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I've seen some great music played at some ace festivals this year. Here are my highlights!

• YoungRubbi - a punk/rap kid from Rotterdam, whose energetic, angry but inclusive live set that was everything you need! The circle-pit was full of people of all ages. Here's a highlights video you should watch! (They talk in Dutch in the video. But it's only short. I'm in the video for at least 1 frame.)

• Nai Barghouti - a Palestinian singer with a soaring, beautiful and powerful voice. We saw her at "Le Guess Who" festival backed by Amsterdam Sinfonietta - I'm not always a fan of orchestral gigs but these string players were light on their feet and doing interesting things. Nai ranged across many different moods, and I love to hear this "arabic" (?) singing style, powerful and ornamented. You have to hear her.

• An amazing church concert from Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko: Heinali played the most perfectly-judged electronic drone music, to complement Saienko who alternated between soft West-European churchy singing and the more "brassy" East-European style of her native Ukranian singing. This was the perfect music to host in the reverberant church space, a perfect collaboration, beautifully performed.

• Meth. This one's very dark and very heavy, not for general consumption. For me this was the stand-out show of Complexity Festival in Haarlem - far more than all the other heavies that day, they put across a performance that was brutal in its machine-like insistence. It's about human weakness and it's completely unforgiving. The tracks (from their recent album) are themed on vulnerable human emotions handled, largely, through screaming. Of course there are lots of bands that go in these directions, but the single-minded intensity was so complete.

• Ndagga Rhythm Force - at Le Guess Who festival, I'm always looking for some hardcore African drumming mixed with heavy electronics. This time it was the Ndaggas, from Senegal (via Berlin). Intense as it should be. (I'll admit... I'm still thinking back to Nihiloxica in 2023.)

• I Am Oak - he's a Dutch indie musician, who during the lockdowns recorded some lo-fi versions of his back catalogue. This led to the stripped-down intimate delivery of the live gig he gave us this year (at Peel Slowly And See festival). His quirky indie acoustic songs, simple rendition and soft voice are just completely loveable. (Currently touring UK FWIW.)

I'd love to hear your highlights too.

Cover versions of songs can reveal the "quality" versus "flimsiness" of the songs themselves, especially covers that take the song into new territory. You know that already from some well-known classic songs - even in rock and pop where lots of well-known stuff might be a great song or might just be a great delivery. My surprise with Radiohead was that, even for the tracks that are most solidly "rock", when other people cover Radiohead -- as reggae or 8-bit or whatever -- the strength of the songwriting shows itself: Radiohead's tendency to inject an interesting "something" into the chord structure of many of their songs, for example, provides the kernel that allows the song to remain distinctive even when people try to transform it. I'm interested to find out from that which Bjork tracks have "good bones".

My prior expectation is that a lot of Bjork's music rests on her vocal adventures as well as her adventures in techno production, neither of which carry over into cover versions. But then, on the other hand, I did previously think Radiohead's "Kid A" was all about wallowing in production effects, and I wasn't right about that! - They have some actual tunes buried in there, which the cover versions brought out.

The way to tell a good Bjork cover version, or a Bjork song that is good enough to be covered well, is when you're listening to the other artist and not hearing the echo of Bjork's voice throughout. There are plenty of covers that fail this test, which can be either because the covering artist didn't try/succeed to make the track their own, or perhaps because the track doesn't support it.

Hence, after some detailed inspection, here's a pretty small list of cover versions that pass the test! They're all great:

1. Stornoway - It's not up to you -- This track renders a Bjork song in a much more mainstream happy folk-pop version -- to me this is good, and interesting, because I hadn't noticed that this track had enough substance to work like that, separate from all of Bjork's quirks.
2. Peter Musk - One Day -- A fabulous cover, in which the vocal and also the guitar actually retain a lot of material from the original, but also completely re-clothe it in their own style. The vocalist follows the original melody lines, and keeps the "pining/loving" emotion, but for his version he evokes the same emotions with his own jazz/folk scat singing.
3. Georgi Kay - Joga -- This is a great example. The music is basically unchanged (the strings are rendered directly as elegant electric guitar), but the singer takes the vocals in completely her own direction: a sort of yearning pop ballad, with a very different implied emotion than in the original.
4. Ben Gibbard (Deathcab for Cutie) and Ben Barnett - Joga -- A simple lo-fi indie guitar recording. The layering of the guitar parts creates a nice harmony, almost like bells ringing-the-changes. Slightly less impressive than Georgi Kay's version, but I like the lo-fi atmosphere, and it's quite fun given that Bjork's sound is often very hi-fi.
5. Daryl Banner - Hunter (8-bit cover) -- He did a lot of Bjork versions, and most 8-bit covers are simply re-instrumentations, even if good. This one manages to take the melodies and rhythms in Hunter and do something different with them.
6. Death Cab for Cutie - All is full of love -- This makes an expansive and spacious indie rock track out of this one. The singer owns the vocals, and is surrounded by a new context of expansive guitar lines.
7. Radiohead - Unravel -- Here you can hear the similarities between Thom Yorke and Bjork in the way they use vocal "flights". There's not much more to this track than a nice Thom Yorke rendition, perhaps?

And an honourable mention for the classical string group "Wooden Elephant" for their instrumental cover of the whole album "Homogenic". -- In one sense it's not what I'm looking for, especially as Bjork already focusses a lot on strings in her production. But when listening to this performance, I noticed that they've done one thing very successfully: they've integrated to vocal melodies in with the other melodies, and they haven't tried to make it sound like a human voice, but just another string voice in the very nice diverse string orchestrations they come up with. So... well, something of an aside, really, especially since this is a slightly avant-garde classical performance, not exactly the pop cover version.

...

OK, so what? Where has that brought us? I rejected a lot of others: one thing I notice is that for many singers it's quite hard to get away from the Bjork vocal quirks that they remember from the original - they're often tempted to reproduce them, at least a little bit. That's something of a trap because it draws them away from putting their own stamp on it. The versions I've listed here are the few singers that really get away from that and fully make it their own.

What do we learn about the music? Well, that's not up to me. This selection spans lots of years/albums, but only from the range 1993-2001 (then again, that's also the most well-known material). Some of the covers do reveal some new strengths in the composition that I hadn't seen before. Will people be covering some of these songs twenty years from now?

Posthuman's "Requiem For A Rave" is, as the title tells us, very explicitly a contribution to that thing that seems to be becoming a genre - "rave-nostalgia", which looks back at 90's rave music often with a forlorn air. The most famous example of that mood is Burial, whose desolate soundscapes are littered with broken beats, alienated synth lines and out-of-context disjointed classic rave samples. The overall impression you get from Burial is the feeling of being lost in the city in the rain after being kicked out of (or not admitted to) a rave.

One of my favourite tunes at a different end of the scale is "Rave Review" by Skism. That one is not forlorn at all. It builds a seriously intelligent reference-laden rave track around vocal samples of two famous dickheads (Henry Rollins and Tim Westwood) and their deeply dumb critiques of rave/dubstep. You can appreciate this track without understanding the references - it's a banging tune - in this instance you WERE admitted to the rave! But the reference-heavy sampling and the way he abuses Rollins/Westwood create a heavily sarcastic track, a glorification of dance music, a watertight proof that you don't need to be dumb to enjoy simple ecstatic music. A proof that it means something.

It's not the same as retro raving, i.e. simply recreating the sound. It's all reinterpreting and trying to come to terms with something. It fascinates me this "music about music", it can be dense with subtle references and reframings, which is something that classical musicians might talk of but seems incredible for seemingly simple-minded music without plot or (usually) lyrics.

Back to Requiem For A Rave. It's halfway between these poles. It loves to indulge in classic ravey sounds, but it also loves the soundscapey freedom to place them in un-dancey and sometimes disquieting combinations.

It wants to have its cake and eat it. There are lots of samples of rave MCs, pushed through cold reverbs to make them distant and foreign, and yet we also drop into chummy breaks and hang out with them. As a result, the album successfully renders a true nostalgia over rave: backwards-looking, inwards-looking - in the slightly pathetic manner of all nostalgia - whereas Burial is more open to the coldness of the world outside.

The closing track from Posthuman even brings in a vocal line beginning "Take me back, to when you and me were happy"... It's probably not going to win over many people for who the nostalgia doesn't ring so strongly. Sonically, it's not as deep, layered or interesting as Burial or Skism. "A love letter to our teenage selves", as Posthuman say themselves on their Bandcamp page. I don't think any of our teenage selves expected this genre.

I've been trying to think of times when I've heard a proper Lancashire accent in music recently. (Pop, rock, rap, whatever.) It's not easy! Suggestions please? We want someone who's done for the Lancs accent what the Arctic Monkeys have done for Yorkshire...

A couple of nice examples are Shaun Ryder and Guy Garvey. But then it's a bit of a mixup because the county of Lancashire used to include Manchester, but the modern county doesn't include Shaun or Guy's hometowns, so, well, they've got the right voices but they might get disqualified on a technicality :(

Looking back to earlier eras... the same thing happens with The Beatles. Liverpool used to be part of Lancashire but not any more. Anyway The Beatles are confusing because they sometimes used quite genuine regional accents, sometimes transatlantic rock'n'roll accents - quite explicitly hopping about. Much more dependable, and much older, George Formby's voice is a proper representative sample.

Here's one modern example, though not famous: The Eccentronic Research Council - the woman in that track is Maxine Peake (another Manc/Lanc stowaway).

Oh and I don't really want to mention The Lancashire Hotpots because they're too daft.

Chumbawamba were from Burnley, hoorah. But their singing doesn't have much of the accent as far as I can tell.

FFS come on! This list needs some vim. Let's chuffing represent! Answers on a postcard.

Edit: top tip from Lucy: The Lovely Eggs - that's what I'm talking about!

Arch1 is a tiny little music venue in East London. It's got a great atmosphere, a great acoustic, and it's run by one man, a lovely fella called Rob. It's just what you want.

And now this:

A sudden flash flood due to the storms, and all of a sudden it's taken out lots of expensive equipment (amplifiers, mixer, drumkit, and the handsome little piano at the back) as well as obviously ruining the place.

The venue is a labour of love, Rob's been working at it 7 days a week, and it needs our support. Please support the crowdfunder to save this venue.

Wow, look what came in the post today: the latest release of Alan Jenkins' FREE SURF MUSIC. In fact I got all four albums as part of his kickstarter pledge (watch that video).

This latest one (#4) is one track of 47 minutes and one almost as long. It's a tuneful yet avant-garde surf landscape. Love the way it's experimental yet with tunes that I was singing along to even on first listen.

Frankly I don't understand why there aren't more people making this kind of music. Broad-minded surf instrumentals which lapse in and out of surreal abstraction! ISN'T IT OBVIOUS? COME ON PEOPLE

What tracks would you take into a shop to test out a hifi?

FWIW here's what I'm thinking.

• Dope Tito Feat Suzi Rawn - All I Know (Charlie P Dubstep Mix) - to check the bass response, obviously.
• Shalmaneser - You Never Give Me Your Monkey - listen to that opening and tell me …

I'll admit it: I wasn't sure I could tolerate 48 hours of nothing but post-rock. Lots of great stuff in that scene - but all at once? Wouldn't it wear a bit thin? Well no, ArcTanGent festival was chuffing fab. My top three awesome stickers are awarded to:

• Bear Makes Ninja …

Wow. The Jabberwocky festival, organised by the people who did many amazing All Tomorrow's Parties festivals, collapsed three days before it was due to happen, this weekend. The 405 has a great article about the whole sorry mess.

We've been to loads of ATPs and I was thinking about going …

Just back from a fab All Tomorrow's Parties, this one curated by Jeff Mangum. As well as the bands, he curated quite an educational TV channel throughout the event - we got to learn about Chomsky, Zizek, the Bali islanders, oh and Monty Python on endless loop.

Some of the things …