Last week was all about the thrill of the hunt. Now we want songs that rage against the dying of the light

Greetings, wrinklies. Now, don't get me wrong, I know that those wrinkles are not a sign of age, merely a result of a brow furrowed in scepticism: "Who does he think he is calling me wrinkly? He should have a look in the mirror first, the simian half-man." You are right, of course, but wrinkles will one day come to us all and that eventuality is the concern of this week's topic.

But first, the A-list (and a column that discusses it): Blood Sports â€' The Style Council; Marvelettes â€' The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game; William Cornysh â€' Blow Thy Horn Hunter; The Seeker â€' The Who; Pentangle â€' The Hunting Song; Dread Zeppelin â€' Moby Dick; Dead Kennedys â€' Winnebago Warrior; Ronnie Lane â€' The Poacher; Gene Vincent â€' Bird Dogging; Sonny Terry, Brownie Mghee â€' Fox Hunt

Tally ho! Straight to the B-list we go:

Alasdair Roberts â€' I Went Hunting

I see there's a video of Roberts elsewhere on this website. This track is thoughtful, delicate and well-composed with a delightful intricacy to the vocal line. Great nom from Mnemonic too (I think I often say that).

Show of Hands â€' Longdog

Here's a straight-up, honest-to-goodness hunter and he's not afraid to admit it. This sounds...

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Marimba solos at 180 bpm, lyrics like African soap operas and a whole lot of ass-shaking ... welcome to Shangaan dance and the mysterious man behind it all

For Wills Glasspiegel, the discovery of Shangaan electro came after an evening of random YouTubing in his Brooklyn apartment. His sofa was then acting as a bed for Tshepang Ramoba, drummer with South African band BLK JKS, and the pair were looking at clips online. "Tshepang knows I manage a musician from Sierra Leone called Janka Nabay," explains Glasspiegel, "and he said 'you know, we have music like Janka's in South Africa too', and that's when he introduced me to Shangaan electro."

At 180 bpm, shangaan combines MIDI keyboards with marimba beats, distorted vocal samples and lyrics that Honest Jon's, the record label which is putting out a compilation, described as "African soap operas, tied up with domestic matters and a yearning for the slower life". But equally important is the dancing that goes with it; hyperfast footwork, the odd avian-like leg movements and, for the women, a lot of ass-shaking in colourful skirts. There's also a propensity among Shangaan dancers to dress up, as is evident in the clip of the Tshe Tsha Boys, which shows the trio (including one child) wearing bright orange jumpsuits and clown masks during performances.

When Glasspiegel was introduced to Shangaan electro, it was largely unknown outside the city of Malamulele in Limpopo, South Africa. Already an...

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Last week it was all about a coming together of hands. This week, it's hands again; but hands that are hard at work

Last week, eh? What a wonderful time it was. A thing of joy, wonder and colliding palms; truly what RR is all about. I would cry, if I hadn't had my tearducts sewn up.

Age and experience have taught me that, whatever I think of it, someone will declare the A list (oh yeah, here's the column about it a stinker but I reckon it's more of a corker than Korky the Kat corking bottles in a factory owned by the father of Jack Cork, the Chelsea midfielder. Anyway here it is: The Stooges â€' No Fun; Outkast â€' Hey Ya!; Steve Reich â€' Clapping music; Paco de Lucia â€' Cepa de Andaluza; Queen â€' We will rock you; Abyssinian Baptist Choir â€' Said I wasn't going to tell nobody; Nusrat Fatih Ali Khan â€' Allah Mohammed Char Yaar; The Marvelletes â€' Too Many Fish in the Sea; Miles Davis - Black Satin; The Ventures â€' Let's Go

For the record, I love love loved Black Satin. So wild and inventive, yet the groove still abides despite it all.

B time:

Toumast â€' Ammilana â€' This week's nominations hailed from all corners of the globe. Toumast are Touaregs from the Sahara, but ullulations aside, they sound like the distant cousins of the Velvet Underground. Clapping here forms a percussive backdrop to a mysterious ongoing drone...

The...

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This groundbreaking 1959 album is as close to perfection as jazz gets without sacrificing its spontaneity

I had hoped that a blog on the popular and funky Hammond organist Jimmy Smith might attract more than the average number of commentators, but I wasn't prepared for the gratifying deluge of responses following my inclusion of Smith in this series.

It has to be said it was a passing disappointment to discover that most of the comments were about the advanced age of the England World Cup squad, with fitting eulogies for Rosie Swash running a close second. But us jazzers are always being accused of living in a world of our own, and analogies between football and jazz (check out the Vortex Club's World Cup Jazzball series) always seemed appropriate to me.

It has to be said, of course, that if jazz musicians greeted the unexpected moves of others with the reflexes of the England defence against Germany, the music would have died out a long time ago, but the best spontaneous jazz-making certainly brings Brazil or Argentina's one-touch fluency to mind. In respect of which, commenter oohrogerpalmer's aside about his Hammond-organ playing nan in his otherwise footie-centric comment brings to mind my venerable mother-in-law, and her observations on the England-Germany game: "There seemed to be a lot of people in white shirts playing football, and a lot of people in red shirts watching." Gary Lineker et al could probably have done with...

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Kenzo's Creative Director Antonio Marras talks to Dazed about the clash between Japanese and French styles in the Spring/Summer 2011 menswear collection.



In the autumn of 1964, young Kenzo Takada travelled on a boat all the way to Japan from France, arriving in Marseille on 1st January 1965. The adventurous trip turned along the way into a journey of discovery since the ship made many ports of call that contributed to give the young designer a cultural shock and that influenced in later years his designs. Kenzo's current creative director Antonio Marras reversed the story: the Alghero-born designer knows very well that travelling is encoded in the fashion house's DNA and took Kenzo's destination, the port of Marseille, as a starting point to tell a transnational fashion story.

Traditional white and blue sailor's stripes were used for c... article continues »

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Let us know what went astonishingly right or horribly wrong this weekend, or even send us a short review. Was it the best Glastonbury ever?

After four days of blazing sunshine, music ranging from grime to a brass band, and attractions as diverse as a talk on the banking crisis in the Left Field to transvestite vogueing in the reliably decadent NYC Downlow, Glastonbury 2010 is over. Every year â€' even the ones in which apocalyptic weather conditions prevail â€' Michael Eavis says it's been the best ever, but this year he might have been right.

So how was it for you? What was your Glastonbury moment? What did you do after dark? What was your favourite discovery of the weekend â€' or was there anything that went horribly wrong?

We're also interested in what you thought of our coverage this year, from our podcasts, videos and picture galleries to our Glastonbury scrapbook, tweets and Grace Dent's TV liveblog. Share your thoughts below â€' and do write us a review of the best (or worst) band you saw all weekend.

Modular and DFA's Aussie band Canyons are back with their own label...



The Canyons are comprised of Leo Thomson (aka Leo Holiday) and Ryan Grieve (aka Ryan Sea-mist). The DJ/Producer team began making music in Perth before moving to Sydney which they now call home. They first began getting recognition overseas by doing releases through their own label, A Hole in the Sky, to DFA. They are renowned for their discovery of Tame Impala, and have completed remixes with such bands as Empire of the Sun, Ladyhawke, Tame Impala and Lost Valentinos. When Dazed Digital caught up with them in their studio in Sydney, they were busy working on their debut album which will be released through Modular Records in the near future.  

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Mflow, a new download service, encourages users to recommend tracks to each other for a free listen

If I had a penny for every time I've heard pro-piracy people say the music industry should stop whining about illegal downloading and be entrepreneurial â€' well, I'd be making more money than I or any of my colleagues are making from online streaming. It's as if they think being against piracy somehow equates to being against the internet.

The fact is, we've seen a slew of new music services aimed both at consumers and musicians themselves. There's certainly no lack of entrepreneurialism. But some of these services are more about lining their own pockets than building sustainable new models to help musicians survive. Recently, an online service called The Men from the Press aimed to charge unsigned, self-releasing artists for having their music critiqued by music journalists. The more esteemed the publications the journalists worked for, the more it would cost. The service shut down after only a few weeks, with many journalists and publications criticising it for giving artists the impression they could actually buy reviews.

As I've written, although I like the Mog.com music subscription service from a consumer point of view, I seriously doubt artists will make money from it. Indeed, it seems the money part was an afterthought: "That's for labels to work out," the CEO has said. (Incidentally, a friend of mine was surprised to see his self-released tracks on...

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When it comes to the NME myth-making process â€' and hating in others what they despise in themselves â€' Julie Burchill and Nick Kent take the cake

"Karma", as the Dalai Lama has never actually been heard to say, but could certainly be forgiven for thinking, "is a bitch." One of the articles of faith outlined in Nick Kent's self-confessedly unreliable memoir Apathy for the Devil is that rock journalists have a professional duty to be "right there in the scrum as wilful participants".

Kent's involvement in early versions of the Damned and the Sex Pistols (sadly, Malcolm McLaren's attempt to reunite him with ex-girlfriend Chrissie Hynde in a band called the Masters of the Backside never really got off the ground) suggests that, in this respect at least, he was as good as his word. Ironically, Kent's willingness to live by his own credo would ultimately help make him the whipping boy â€' literally, at the chain-wielding hands of Sid Vicious â€' for punk rock's disingenuous determination to present itself as a clean break with the music that preceded it. "To be victimised by the very thing I'd helped bring into being," he observes poignantly on p288, "that was cold".

In recent weeks, this same pattern has repeated itself. When Kent decided to describe his former NME colleague Julie Burchill as having "a vibe about her that could best be described as Myra Hindley-esque", he must have known what was coming to him. But...

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A new music streaming service, MOG, has set up shop. While its payment structure is unclear, it seems that the revenue split destined for artists and composers is even more uncertain than that from Spotify

For the past year, Spotify has dominated much of the debate around music streaming sites. While it's been praised by users, questions have been asked as to whether its business model is sustainable if they don't manage to convert enough of its free subscription service users to premium, paying subscribers. Record labels have largely been positive (which might have something to do with them owning equity in the service), but artists have been less so as they're wondering if any revenue will filter down to them.

Now a new American streaming service called MOG is planning to take on both Spotify and Pandora (currently only available in the US due to licensing restrictions) by offering a hybrid of on-demand and radio. I spoke to president and CEO of MOG, David Hyman, who is certainly a confident man: "I built Gracenote, monetised it and the patent is still under my name. I built my first music website, Addicted to Noise, in 1994, and it became the biggest at the time. I ended up selling it to MTV."

MOG is a $5 a month all-you-can-eat subscription user interface (Hyman says it'll probably be £5 a month in the UK as European publishing rates are higher). The service will be...

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