So, I heard this cool album...

Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (1979)

Hippy Nerve Gas. Amusement Park Disasters. Drugs. Paranoia. The Cold War. Vandalism. The Khmer Rouge. Childkillers. Shitty Landlords. Wiping out Homeless People with the Neutron Bomb. And a kickass cover of Viva Las Vegas. This is the first album by one of the greatest punk bands of all time and it's fucking mad. The DK's were a combination of several unique talents - no one sings like Jello Biafra, he's brilliant, psychotic, unnerving and wickedly funny. He bares it all on this debut album, screeching, raving, growling with menace and laughing maniacly, ably backed by East Bay Ray's dynamic and agressive guitar work, which ranges from distorted 50s pop rampages (Kill the Poor, Lets Lynch the Landlord) to his trademark creepy, cinematic slide (Holiday In Cambodia - I'm not one for favourite songs, but this is way up there in my nonexistant ranking) and Klaus Flouride's crunching, dirty bass.

This album is full of horrible unpleasant topics, consumer excess, breakdown, mental illness, leaking chemical weapons dumps and the Year Zero, handled with unrelenting sarcasm and black humour. Musically it's more than your average punk album, like a blocked-up sewerage pipe it overflows with 50s surf pop and 60s psychedelic influences and the paranoid musical style of the fifth Kennedy, the enigmatic 6025. This album is a toxic punk landmark. I love it.

Autechre - Tri Repetae++ (1996)
Ever wanted to know what music robots will make after the last fragile human is crushed by their titanic automated war machines? Of course you have! And this is the album for you!

In a break from their previous subtle, melodic ambient masterstrokes, (Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994) ), Humanoids Sean Booth and Rob Brown ruthlessly shut down their emotion cores and produced this inhuman, antiseptic, alienating, disorienting ear crusher masquerading as an album. Where Aphex Twin likes to give listeners the finger with distorted vocals and blistering snare rushes, Autechre calmly inform the listener that; with this album, they are obsolete, soon to be replaced by automatons who will perform their functions with greater efficiency. There are no exceptions, no warm edges, no friendly analogue bubblebaths. Instead; drills, needles, antiseptics, and acid jackhammers will eradicate any trace of unhygenic humanoid waste, to the buzz of electroceramic compound lathes and the drone of radioactive fusion cores.

For all it's angular antiphonic beats and droning synthorgans , this album manages a kind of alien beauty; inorganic, clean, and majestic. Listening to it conjures images of spaceships unfolding in orbit, automanufacturing plants and refineries spawning yet more robotic stuctures, metallic unlife unfolding across moons, across gas giants, harvesting suns and creating new ones in the cold, inky void. Beautiful, mindbending sights; but no room for people.