“The Prodigal Son of Magnesia” is an attention-grabbing title. So are “Three Legged Giant Centipede” and “Public Execution of the Sleeping Lotus Eater”. Each suggests that the album from which they are drawn could be a prog rock epic inspired by conflating existing myths with newly made-up fancies. Track lengths exceeding 10 minutes further the impression. Yet despite surface impressions, 1 is not a showcase for instrumental prowess or tricky arrangements.

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"

STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura.

At three decades deep in the creative industries, it's fair to say Trevor Jackson is a renaissance man. He is a designer, filmmaker, music producer, radio and club DJ, compilation curator, label owner (he introduced Four Tet and LCD Soundsystem among others to UK audiences), professional grouch – and impossibly prolific in all those spheres.

Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.

SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017

Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★  The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things

Óttarr Proppé, the stylish chap pictured above, was appointed Iceland’s Minister of Health in January this year. Last Saturday, when the shot was taken, he was on stage in his other role as the singer of HAM, whose invigorating musical blast draws a line between the early Swans and Mudhoney. At that moment, at Reykjavík Art Museum, it was exactly a week on from the declaration of the first results in the country’s Parliamentary election, the second within 12 months.

It seems to be the season for light entertainers to show us their musical chops, with Nick Knowles, Bardley Walsh and Jason Manford all doing their level best to prove that they are All Round Entertainters. Matt Berry, however, provides a rather different twist on the comedian-troubadour trope.

The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over.

Possibly named after a variety of magic mushroom, left-field Glaswegian six-piece Golden Teacher have been turning out their very strange idea of party music since 2013. Initially they did so for local freak-fostering collective Optimo but have since appeared via various outlets, finally ending up on their own eponymous label. Their sound is electronic but also organic, with percussion that rolls and sometimes has a touch of the more polyrhythmic, advanced drum circle about it. Don’t let the words “drum circle” put you off for Golden Teacher are an invigorating proposition.

Heavily stewed in the outer fringes of dub where the likes of On-U Sound Records have resided for decades, Golden Teacher are also unafraid to add layers of further psychedelic echo. In the case of “Diop” and the eight minute title track, tribal percussion designed to untether the mind takes over. A good reference point might be the best moments of Micky Hart’s Rolling Thunder album, if it had been made for Nineties clubbers rather than hippies (he’s the bloke out of The Grateful Dead who liked going cosmic on his bongos). No Luscious Life also has a post-punk sensibility, an edge that recalls New York skronk-dance outfits such as !!! and Outhud.

There are a couple of attempts – sort of – at vocal pop, or at least alt-pop, since it sounds nothing like the tween meme phone-piffle that mostly haunts the current Top 10. “The Kazimier” is Grace Jones by way of The Tom Tom Club and the synth-poppy “Spiritron”, a keys-fuelled ode to the singer’s “cosmitron”, is akin to Fujiya & Miyagi attempting to make P-funk.

There’s a lot of music about that doesn’t attempt anything new. Life is blighted by the stuff. Not Golden Teacher. In an era when it’s hard to do so, they use their imagination to push the boat out. This is head-fry music for freaky dancing. If they weren’t named after that psilocybic fungi, they should have been.

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Overleaf: Listen to a four minute edit of Golden Teacher "Sauchiehall Withdrawal"

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.