His stage name translates as “Rotten World” but lately, life for Mondo Marcio has been pretty sweet. One of Italy’s top rappers, the artist has for the last decade been helping give form to a highly misunderstood genre of music in his home country and selling loads of albums in the process. A once callow teenager taken in by the world of hip-hop, he has now blossomed into a fully assured individual who works steadily to reinvent the genre through a particularly Italian perspective. Six proper albums into his career, Mondo (whose real name is Gianmarco Marcello) has now cultivated a style that incorporates everything from electronica and R&B to orchestral pop and dancehall reggae into his rumbling, bass-saturated brand of hip-hop.

Born in Milan, the 26-year-old struggled with a difficult upbringing that saw his home-life in disarray and at the mercy of Social Services. With such an inauspicious start in life, the rapper was left to fend for himself, trying to keep afloat, rather unsuccessfully, with school and the troubles of a broken family life until inspiration finally hit. With courage and a burgeoning sense of curiosity, Mondo abandoned the everyday routines of teenage life for the more dangerous and exciting turns of the music world. Adopting a stage name that would reflect the youngster’s outlook on life, Mondo quickly worked his way up, spitting rhymes and cutting tracks, honing his craft until he could manage to put together a solid collection of work to bring to the masses. After releasing a demo, which he shopped around to a number of music execs at independent labels, the young Italian soon caught the attention of those in the growing circles of the hip-hop communities in Italy. A proper debut was released in 2006 and since then, the platinum-selling artist has been churning out albums that have further carved a niche in the thriving and vibrant scene of Italian hip-hop.

Where: Outside your bedroom window. Specifically, in a bush outside your bedroom window. Don’t mind the video camera. It’s just an artifact that is definitely not for recording your every movement while I sniff a bottle of the same perfume you wear.

Who: Me, watching you.

When: You’re sleeping.

When was the last time you crept to someone’s window and watched them sleep? Or asked a stranger to marry you every day? Most importantly, why are you wearing your sunglasses at night to watch other people breathe?

These are the songs that, when the items are collected for evidence, will be found on the stalker’s iPod. Stalkers spend long hours hiding in bushes, under cars, and in shadows. They need playlists too. Of course, the writers behind these songs might say we’re taking them a little too literally. There’s high-minded, abstract ideas behind these lyrics, mostly about the art of stalking.

Lori Carson spent the last three decades immersed in the life of song, sketching out the details of her most personal explorations in a series of chord progressions, overdubs, and musical meters. Her music introduced the world to a highly introspective and sensitive woman who seemed to be communicating a life’s worth of trouble and joy by way of the guitar. Carson’s first effort, 1990’s Shelter, was a shy entrance into a world dominated by excessive noise; hair bands were dying out, hip-hop was just cresting in the mainstream, and British dance music had started to expand beyond the borders of the UK. Shelter was brave, in that it forced Carson into a lone confessional space with only her guitar. At the time, female singer-songwriters brandishing guitars were far and few between, and the industry hadn’t much time for young women making big confessions in very small ways. Carson’s music defied those misconceptions. Her musings may have been secretly intimate and, therefore, easily ignored, but her no-nonsense storytelling approach and convincing sway with melody and inflection ushered those who did listen into her small, private world.

Anton Fier, founder of the Golden Palominos, took notice and invited the singer to appear on two of the band’s most inventive and forward-thinking albums, This is How it Feels and Pure.  Both albums explored electronic textures in a rock-band set-up, with Carson’s breathy cooing and warm acoustic guitar giving a sensual shading to each of the seductive numbers she appeared on. Following her stint with the Palominos, Carson would return to recording solo, turning out quietly devastating works, like 1997’s Everything I Touch Runs Wild, recorded mostly in the calm privacy of her apartment. Wild, the album in which the artist was finally received with some attention outside of her cultishly small fanbase, borrowed some of the influences heard on her collaborations with the Palominos, along with some of their guest session players (most notably Bill Laswell). A string of albums would follow, exploring various reaches of folk, pop, and electronica, and Carson remained musically active whilst still keeping a low profile and on the margins of commercial success.

If one were to reductively categorize each No-Man LP, Together We’re Stranger would be the duo’s “ambient” moment. Of course, past works by the duo certainly had their bouts of ambience; even the edgy industrial trip-hop of Wild Opera let in a few breathers (the spare piano ballad “Taste My Dream”). On Together We’re Stranger, however, Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson really let their compositions expand and flow. Part of this has to do with the origins of this music: as Bowness notes, the album initially began when Wilson sent him snippets of his work under the Bass Communion name (in particular the track “Drugged” from the self-titled debut). From there, Bowness sang atop Wilson’s ambient soundscapes; this is what led to the creation of the title cut of this LP. In the 28 minute opening suite, ambience is very much the name of the game; though the crescendo of “All the Blue Changes” incorporates many different musicians, its emphasis is still texture and space, two of the key themes present in Wilson’s experiments as Bass Communion.

With the last three and especially the last two tracks on Together We’re Stranger, No-Man returns to verse/chorus structure. The bipartite epic “Photographs in Black and White” is least conventional of these three; “Back When You Were Beautiful” and “The Break-Up for Real”, in contrast, find this English twosome going back to conventional formats. This isn’t to say that Wilson and Bowness phone it in for the latter half of this record, far from it. “Back When You Were Beautiful”—one of the finest things to emerge from Bowness’ pen—is just as heart-rending as anything in the opening suite, and instrumentation-wise it marks some of the most creative arrangements ever heard from this duo.

Mendelsohn: I just realized that after the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, we won’t be talking about another Rolling Stones record for the next several years. I’m a little saddened by that, Klinger. The Stones have been such a fixture on the Great List that you can’t spit at the Top 100 without nearly hitting one of their records. Plus, as rockers go, the Mick and Co. don’t shy away from the nitty gritty and I like that. Aftermath, however, is a bit tamer than, say, Sticky Fingers, but I guess for a record released in 1966 it was probably as shocking as they come. Right off the bat though, I notice that the first four songs deal strictly with the fairer sex. “Mother’s Little Helper” is an indictment of housewife drug abuse (talk about the pot calling the kettle black), “Stupid Girl” is a derisive sendoff to women with “Under My Thumb” coming in a close second, while “Lady Jane” is probably the sappiest love ballad the Stones have ever recorded. I’m sensing a little sexual frustration. So I guess I can see where they album would speak to the socially inept music nerd.