Drum & bass has always been a music of motion, a genre that hurtles toward the horizon at 174 beats per minute and rarely looks back. Stay still in the middle of it and you feel the floor move. So it is a small act of rebellion that "Stay a While" asks you to linger, and a larger one that it gets you to agree.

Somewhere in a cramped workshop, a man has spent the better part of fifteen years coaxing a monster into existence. The razor belt, part chainsaw and part electric guitar, sounds like the sort of contraption a sensible person would keep away from the neighbours. Shortout Kid has instead kept it close, tuned it, tamed it, and now unleashed it on "Lamb", the first proper calling card from his forthcoming debut album. It is a gloriously unreasonable record, and it is better than it has any right to be.

Debussy's "Clair de lune" began life, around 1890, under a different name. *Promenade sentimentale* was the title of the movement, the third of the *Suite bergamasque*, and the composer sat on it for some fifteen years before letting it reach print in 1905. The more famous title comes from Verlaine, whose masked revellers dance sadly beneath the moon, singing in a minor key of love and a life they do not quite believe in. Debussy's gift was to catch that doubleness, joy and sorrow braided together, without a single word. Sasc Classical's new single, produced by SoloArtStudio, sets out to honour that gift, and does so with a sincerity that disarms.

Park City, Utah is famous for ski lifts, film-festival lanyards and millionaires in expensive fleece. On paper it is not the sort of town that produces a man who sounds as if he has spent a fortnight in a pickup truck with a Buck Owens cassette and a flask of something unlicensed. Yet here is Johnny Ranck with his self-titled debut EP, and the paperwork turns out to be misleading.

Nobody should be allowed to be this unguarded in public, and yet here is Erin Sydney, in a Chicago club in July, taking a song about marital jealousy and singing it as though the roof is already on fire and she's the only one who's noticed. "Jealous Love (Live)", lifted from the forthcoming *Live in Chicago* EP, is a rock record in the oldest and least fashionable sense: a few people, loud amplifiers, and an emotional situation that cannot be resolved by anything short of volume.

Press releases tend to promise a great deal, and ambient music, a genre built on the absence of incident, is particularly prone to overselling its own quietness. So it is a pleasure to report that John Beith, working alone in a home studio in Devon under the name The Snowball Effect, has made a single that earns its calm honestly. "The Colour of Dust" is unhurried, handsomely made and quietly affecting, and it rewards the kind of attention that most music no longer bothers to ask for.