As pop music develops an ever expanding back catalogue, even the most dedicated music fan needs some help in navigating a way through its myriad vaults. It’s here that the DJ – the talent scout, the tastemaker – becomes more important than ever. We need obsessive crate-diggers who spend their days rummaging through second-hand vinyl shops from Nashville to Addis Ababa, as a pith-helmeted colonialist might hack through jungles in search of valuable minerals. The Amorphous Androgynous, a DJ/producer duo comprising Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, emerged via a different path to many other crate-diggers. Instead of the usual rare groove/acid jazz route, they started out in the late 1980s as Humanoid and had a big pop-rave hit with “Stakker Humanoid”, before mutating into The Future Sound Of London, a more cerebral, “progressive techno” outfit. Amorphous Androgynous was initially just one of their many DJ monikers, and in 1997 they fronted a two-hour mix on Kiss FM entitled “A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind”. It mixed Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” with “Silver Apples Of The Moon” by electronica pioneer Morton Subotnick and segued into Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone To The Moon” while slipping in brief quotations from Charles Bukowski reading from one of his own novels. Soon the Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble sessions – in clubs, on radio, record and podcast – started to become a minor phenomenon. Here, 50 years of pop history was rearranged into a fantasy world in which psych-rock nuggets, acid folk, easy listening, world music, prog and primitive electronica are mixed with the odd pop wildcard; knitted together with quotations from assorted psych shamen. Noel Gallagher came across a comp by chance, snapped up dozens of copies and gave them as Christmas presents to friends, including Paul Weller and Kasabian. Gallagher, who invited Amorphous Androgynous to remix “Falling Down” and DJ at Oasis after-shows, claims it forced him to look at pop in a different light; and Cobain says hundreds of fans have said the same. This volume is a typically eclectic and eccentric collection: nearly 50 tracks, linked by between-song narration from Timothy Leary. Cobain’s rather mystical idea that “the past, the present and the future are all with us at once” starts to make sense, as half a century of recorded music is gleefully reshaped. This is a world in which The Moody Blues’ 1968 belter “The Best Way To Travel” invents both Syd Barrett and Blur, and where Donovan gets deeper into spiritual folk-jazz than Nick Drake ever did (“Get Thy Bearings”). It’s a world where “The Beast” by Aphrodite’s Child becomes a terrifying slice of gothic funk, where Steve Winwood and Ennio Morricone become fearsome Hammond jazz gods, and where ragtime pianist Dick Hyman is turned into the godhead of electronica. There are names often dropped by in-the-know hipsters (Linda Perhacs, Amon Düül) and rare groove purists (Rotary Connection, Dorothy Ashby), but Dougans and Cobain also smuggle in recent releases by the likes of Noah Georgeson, Supergrass and Weller. This will lead you up countless new pathways and get you into artists of whom you’ve barely heard (Golden Animals? The Animated Egg? Get in!). Even the most dyed-in-the-wool rock fan with an aversion to the mix-tape will find something compelling here. John Lewis Q+A Garry Cobain of Amorphous Androgynous What’s the distinction between Future Sound Of London and Amorphous Androgynous? At the end of the ’90s, music was quite genre led – indie, dance, ambient – and we’ve always been unhappy with that. We really wanted to break open the experimental door, and that needed a name change. How do you define psychedelia? The word has been around for hundreds of years as a spiritual definition by shamen and anyone looking for transcendental experience. So, for me, part of the ethos has been to reclaim it from the ’60s and drag it into a timeless, genreless, sound dimension, to activate some kind of freedom to experiment. How difficult are these tracks to license? It can take ages. We can play anything we want on our radio broadcasts, but with CDs you have to haggle. With recordings of spiritual leaders, I’ve had to build personal relationships with ashrams in India, or whoever owns the copyright, trying to convince them I wouldn’t be taking the words out of context. We treat these compilations with the same love and care we show our own records! INTERVIEW: JOHN LEWIS

In a fairer world, Steve Wynn would be a household name. In the LA of the mid-’80s, he led the Dream Syndicate, the most intense, expansive outfit of the “Paisley Underground”. The band had a dark poetry and brought a kinetic energy to ’60s influences like The Doors and the Velvets, resulting in classic albums like The Days Of Wine And Roses, and Medicine Show (with hindsight, a 1980s Exile On Main St). The Syndicate fizzled out in ’89, but not before putting down a withering gale of a swansong, Live At Raji’s. Post-Syndicate, while most of his Paisley peers were fading from view, Wynn embarked on a solo odyssey, resulting in a maze of criminally ignored classics, and a wealth of divergent band projects – most recently, The Baseball Project, for which he received a belated burst of popular acclaim. Around 2000, though, Wynn began working with Jason Victor, Dave DeCastro and Linda Pitmon of Miracle 3, a development that led to a sharpening of his songwriting. Played by this whip-smart band, Wynn’s noir-ish tales of ignominy and disconnection resulted in the most visionary music of his career. The controlled chaos of “Amphetamine,” a blistering road anthem and a highlight of the band’s signature album, 2003’s Static Transmission, might best represent The Miracle 3’s transcendence. Northern Aggression, Wynn and band’s first studio album for five years, can stand tall in that company. An audacious, risk-taking tour de force, it locates itself in the upper reaches of Steve Wynn’s increasingly daunting canon. It comes at the listener from unexpected angles: the solemn desolation depicted in soul ballad “The Death Of Donnie B”, and “On The Mend,” a steely, postmodern psych freakout. This is a sleeker, fine-tuned Miracle 3, pushing at sonic extremes, aided at the mixing desk by Nicolas Vernhes, a hotshot New York producer whose avant-rock signature on works by Animal Collective, Spoon, Fiery Furnaces, and Black Dice, among others, has defined state-of-the-art rock’n’roll in the 2000s. Northern Aggression begins with a sleazy Stooges riff grafted onto the roar of a jet engine, and touches down 10 songs later on a chiming guitar-pop knockout called “Ribbons And Chains.” In between, the LP rarely takes a rest, raining down crazy riffs and digging deep into modern alienation. “Resolution” turns interstellar amid waves of sustained feedback, while “Colored Lights” brings pure melodic resplendence under an army of buzzing hyper-riffs – it might be the album’s representational cut. The songs, meanwhile, are populated with protagonists dealing with decay, malaise and psychological decrepitude. Yet the crown jewel of Northern Aggression is “We Don’t Talk About It”, portrayed by Wynn himself as “Tony Joe White filtered through the Lower East Side; Captain Beefheart strolling through the Bowery”. An onslaught of off-kilter funk, almost symphonic in its shifts of tone, tempo and mood, with Wynn’s hipster-jive bobbing and weaving around Victor’s machine-gun guitar, it’s a stunner, betraying multiple layers of meaning. “I’ve been swatting at the flies around my skull,” Wynn bellows at the song’s apotheosis, “until I realised they were trying to talk to me.” As a statement of his working practice, it couldn’t be much finer. Luke Torn Q+A This record is just an all-out blitz from the get-go. Was that the plan? There was little in the way of method or manifesto. I went down to Richmond, Virginia, Montrose Studio, with a handful of songs, the promise of a pastoral recording environment, and the best band I’ve ever had. I looked at our backwoods scenery and expected some kind of modern Harvest, but we ended up doing what we do – emotional sonic explosions and trippy soundscapes from all ends of the dynamic spectrum. Could we call this the Steve Wynn/Miracle 3 ‘New York’ record? Ha ha. You’re right. The pace, scenery, and attitude of our Southern setting freed us up to let our hyped-up NYC flag fly freely. That’s how we got the title. My friend Stephen McCarthy jokingly told us to leave our Northern aggression at the door. Your protagonists are alienated, but in the dark as to why. Coincidence or metaphor for our times? Yeah, there’s a lot of searching and flailing around blindly. It’s a theme in what I do – best intentions, bad choices. Dread, anxiety, defiance. I don’t know why. I’m actually a pretty optimistic guy. INTERVIEW: LUKE TORN