Johnny Conquest ‘Uptown For The Americas’ (Sirkus, 2001)

For some reason, at the tail end of last year, the song ‘So Alive’ got lodged in my head.

The artists that live on the fringes, the forward (or sideways) thinkers, have always drawn me in. This fascination really kicked in at university when, in the early 2000s, I presented a radio show with Erotic Volvo of Birmingham wrong-pop band Misty’s Big Adventure. As a kind of musicologist of the weird, his selections were never predictable and often a revelation.

In Ananda Shankar’s relatively short lifetime, the Indian sitar player was never afraid to push boundaries.

We’ve followed the secret map of electronic music past and found a hidden chest of lost gems. This month, we’re pulling out and polishing Bel Canto’s ‘White-Out Conditions’