Back in 2010, Janelle Monáe (pictured) went big with the futuristic pop, R&B, funk  and much else of her highly praised album The ArchAndroid. Now the multi-talented performer from Atlanta returns with a single from her upcoming LP, The Electric Lady. The song “Q.U.E.E.N”, featuring a guest vocal Erykah Badu is a sleek and confident mélange of R&B, rap and pop with a lovely gentle bassline floating along near the end. It’s already been released digitally and is streaming  at janellemonae.com.

How does it feel to be playing Field Day again?

The latest Sonic adventures...

This Oregonian 38-year-old, perhaps best known as the "Him" to Zooey Deschanel's "She" (who guests here), hasn't reinvented any wheels with his seventh album.

Mike Kelley, who died on or around 31 January, was an artist and musician who became a major figure in the US art world. His work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. He was found dead at his home in South Pasadena, near Los Angeles, and appeared to have taken his own life. A friend told investigators that Kelley had been depressed because he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, but no note was found.

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Almost nine years ago the Belgian brothers David and Stephen Dewaele, using the monikers Soulwax and 2ManyDJs, helped bring the then nascent craze for "mash ups" to wider attention with their As Heard on Radio Soulwax Vol 2 mix album.

When it comes to Nas it's hard not to gaze back longingly to his stunning 1994 debut Illmatic; it can be hard to keep up the pace when you come out of the blocks so fast.

Gently wrought from strands of acoustic guitar, mandolin, violin and harp, encountering the genteel Demolished Thoughts after Thurston Moore's more abrasive work with Sonic Youth is akin to hearing Paris 1919 after John Cale's rampaging Velvet Underground period.

Mournful songs of place and imagination run wild, produced by Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley in some barn in the Catskills.

Last summer the leather-jacket toting sisters Colette and Hannah Thurlow, better known as 2:54 (see below), got attention for some roughly sketched demos of doom-laden fuzz rock.

Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth (below) once authored a book celebrating the old-fashioned cassette mixtapes, so, appropriately enough, when his band put out a newfangled online mixtape, it was accompanied with the graphic of a cassette tape, its spools spinning as the music plays.