Music

Rough Trade Shops has released the perfect stocking-filler for newcomers to music from Africa with its Africa 13.

Seasoned fans will be familiar with some of the choices originally released in the UK on labels such as Crammed Discs, Awesome Tapes From Africa and Soundway.

Highlights include the hypnotic polyrhythms of Congo's Konono No. 1, the minimalist electro groove of the Owiny Sigoma Band and Staff Benda Bilili's dance-floor filler Osali Mabe.

"I have always followed very closely what was happening here in movements against racism and against the Nazis. London had a big influence on me along with the music I heard at home in the 1960s when I was a kid, the protest songs from the Basque Country and from Latin America. The revival of ska and punk in England was a big influence on my first band, Kortatu, along with the two tone movement with Selector, The Specials and The Beat.

Wise Up Ghost is a collaboration between Elvis Costello and live instrumentation hip hop soul group The Roots.

I approached this album as a huge fan of The Roots and as someone who has nothing more than a very limited knowledge Elvis Costello, although after listening to this I think I may need to remedy that.

Whatever else the long-gone "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" was, it was multicultural. Established in 1945, it was made up of six republics and populated by 22 different ethnicities, including Muslim Slavs, Albanians, Jews, ethnic Germans, Turks, Vlachs and Hungarians. It had three major religions, two alphabets, three official languages and a variety of minority languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian and Roma.

Electronic hermits Boards of Canada are renowned for making hypnotic and addictive down tempo electronica and shunning the limelight. In the run up to the release of Tomorrow's Harvest, Warp Records devised an elaborate breadcrumb trail of hidden codes and a handful of mysterious promo vinyl dotted in music stores around the world.

Out now on Black Box Records

Author is a collaborative project between well-respected dubstep artists Ruckspin & Jack Sparrow. The pair are a key part of Leeds' extraordinary electronic music scene.

Steve Mason's superb second solo album sees him make a welcome return to a more experimental style that characterised his former combo the Beta Band. It also reveals deep anger at the current political situation. Mason's melancholic and troubled introspection is still present - now shot through with a new hopefulness - with the tail end of this 20-track album containing his most politically overt lyrics to date.

When Public Enemy implored the world to "Fight the Power" they probably never dreamed they would go on to inspire hip hop about jaffa cakes. Nor would they have ever imagined such hip hop would be any good.

Ry Cooder, the American session guitarist best known for his role in producing the Buena Vista Social Club, has been steadily extending his catalogue of original material since 2005.

UK hip hop (and its 130 beats per minute cousin grime) rarely gets the coverage or support it deserves. While many people know of Katy B, few know of the Brixton hip hop collective, The Illersapiens, she originally sang with.

Artists such as Ty, Jehst and Roots Manuva have been honing their craft for years with very little profile. Back in 2008 Estelle said in a Guardian interview there is "blindness to black talent" in the UK music industry. Plan B recently vented his frustration that "people are prejudiced towards hip hop".