So theartsdesk on Vinyl reaches its 50th edition. That’s at least a novels’ worth of words. Maybe two! But we’re not stopping yet. The heat of the summer has arrived but the vinyl deluge hasn’t dried up, so check in for everything from Germanic electro to Scottish Seventies pop-rock to Japanese minyo music reimagined. And much more. All vinyl life is here. Dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Quantic Atlantic Oscillations (Tru Thoughts)

Nineteen years, seven albums and untold side projects into their career, Hot Chip have for the first time enlisted outside producers: Rodaidh McDonald and French disco/house don Philippe Zdar. And it's worked. Over the course of the previous albums, the band had steadily evolved from ramshackle and rather self-consciously quirky writers and players to a far slicker operation.

If contemplated without a context, Loops in the Secret Society initially appears to be a bold 68-minute, double-album fusion of Hawkwind’s hum and whir, Krautrock insistence, spacey electronica and folky otherness. Jane Weaver’s voice is disembodied, as if in a trance.

Here’s a strange thing: sit in a quiet room reading through the poems that make up Kate Tempest’s third album and her swirling collage of words drags you in. It’s an opaque concept work, mingling themes of a broken Britain, teetering on the brink of socio-political disaster, with the gritty, urban search for love in a time where sex is served up like fast food.

What happens on the stage of Stockhausen’s first opera would fill a book – quite a bad novel – but the plot is simple enough. Michael grows up with a domineering, game-hunting father and mentally unstable mother; discovers sex; passes his exams; travels the globe and finds his calling in life as a visionary and saviour.

It's five years since Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus released an album, and it's not entirely clear how far he's moved creatively. To be fair he's been busy branching out in other directions, producing for superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar, making short films, and helping members of his Brainfeeder stable like Thundercat and Kamasi Washington along to greater fame. But with this album he seems to have taken up precisely where 2014's “Your Dead” left off.

Five years ago, the Swedish tech company Elektron began marketing the first version of the Analog Four, an all-in-one instrument marrying analogue oscillators with a digital sequencer, digital processing and a multi-track capability. That past-present interface had been done before but with its integral keyboard this was, at that point, the most user-friendly piece of kit to do so. K-X-P’s IV is built around compositions created on the Analog Four by the band’s main-man Timo Kaukolampi.

Before we get to the music, there’s the title of Clinic’s first album in seven years to deal with. It comes from the title of a 1970s Granada TV series, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a northern entertainment revue presented by, among others, Bernard Manning. The surviving episodes of the show, with the blue dialed down for a wider audience, offer a veneered view of working men’s clubs that gently steers anything too unsavoury into the wings. As a symbol of Britain’s relationship with its past, it’s damn near perfect. 

Editors’ last album, the electronic-infused Violence, was hailed as a big departure for the indie rock band on its release a little over a year ago.

On his second album, Swedish star DJ Kornél Kovács has achieved the impossible and made “tropical house” interesting. Somehow, he's taken every cliché of that slow, lilting pop dance sound Drake and lifestyle influencers Instagramming from pristine beaches and tweaked them to find unexpected strangeness and depths.