault of “A Collective Cancelled Thought” to the swirling downtempo lyrical showcase of “Weapons”, but the tone never changes and the way the lyrics are sludged way down in the mix, despite being angry and often politicised, adds to a sense of increasing sameness as the album continues. It’s one of those where, a few songs in, the listener is swept away by the relentless, grinding atmosphere, but a bit later on the formula has become somewhat monotonous. It’s not that the style doesn’t work. It’s just that the album lacks the dynamism to carry it to its conclusion. In a very 21^st century style, then, it’s an album worth having stashed amid the playlist shuffle.

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Overleaf: watch the video of Dälek's "Echoes of..."

The term “hip hop” has become a catch-all that now includes a multitude of autotuned chart-pop rubbish which bears no relation to the genre’s origins, central tenets or recognised sonic imprint. Is Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” hip hop? Many would say so, due to it having the visual identifiers of hip hop. But it isn't really, is it? At the other end of the scale, there are artists who’ve wandered off into all manner of abstract electronica, with LA’s Low End Theory/Brainfeeder axis the most acknowledged hub for such activity. ZGTO fall into this latter category and, while some of their music slides off into pure experimentalism, A Piece of the Geto mostly stays more attuned to what hip hop is really about than, say, Chris Brown.

ZGTO are MC ZelooperZ, one of the more oddball talents involved with hip hop star Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade label/collective, and producer Shigeto, a name in underground electronic circles, both of them from Detroit. Their combined sound mixes muted, underwater-sounding, narcotised backing tracks with ZelooperZ’s drawling, croaky, nasal wordage, heavily flavoured with the whole Dirty South “purple drank” word-swallowing thing (i.e. mumbling due to being out of it on fizzy pop mixed with codeine-heavy cough syrup).

There are occasional choruses, as on “Whippin’”, but for the most part A Piece of the Geto is about a hypnotic, stoned mood, with the closing “Unfold” even riding a relentless twisting, mantric synth tone worthy of Finnish noiseniks Pansonic. “I’ve been smoking dope since they had the Afghan,” runs a lyric in “Band Man”, and there are regular asides that reference drug-dealing, but it’s certainly not about boasting or revelling in riches. Instead, there’s a smudgy, doomed ambience which, at times, as on the strangely tuneful “Off Dat” or the momentarily romantic “Unconditional Love”, achieves beauty.

ZGTO have created something original, up with the most vanguard abstraction released by Ninja Tune sub-label Big Dada and the like. Over an album’s length it would benefit from more variety and a few more structured songs but, in the meantime, it’s an intriguing debut.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Off Dat" by ZGTO

Mark E Smith’s wit and the ever-changing, ever-suffering line-up behind him have established The Fall as one of the most seminal post-punk bands in Britain. From their classic 1976 debut Live at the Witch Trials to 2015’s acclaimed Sub-Lingual Tablet, they’ve regularly churned out record after record of blisteringly off-kilter and innovative jams and in true Fall fashion, New Facts Emerge both continues and contradicts this legacy.