There are records that feel like documents and there are records that feel like contraband. Live in Detroit 1986 sits firmly in the latter… a tape smuggled out of the room, dubbed and redubbed into soft focus until the hiss becomes a third rhythm section. Captured less than a year after Fela Kuti’s release from prison, at Detroit’s Fox Theatre during his first U.S. tour, the set lands with a charged, itinerant electricity: part exorcism, part declaration.

Brazilian guitarist Fabiano Do Nascimento and Los Angeles producer Eddie Ruscha (aka E Ruscha V and Secret Circuit) team up for the gorgeously ambient and adventurous Aquáticos, released earlier this year on the ever-reliable Music From Memory label. Pairing Nascimento’s 7 and 10-string nylon guitars with Ruscha’s modular synths, drum machines, and vintage keyboards, the duo create meditative, electro-acoustic sounds with an alchemical fluidity.

May 1980, London: Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson drops Bass Culture on Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, the first of two LPs he’d release that year. Jamaica-born and Brixton-raised, the album finds Johnson distilling Babylon’s heavy hand into deep, subterranean basslines laced with incendiary street-level missives — “muzik of blood, black reared pain, rooted heart geared, all tensed up.”

Occasionally, a song breaks forth from the void and strikes you like a bolt of lightning. That’s how it feels listening to “Rockcurry,” from the late dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry and electronic duo Mouse on Mars (Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma)’s forthcoming Spatial, No Problem, out on the June 5th on Domino Record Co. It feels a little like plugging a fork into the electrical socket. Shock. Boom. A whole new world.

For 37 years, John Peel worked as a conduit, pulling unheard voices out of the static and setting them loose across the BBC dial. In 1977, one of those voices was This Heat, formed just a year earlier in a Camberwell rehearsal space. Frayed at the edges, with clipped rhythms pushed straight to broadcast, they didn’t sound like a band adapting to a Maida Vale studio so much as one ignoring the usual expectations of a radio session.

Like an unwavering sonic horizon, Orange delivers a vibrant and jangly collection of songs that weren’t just merely worth the wait, but feel like just the right amalgamation of musician Tim Presley’s prolific career to date. The first White Fence record in over seven years, the chiming guitars and Ty Segall back behind the drum kit and console convey a warbly and mysteriously optimistic guiding light. Hence the record’s namesake, the record offers a clear-eyed and bullish vibrancy in contrast to the downright foggy greys and blues of yesteryear.

Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature expanded on the last album, The Heat Warps, to include the U.K. improvisatory guitarist Tara Cunningham. Their dual guitar play was loose and intuitive, softening the lines drawn by the band’s motorik sound and adding an unpredictable but well-thought out element to its songs. Now, the two of them extend their conversation in Sleeves, in this quiet but riveting concoction of acoustic guitar and voices.

Three years and as many live albums have passed since Setting’s debut album. In that time, the trio of Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund have sharply fine-tuned their form of exploratory electronic Appalachian drone music, and their new, self-titled album finds them on a heightened plane. The chemistry built between these three players over the last few years comes alive here in an even richer hue of their cosmic arboreal vision.