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While Yonce is off filming adverts for International Conglomerate Number 7, Kelly and The-Dream are keeping it more real with their recent collaborations, first Rowland’s Dirty Laundry and now The-Dream’s Where Have You Been, a similarly solemn track, taken from his new LP 4Play:

Welcome to this long overdue edition of Armchair Dancefloor. Below, as ever, you'll find The Playlist, featuring a cluster of new and forthcoming releases worthy of investigation. But first...

Focus: Mount Kimbie talk Cold Spring Fault Less Youth

I can't think of many times in my life that a track has excited me on first listen in the way that Mount Kimbie's "Maybes" did when I first heard it back in 2009. It's drawn-out guitar chords, desperate-sounding vocals and cavernous beats felt human and emotive in a way that seemed to transcend the song's crude electronic makeup. More potently, it sounded completely unlike anything else around at the time; combining the powerful dynamics of experimental dance music with pure, organic songwriting skill. In short, it was an exceptional debut move and one which marked the band out as one of the most exciting new talents in the UK.

Since then Mount Kimbie - the duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos - have gone from strength to strength. Follow-up single

Available on: Matador LP

There

Club crew B.YRSLF have churned out another free olio celebrating the energetic and the antic.

The French clique have aligned themselves with a global network of beatmakers producing their own gaudy take on Stateside sounds, with Cedaa, DJ Hilti and Slick Shoota among the artists offering mutant versions of juke, Baltimore house and ballroom. They’re generous evangelists too, putting out a number of free compilations (including last year’s Summer Crisis set).

Their latest goodie-bag is Transistor Rhythm, a various artists compilation assembling 23 tracks from the wilder/goofier end of the club music spectrum. Subtitled ’808 & Ghettobass Special’, the collection features a host of footwork-indebted bass sounds. Embassy boss Distal is the biggest name in the set, with Fade To Mind graduate Cedaa and Russian rabble-rouser Pixelord also making the cut. Further acts include Visionn, DJ Taye and Seapoint.

A Facebook follow will earn you the compilation; click below to stream snippets of all the featured tracks. [via XLR8R]

Tracklist: 
SOUNDBANK # 1 :
01 @Pixelord – Floppy Room [EXCLUSIVE]
02 @Vlsonn – East Clipper [EXCLUSIVE]
03 @SlickShoota x @Principal-Dean & Snakefoot – Pussyclot Funk Dem 2013 [...

Bristol-born mumbler Tricky is back with his first album in three years – and it’s arguably his best since 1996′s Pre-Millennium Tension. 

Released on his new label of the same name, False Idols sees Tricky finally setting aside the cross-genre larking which characterised his last five-odd albums. No thrash, reggae or ‘Lovecats’ covers here – instead, False Idols is a focused exercise in brooding trip-hop and low-slung soul. Even if it lacks the free-associative brilliance of his first few records, it definitely shows Tricky stumbling back onto the right track. head to NPR to listen to album. [via Pigeons And Planes]

False Idols is due on May 28. FACT TV recently sat down with Tricky, easily one of our favourite episodes to date. Head here to watch our man from the West sound off about accidentally collaborating with Zebra Katz, quarrelling with Katie Price and his bumbling cameo at Beyonce’s Glastonbury show.

Jack Tatum clearly believes that a moving target is harder to hit, having been in near perpetual motion since he first broached the music scene in the guise of Wild Nothing back in 2009. Since then we've been treated to his dreamy pop earworms across two full length albums and an intervening EP, each released to wide acclaim and each feeling like a distinct progression from the last.

If the lush lo-fi ethereality of 2010's Gemini showed Tatum's first tentative steps blinking into the light, its finespun melancholic foundations were only extended and illuminated through follow up EP, Golden Haze. Then came last year's Nocturne, which felt like a distillation of Wild Nothing's sound and influences, having a clearly defined melodic structure but coupled with an effervescence, that created something which remained high on 'dream', but equally strong on 'pop'.

This all brings us to the new Empty Estate EP and (initially at least) familiar ground on an opening pair of tracks clearly designed with summer in mind. Shafts of light flood the jangle of guitars on 'Bodies In Rainfall', while breathy vocals and pulsating synths create hooks on follow-up 'Ocean Repeating (Big Eyed Girl)'. These form a couplet, which serve as head nodding reminders of everything Tatum does best, erring on the lighter side of his sound, they are a floatation device to keep us buoyant as the music pools into more less familiar waters.

The ch...

With a grind of synths and a few involuntary twitches, Detroit

It's the politically incorrect stance to take, but I am pro-pigeonholing - in theory, anyway. An inbox with colour coded labels is one to be revered and emulated. Sadly, I've never found myself with the patience or tenacity to go much beyond multi-hued stars for emails that I will remember to have a look at one year down the line.

Similarly, the Dewey Decimal System, washing machine settings, actual pigeonholes, and rubbish bins, all serve to demonstrate the triumph of segregation. Catalogue your life. Label your experiences. Consider the science and the religion that tell us that the grandest complexities are just larger manifestations of the simplest event. Consider how psychology has reduced an endless continuum of human experience to six basic emotions.

Consider how much I rely on labels to make my job easier.

Bloody Thought Forms.

Ghost Mountain is an album so musically ambiguous, it is impossible stow it away under a conveniently selected all-encompassing genre. Which is actually a Good Thing because no one likes to be labelled (nor should they be), but, conversely, everyone loves speaking in labels. If it weren't for genres we'd be forced to validate Roland Barthes' snide observation that music criticism is simply the scattered 'poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective'.

Adjectives, adverbs, and descriptors in general are horrific (see what I did there?). As a rule, they tend to take more away from a statement,...

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Punk warriors The Clash will go all LL Cool J on a new box-set, overseen by guitarist Mick Jones. 

The Sound System box-set will feature the band’s first five LPs – that’s The Clash (1977), Give ‘Em Enough Rope (1978), London Calling (1979), Sandinista! (1980) and Combat Rock (1982) – remastered from the original tapes by Jones. The set will also include three CDs of rarities, demos and singles, a DVD featuring previously unreleased footage, and a fresh edition of the band’s iconic Armagideon Time zine. Art direction has been co-ordinated by Clash bassist Paul Simonon, who has elected to design the box in the shape and style of a vintage boombox.

According to Jones, the “concept of the whole thing is: best box set ever”:

“Remastering’s a really amazing thing. That was the musical point of it all, because there’s so much there that you wouldn’t have heard before. It was like discovering stuff, because the advances in mastering are so immense since the last time [the Clash back catalogue] was remastered in the 90s…We had to bake the tapes beforehand