Pendulum, Wembley Arena

The full lineup of Pendulum, their facial hair as untrendy as their sound

Is drum'n'bass heavy metal the future, or just a fantastic racket?

Next time BBC2 want to do one of those periodic “what happened to the white working class” documentaries, they could do worse than come to a Pendulum gig. The crowd at Wembley Arena last night were defiantly not “studenty” as many for post-rave music acts can be, and neither were they multicultural; in fact, switch the haircuts and outfits around and you could pretty much transplant the same set of people back 30-odd years to an early Iron Maiden show. This was a 21st century heavy metal crowd through-and-through – not fashionable, not refined, but ready to get involved to the maximum extent possible.

Magnetic Man, Heaven

Magnetic Man's LED cage

Dubstep trio fill the generational gap

Rave music, in its many ever-mutating forms, is now more than a generation into its existence. Many, possibly most, of the crowd pushing into Heaven, under Charing Cross station, weren't even born when acid house fully hit the UK in 1988, but none of them are here for some retro experience. It's hard, as a superannuated lover of electronic beats, not to feel cultural vertigo at the fact that what once felt like the most impossibly inhuman of sounds has now become so ubiquitous and so established as to be a kind of folk music. But there it is, as established as the blues or punk rock, and as woven into the fabric of our lives, yet still mutating and still throwing up fresh variants such as the dubstep which Magnetic Man play.

Moombahton, Boombahchero and 21st-century genre meltdown

A suitably confusing image for a confusing sound

Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music producer in Rotterdam, with some remixes of his work, saying, “There was this dude called DJ Orion and this dude was working in his lab on his freak creation. Mixing moombahton with  footwork and guarachero at 140 bpm. He named it: boombahchero.”

Techno for Concert Ensemble

Where techno and modern classical meet

Parallels have occasionally been drawn between techno and modern classical music, most especially dissonant movements such as minimalism, serialism and the broader avant garde. The purest techno has a stark, almost barren simplicity and those involved with it, notably Detroit techno original Jeff Mills, are keen to build bridges with the orchestral community, taking techno into concert halls and hoping to add a certain intellectual kudos. Such ventures are a mixed blessing - often losing the sheer energetic fun of the music along the way - but a new German outfit called Brandt Brauer Frick bridge the gap in a fascinating manner, throwing in a hint of jazz along the way.

Green Man Festival 2010, Glanusk Castle

Post-folk festival in its eighth moist year

If there's one festival in Britain where people are ready for the rain, it's the Green Man. After all, nobody goes to the Brecon Beacons to sunbathe, right? The weekend, which began the spate of boutique and specialist festivals that dominate the summer season now, remains one of the most spirited in the UK, and its crowd seems to be one of the hardiest even when, as this year, the deluge is near-continuous.

Silver Apples, The Luminaire

The spry Simeon Coxe operates his esoteric machines

A pioneer of electronic music speaks to all the people

One doesn't want to be prejudiced about audiences, but when you go to see a show by a “pioneer of electronic music”, particularly one in his seventies, you most likely expect a crowd that are fairly male, fairly unfunky and tending towards the middle-aged. And to be fair, there were a good few paunches and beards in evidence at the Luminaire – but there were also a quite startling number of young, dressed-up, attractive and really rather groovy twenty-somethings of both (and indeterminate) genders milling about the place too.

Singles & Downloads 6

Wiley, master of both grime and pop

From Wiley to Kylie. the tastiest new downloads

Wiley, Electric Boogaloo (Back Yard)

Erratic and spiky where his old mucker Dizzee Rascal has been slick and unerring in his rise to the top, East Londoner Richard "Wiley" Cowie has managed several massive pop-dance hits while remaining thoroughly entangled in the edgier, more aggro grime music scene which he helped to invent. This is very much on the pop-dance side of his output, with every mid-1990s club-energising trick in the book thrown into the mix - but it is done with huge élan, and there is enough of Wiley's wildcard persona audible in his raps about getting stuck into the dancefloor rather than lurking by the bar like a celebrity, to raise it well above the generic.

Berlin Sounds: the not-so-new Bohemia

Another wave of electronic creativity from perpetually hip Berlin

“I'm moving to Berlin.” In artistic circles and especially those that include electronic musicians, over the past few years such a threat has become so commonplace as to be cliché. It's not without reason, though. For one, despite gentrification, Berlin has endless space (and empty industrial artistic “spaces”) and its cost of living is about a two-hundredth that of London. And just as importantly, it is more soaked in electronic music than anywhere else on the planet.

Electronica 2000-9: Back to the Grass Roots

After the death of the 'superstar DJ' club music rebuilt itself on its own terms...

The received opinion is that the music of the 2000s has been characterised by fragmentation, discontinuity, faddishness and a lack of coherent identity.

Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, BBC Four

The long, strange saga of Germany's avant-garde electronic pioneers

It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)