For underground music producers, there almost always comes a phase in life when they accept they're no longer young guns and embrace either massively complicated synthesisers, floaty new age music, or both. For Bristol-based Jake Martin aka Hodge it's the latter. This, his debut album after a decade releasing a couple of dozen EPs on connoisseurs' favourite labels and DJing around the world, has all the signifiers.

Given the times, theartsdesk’s New Music section is starting weekly round-ups of new streaming fare to liven the spirits and entertainingly pass the time during this lockdown. Here are our first five suggestions. Dive in!

Light In The Attic Showcase

Normally we'd put a descriptor - "cellist", "film maker", "techno producer" for example - in the title of this interview, but for Irina Nalis there isn't space. Like, "10 Questions for psychologist, ministerial adviser, festival founder, architectural consultant, digital humanism activist and techno veteran Irina Nalis" wouldn't fit across the page. But that's the multidisciplinary world for you.

Around the turn of the millennium, when Dan Snaith started releasing music – initially as Manitoba, then Caribou, and latterly also Daphni – he tended to get lumped in with the folktronica movement. In fact, the closest he came to actual folk was a heavy influence from the more delicate side of late 60s psychedelia.

It was hard avoid bleak in 2019. Then the election hit and everything went off a cliff. Watching the world turn to a shit-bowl of ignorance and greed, the raging nihilism of the year’s key film, Joker, suddenly seemed appealing. The 2020s will be about a response, clearly, but in the meantime spirits need lifting. The album that has served that purpose round my way since its release in April has been No Geography by The Chemical Brothers.

Liam Payne is a Simon Cowell-manufactured pop star worth tens of millions off the back of music that’ll be regarded in a few years’ time much as the Bay City Rollers or Curiosity Killed The Cat are regarded now.

The O2 is usually a bright, sterile space before the bands come on. Its starkly lit US sports event ambience is accentuated by humanity milling around layered plastic seating clutching giant tubs of soft drink. Not so tonight. The venue has been open for three hours before the headline act is due. The lighting is purposefully dingy as 2ManyDJs and James Holroyd spin techno-flavoured sounds, warming up the crowd.

There couldn't be much that's more techno than for a musician to have had a quarter-century career, only just be releasing his second solo album, and making it a quadruple.

Ever since rock’n’roll began, the orchestral cover version has played a contentious role in popular music. It has sometimes signified a revision of raw musical styles for those who prefer being spoon-fed; it has sometimes represented aspirations to high culture and the concert halls of yore; in more recent years, it’s often been a gambit to persuade those growing older to re-listen to a defanged version of their youth. And it’s almost always a cash-in.

In the eight years since theartsdesk last spoke to Carl Craig, a lot has happened. He moved from his native Detroit for a sojourn in Barcelona (partly for ease of access to his summer DJ residencies in Ibiza), then recently returned. He's reinvented tracks from his back catalogue for orchestra, in a style he dubbed "action and adventure" - certainly more John Williams than Debussy - and has performed them as such around the world.