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Germany’s Ulrich Schnauss has a knack for weaving together various forms of electronica, as he puts it in his Red Bull Music Academy interview, “in the widest sense of the term.” Schnauss is the self-proclaimed product of both 1980s German dance music, the likes of which had been started by Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, and other bands from across the spectrum of shoegaze such as The Cocteau Twins and Slowdive. But it’s Schnauss’ sixth sense for fusing these elements together which makes it work, the result of years of obsessive practice and label-hounding. While some of it verges on the sentimental side, there’s gems like “Stars”, where dampened percussion and a sort of ambient drone enhances the lyrics of a vagabond narrator, while “Between Us and Them” best captures Schnauss’ knack for capturing something between melancholia and restlessness, giving a sort of spectral feel to music that needs no words.

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Anyone remember these guys? I have something to get off my chest: As a heterosexual male, I got a lot of crap in my youth for liking the Pet Shop Boys. Still I remained rock-hard and steady in my Showboats, knowing that in between my copy of Olivia Newton John’s Xanadu and the soundtrack to Yentl I could find a copy of the album with “West End Girls” on it. All you haters, laugh if you want but it makes for a kick-ass soundtrack to a game of frisbee football or badminton even if repeated blows to the head have forced you to keep it to yourself on your iPod. The PSB (as aficionados such as myself refer to them) first gained infamy through that aforementioned track, and  with New Order producer Stephen Hague playing on their team, that was all she wrote. Listen to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe reminisce on Red Bull Music Academy Radio. Put on your (Domino) Dancing shoes, young man, and Go West!

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DJ Alfred Darlington’s pseudonym is no throwaway–this Daedalus is as much an inventor as his mythical Greek namesake; his wings are his rhythms and rhymes, his beats and freestyles–and the Santa Monica-born spinner soars on his own anarchic sound that is as genuine in its extolment of the contemporary as it is old-school. I’ve gone overkill with the literary comparisons, but the point is his knack for interacting with the crowd and keeping the listener on the club floor, even if vicariously–something nowhere more evident than in his show in Italy at the 2009 Dissonanze Festival, available on the Red Bull Music Academy site. You listen to his music, you go to his show, and you’re borrowing his wings. His gift is his beatmatching, which is most likely to solidify his signature sound– it’s a versatile canvas of moods from so many different genres sprawling into each other perfectly, and something sorely absent from the club scene of today, which seems tepid in its experimenting with different scenes. His only drawback is the occasional foray into monotonous and run-of-the-mill beats, but what an innate talent the man has for mixing jazz with R&B, hip-hop with 8-bit Nintendo noise– or pretty much whatever he feels like at the moment.

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Hervé, aka Joshua Harvey, is a UK-based producer and DJ with a penchant for mixing in a darker, more noir-ish side of jazz with the hip-hop beats he’s accrued and perfected over years of working with several different artists. Hervé also had a knack for finding new ways to make his live DJ attract a youthful, more rave-oriented audience, and set about remixing and/or producing everyone from MSTRKRFT to DJ Switch to The Prodigy to Kid Sister. All the hard work paid off when a lot of those artists began pimping his name all around the world, only helping to spread what would soon become a reputation throughout the rock world as one of the best producers and DJs to work with. Through his latest production and DJ artistry, he’s been working with some of today’s biggest acts like Shiny Toy Guns and genre stalwarts such as The Chemical Brothers. Here’s a little peek at his unique approach to producing on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.

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It could be safely said there’s endless legions of bands with what one might call ‘lame’ names, or misleading monikers that seem anything but fitting when actually listening to their music. But it’s doubtful there could be a more fitting one for Hideaki Ishi, who hails from Tokyo and has lived a life that’s the stuff of a Hollywood (or Japanese Gangster!) films. A high school dropout, DJ Krush worked his way up from lower-level street gangs, only to become a full-fledged yakuza member. Based on that somewhat vague biography, one might anticipate rhythms of machine gun-fire or, at the very least, some ear-splitting drum and bass rhythms. But as things turn out, Krush is anything but aggressive. Instead, years of experience as one of Japan’s very first hip-hop DJs has led to a very ambient, laid back fusion sound, one that mixes a lot of sultry jazz with trip hop rhythms and stand-up bass, lounge music that intertwines with intricate time signatures and anarchic, across-the-board mixing of genres. Then again, he isn’t above mixing it up with heavyweights like Malik B and Black Thought. Here’s a peak at one of the genre’s innovators on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.

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If you’ve ever had the (dis)pleasure of seeing the movie version of Naked Lunch, you might remember that Mugwumps are the half-typewriter/half-beetle creatures that talked with British accents out of their buttholes to Bill Lee while he binged on skag, er, bug dust, and tried to avoid screwing his wife. While not quite as eccentric or visceral in imagery, there’s a certain surrealism to Geoffrey aka Mugwump, perhaps not to unlike a bug you’ve caught that makes you want to nod off and get lost in the sort of film-noirish world that William Burroughs created. Occasionally Mugwump veers into a hackneyed dance world of overused beats and rhythms, but when he’s on, he’s on — and at Red Bull Music Academy, you can get a brief glimpse of the ambient, trippy world Mugwump’s created, one that may make you think : Hmm, maybe I’ll try some heroin. I mean bug dust, hahaha.

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Most famous for songs like “Whip It” and “Workin’ in a Coal Mine,” Devo was another band that began as a more punk-sounding group that got lost in the glitz and glam of New Wave 80s sounds gone horribly awry. A couple years before that 1980 chart-topper, Warner Bros. had the good sense to sign a weirder, rawer rock n roll version that even in its embryonic stages displayed signs of eccentric genius. Think Talking Heads meets The Dickies, with a little of that dinky synth sound that would make them famous thrown in for extra good measure. After disappearing for a good long while, the Akron, Ohio quintet resurfaces on the RBMA, complete with red energy domes and sleeveless hazmat suits– it’s well worth a listen just to hear Gerald Casale look back at some surprisingly somber events which inspired them and their name.

To get a better picture of the weirdness behind Devo, you should check out the very bizarre and hilarious color study test at this website.

Devo also played the Olympics. Here’s a nifty video featuring a sea of energy domes:

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Given the current musical climate, it’s not hard to believe that so few know who Bad Brains is. And given the fact that there have been so few other great punk bands in music history, I sometimes feel ashamed for forgetting they even exist. But to re-establish the band’s significance for both of us, let me give you a quote (from what is probably to many another outdated act) by Adam Yauch, aka MCA from the Beastie Boys, who called Bad Brains’ self-titled debut “The greatest punk/hardcore album of all time.” Like many other admirers, Yauch saw the unique side of a band forging a unique punk rawness with what were often these sort of reggaeton-style, laid-back vocals. While there’s no doubt the Brains have come a long way from their humble beginnings in D.C. (read: living in poverty which forced a small getup act to dole out demo tape after demo tape so that they could move from a tiny label which would only press a limited number of cassettes to a bigger one like PVC which was only marginally better, combined with constant lineup changes and the usual band strife whew), it’s hard to say how much good it’s done them. But acts like Minor Threat and these guys helped solidify the punk sound of D.C., which I didn’t even really know until a friend passed me the equivalent of a “Punk 101″ cassette tape in high school and familiarized me with everything I was missing. Then they released “Build a Nation” a couple years ago, and it all fell back into place. If you’re remotely into punk, you’ll want to take a gander at what is essential genre history here. Catch a retrospective sell-out with the BB boys on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.

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The unleashing of the Red Bull Music Academy Radio application for the iPhone has turned into quite the event — the iTunes Application Store editors in Europe are already touting it as the next big thing to download, so add that to the already burgeoning list of Red Bull-related apps available online. What’s impressive about the application itself (and what’s pleasing so many of its newest fans) isn’t so much its sleek design or user-friendliness so much as its wide array of music:  there’s hundreds of genres here, from the latest in hip-hop, to indie, to old fashioned rock n’ roll.

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Hudson Mohawke is a series of wandering blips, beeps and noises coming from a collection of turntables and synthesizers from the days of yore — from Casio to Korg, from what sounds like theme to Airwolf to an almost stream-of-consciousness solo on an old-school synth. It honestly could remind you of anything from the soundtrack to any old NES game or like deluge from an old Phil Collins-era Genesis track. It’s no surprise then that “The Hawke” sports the 80s logos and wrestlers of the old WWF on his myspace page — and it’s apparent this is what the guy loves to do, imagine a world that was and shall forever be permanently 80s. Every soundtrack from every Jean Claude Van Damme movie of the time, every one-hit wonder that filled the radio and airwaves of MTV, re-imagined with a hipper sound. Check out Red Bull Music Academy Radio for more.

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