Muse are not cool. For a minute on leaving the tube station I did think they'd broadened their appeal quite dramatically before realising that a fair section of the people around me were heading to Giants of Lovers Rock show also at the O2 complex last night. But no, their audience, judging by those heading for the main arena, are a fairly even split between hyper-mainstream V Festival demographic and slightly misshapen indie/goth kids, not really much more rock'n'roll in demeanour than, say, a Coldplay crowd, but very dedicated.

It's a truism in dance music culture that “everyone's a DJ nowadays”. It's generally meant in a flip, pejorative sense – suggesting that cheap technology means every man Jack and his dog can put a sequence of records together and the role is somehow devalued. But it hides a rather more positive truth, which is that dance culture is intrinsically participative, that the line between industry and punters is so blurred as to be non-existent, that those punters truly are easily as important as the hallowed DJs they look up to.

It's a nervous beginning. This is the first ever presentation of the first proper album by one of the lynchpins of British underground music, and the soundsystem isn't right. Record label personnel and friends are flung across Paris to requisition new loudspeakers, while the invited audience drinks mojitos. After all this, it would be deeply embarrassing if the record turned out to be bad.

Though he first came to public attention via the Los Angeles-based Brainfeeder psychedelic electronic hip hop collective led by Flying Lotus, 25-year-old producer Lorn comes from “the middle of nowhere in Illinois”, and it's easy to see in his music a less sunny disposition than many of his comrades. Most of the Brainfeeder crew have a loose-limbed funkiness to their sound and an accumulation of sonic detail that speaks of heat and humdity.

Welcome to theartsdesk's first radio show with Peter Culshaw and Joe Muggs, recorded with the extremely able help of Brendon Harding at Red Bull Studio London.

To dubstep or not to dubstep, that was the question perplexing the nearly 5000 metalheads jammed into the Brixton Academy to see Korn.

After a nine-month absence, during which Joe Muggs explored the world's largest natural bassbin in the Amazonian rain forest and Thomas H Green waited to receive his passport back from the Bolivian government, Singles & Downloads returns to celebrate the best in new music. From the ambient to the danceable, the glorious to the outright embarassing, we present the juiciest possible representative cross section of modern popular music.

A mea culpa from me: I never gave Sbtrkt's records the attention they deserved. I always thought they were a capitulation, a softening of the radical developments of the post grime and dubstep generation with more traditional musicality and indie affectations to reach out to a more generalist, NME reading audience... and in a way they are – but, I came to realise, that's not a bad thing, and certainly not cynically done.