In New Jersey the ‘working Joe’ pumps ‘gas’ into gargantuan metal beasts at dusty side-road stations, packs processed cheese in vast, vacant factories, or watches thousands of pills fill vessels on endless conveyer belts… In their spare time they take their kids to ‘Little League’, sup Bud Light, watch the Super Bowl and wear lots of stone-washed blue denim and gingham. I think.

In Stockton on Tees, the ‘grafter’ welds ships together with big leathery paws, smelts steel, or processes violent and harmful industrial chemicals. In their spare time they watch depressing football teams that always lose, drink cloudy bitter, try to dodge getting bottled/glassed as the pubs kick out, and erm, other stuff that sounds like it came out of a Ken Loach film.

Young Rebel Set (Blood, sweat and tears not pictured)

The comparison between these two incredibly accurate and painstakingly undertaken case studies should go some way to explaining the intricacies of how an appropriation of Bruce Springsteen’s everyman rock’n’roll by a gang of heart-on-sleeve, feet-on-ground lads from north east England might pan out.

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Taxidermy: model's own

The chandelier shatters from the heinous force of one of the king’s cavalier’s stolen blunderbusses, and suddenly the groomed congregation of aristocrats fall silent. As the gritty haze of gun powder and crystal fragments settle on the ballroom floor, the silhouette of a new hero is revealed… Sir Max McElligott esq, the dandiest rogue this side of the Watford gap, stands a-jaunt, supping on a goblet of fine 87-year-old port. As he ascents a near-by table, demolishing the pyramid of bubbling flutes, the band strikes up and the mysterious highwayman conducts them through an impromptu whirlitzer that somehow snail-trails the dots between Mozart and David Byrne, a waltzing hirdy-girdy of symphonic post-punk bombast. Huzzah!

And as quickly as he appeared, he’d snatched the Duchess beneath his arm, mounted the rafters and swung his way across the room and through the ornate window at the bottom of the hall, into the frosty black night, leaving nothing but a wax stamp of his alias branded on the Duke’s finest gold-gilded china serving dish, reading just: ‘Wolf Gang x’.

It all sounded a bit like this (click track name for download): ‘Night Flying'

In the day time on Saturday in the white marble catacombs of the Sonar By Day complex they had a big exhibition about the future of synthesizers. I'm not much of a synth geek, so i found it a real eye opener...

I discovered, as this photo shows, that one day in the distant future all electronic music will be made by tiny gas-piston hammers hitting giant metal chimes that in turn make monitor screens stolen from from a 1993 PC change colour, all triggered by a midi keyboard.

I also witnessed a demonstration of this crazy new spacey synth called a Reactable - Bjork and Daft Punk are championing - it's basically a giant game of drafts, where each piece controls a different instrument/effect/filter etc. It pulled by far the biggest crowd in the whole exhibition, so perhaps this one really is a window into the future of everything.

If that's the case, I can announce one and all, that if you commandeered a time machine and traveled into the furtherest reaches of what's to come that you'd find that lining the 25th Generation ipod's of the tinsel-haired half-android tomorrow folk is....DRUMROLL... minimal techno!!

Sonar might as well have been retitled: 'The Global Evolutions of Dubstep Festival' this year. But I guess if it had been it would have meant it was 95% full of squatty ex-graffiti artists with aggressive B.O., that is, instead of being 65% full of them.

Above is Gaslamp Killer, he played at the request of the luverly Mary Anne Hobbs (best DJ left on Radio 1? Yup, probably) on her BBC Radio 1 endorsed stage of guess what? Yup, global dubstep evolutions. He's what happened when Mala from DMZ mated with Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Mixmaster Mike. He utilises his silly hair by moshing round the stage to mash-up mixes of Jimi Hendrix's 'Fire'.

He makes Rusko look like a Zionist. Also on that stage was Joker whose trying to inject some flirtiness into what I overheard one grumpy disco sod backstage refer to as "the most sexless dance movement on earth".

Some IDM dudes inside did an incredible note perfect job of creating a giant A/V version of the loading screen for a ZX Spectrum.

Over on the Sonar Pub stage... You're never gonna believe this, but yes, more ever intriguing hybridisations of dubstep!

Glasgow's Rustie did a set, which I was actually really enjoying - a mixture of his own creations: acid-rainforest pitter-pattering mid-range 'wonky' dubstep, cut-n-paste with trancey E'd up Southern-fried hip hop. I say I was enjoying it, that was until my girlfriend said he was the fittest DJ she'd ever seen. Then I spent the rest of the set trying not to nod my head and calling him a one-dimensional Warp-geek-fad...

The best thing I saw all night was Fever Ray. Her set was basically the most enveloping show I've witnessed for as long as I can remember, I can't gush enough... Think the Brothers Grimm take Peyote then put on a conceptual West End show about Native American philosiphies of motherhood, with Jim Henson's workshop circa 1984 on the set and costumes.

She had one onstage member whose sole job was to menacingly brandish a voodoo doll above her head at all times. He was my favourite.

Sonar, in Barcelona, is by far and a long way the classiest festival. You can just hold your camera randomly up anywhere inside the Sonar By Day complex and get a shot that looks like the asylum scene from A Clockwork Orange...

Fucking well Euro view

Plus, they have art. The question is, in 2009, can you install a darkened room with a load of fuzzy TVs and call it art? Or, is this in fact a post-conceptual play upon the entire idea of modern art? Is the artist at this very moment sitting back and enjoying a self-satisfied chortle, as we the public squirm in the aftershocks of his creative statements while he sits and polishes up his next curveball...

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I’m not what you’d call a festival person, per say. But neither would I like to been classified under that bah-humbug stick-in-the-mud (pardon the pun) grumpy sod category. I like a good festival. The ilk of Sonar, for instance, what’s there not too like? Blissful sunshine, incredible city, stunning venues run well, cheap booze, great food, and a pain-stakingly put-together bill of inspiring new music. However, the UK run just seem to want to unilaterally punish me, seriously, they have it in for me. I’ve been to Glastonbury seven times, and every time it’s been apocalyptic. Not messy, slippy-sloppy, good-times carnage, just a health-destroying, in bed for a week after, horrid nightmare. In fact, Reading’s the only one that’s ever been anything but cruel and vindictive to me, hence my ongoing understanding of a great UK festival comprising 500 12-year-old’s kicking the living shit out of eachother in a wall-of-death style mosh-pit to Sick Of It All. So, really it’s the festival God’s beef, not mine.

Anyways, my festival season kicked-off last Friday in a surprising and lavish fashion. I got a last-minute invite sent to my email inbox for an event called ‘Xeno-Fest’, a showcase of the new acts by Xenomania, the production house-turned-all-round-impresarios behind the likes of Girls Aloud, amongst others. It was held in mainman Brian Higgins’ mansion house back-garden in Kent. Those of you who know and dig Xeno, and Higgins, as I do, will at this point be feeling an iota of the all-consuming elation I felt at being invited. BLAHHHAHHHHHH!- something along those lines... These guys are chorus sculptors of quite literally the highest possible order. Deities of refrain.

The event pretty much trouble-shot everything wrong with festivals. Like one of the Carlsberg ads: they don’t do festivals, but if they did…

Way too many people? Sorted, just invite about 40. Horrendously over-priced rat liver burgers? No fanks, what about free-for-all gastro-pub style BBQ? Yes please. Similarly priced piss-warm Carling? How about an endless stream of Moet and an eternal Pimms O’Clock? That’d do nicely. Shit-spurting WC fountains, nah, more like the kind of portaloos that with a welcome mat plonked outside you’d happily settle down in for a few months in between houses. Brain-burningly dreary bill-filling warm-up bands? Gimme a round of purest distilled chart-bound fist-pumping pop glory any day. And as for the bleakly bedraggled quagmire square of turf parked next to a concrete compound off the M25 somewhere, well, personally I’d rather a bit of:

This.

This.

This.

This.

And this.

It had not one,

but two moats (the second’s just behind the ladies on bales of hay there):

It was at points a bit like a cross-breed between a festival, a wedding reception and a middle-management power-point presentation…

Hungry sir?

Thirsty?

This is literally the kind of thing my eyes were put in my skull to see. Tried stealing the ‘X’ and got told off…

Surpassed only, maybe, by this:

Oh yeah, and some bands played. My favourite were Mini Viva, who’re kind of like a two-piece gym-treadmill adrenalized Sugarbabes, riding that unmistakable trademark Xeno splurge of pretty much every twist and turn music has taken in the whole history of everything ever crammed into each and every note. Very soon you’re not going to be able to step out your front door without being mule-kicked by their sparkly high-top Nike blazers. Their debut single is called ‘Left My Heart In Tokyo’ and if it doesn’t go top five then I’ll staple my foreskin to the office copy of the N-Dubz album. The fact that they’re supporting the Saturdays on tour is pretty comedy, invoking thunder-stealing memories of Klaxons supporting Shitdisco, Fratellis with the Horrors on first, and so on. It’s a shame they don’t have the proper single version up on the Myspace yet, but worry not you’ll hear it soon. It’s gonna be bigger than air and, erm, love.

The only thing wrong with Xeno-fest per say, was that of the 40-odd people there, they were exclusively all evil music industry bods with tar for blood and rubies with burning flames in their centre for eyes. The kind of despicable idiots who’ll blog the entire proceedings, gloating at how much more fun it is than actually slumming it out at a real festival, surrounded by real people and ‘real’ bands. Scum, each and every one of them. Heehee. xx

You know how that whole latest wave of ballyhooing lounge-trash synth-pop from the US seemed for a diced nano-second like it could be The Next Big Thing?

Until you realised that every act involved either had the collective sex appeal and star quality of a charcoal tank-top sporting moth, or a kitscher-than-a-giant-Pope-Jean-Paul-II-Pez-dispenser reportoire as collectively memorable as manual to an Ikea flat-pack fart.

Yes Giantess - If you say you wouldn't, you're lying...

Well, Boston's Yes Giantess are here to buck both the above trends in one bad-boiiii spit-roasting of gawwwwwwgeous poster-boy keyboard-cranking.

Here's one of their debut double A-sides, it's called 'Tuff'n'Stuff'