If you’re in Manchester, go and see Hot Chip man turned solo balladeer Alexis Taylor at Band On The Wall.

If you’re in Sheffield, release that pent-up rage with The Amazing Snakeheads at Plug.

If you’re in Leicester, noisy post-rockers Eagulls offer a similar service at The Cookie.

And if you’re in London, helter-skelter improv comic Steen Raskopoulos starts his run at Soho Theatre.

Over in TV land, ITV are going up against the Apprentice juggernaut with, er, Spandau Ballet.

I’ll leave you with the new video for Bo Ningen’s noisy collab with Jehnny Beth from Savages. No forests in this one, but there is a bit of marshland for connoisseurs of desolate scenery. Night night.

Not really sure what the new Belle & Sebastian artwork is trying to say but I don’t think I’ll be ordering the print. Anyone able to enlighten me? The press release for the album mentions “vintage Detroit techno”. Be afraid…

In case you hadn’t registered the increasing frequency of tweets issuing from @BBCApprentice, Lord Sugar’s finger-pointy humiliation time is back tonight.

Last night’s Ten Years Of The Apprentice did a pretty good job of reminding us why the show has been essential viewing for most of its run. But the pre-release material for the new series makes me a little bit nervous. Once again, there’s a blatant undercurrent of selecting the most stupidly self-aggrandising candidates simply to slap them down, as evidenced by this painfully smug (yet officially sanctioned) clip which slaps them down BEFORE THE SHOW HAS EVEN STARTED.

In a similar same vein, an advance clip from tonight’s opening episode shows that always-excruciating scene in which the Amstrad Avenger rifles through the candidates CVs looking for tidbits with which to humiliate them. Let them string themselves up by all means. But if you’re seen to be holding the noose, it all gets a bit grubby.

No suggestion anywhere of new tasks or innovations to the “process”. I’ll be watching of course, though, hoping to be proved wrong.

Some indie music videos have been released today. As is the current vogue, they are both shot in slo-mo in a forest, presumably in the hope of transmitting an air of deep meaningfulness without having to portray anything very specific.

Having mentioned Wildbirds & Peacedrums in passing earlier, this is their brand new video for Keep Some Hope. Presumably there’s some kind of Garden Of Eden thing going on here, what with the apple and the snake. But mostly it just seems to be an excuse for the husband-and-wife duo to snog each others’ faces off. Get a room / log cabin!

The excellent Adult Jazz have also just issued a new video for Am Gone (my single of the week back in January). Bit of a Beckettian vibe to this one, as a man in stocks stumbles around helplessly before finally remembering he’s swallowed the key. Could have saved us all five minutes of drawn-out angst there.

If that’s whetted your appetite for slo-mo forest-based indie videos, here are some more recent examples to prove that it’s definitely a thing.

New Orleans rapper Jay Electronica is a bit of an enigma. Since bursting on to the scene in 2009 with a pair of stunning Just Blaze-produced singles, Exhibits A and C, he’s signed with Roc Nation, toured with namesake Jay Z and had a high-profile affair with a British heiress, but has yet to deliver an album.

And here’s another diversion: a trailer for a dreamlike, experimental movie featuring Jay E hanging out in the Himalayas.

Director Jason Goldwatch attempts to explain the movie but isn’t overly helpful TBH:

Jay Electronica is full of mystery, and like a magician, his character lends itself to new ways of seeing things that would seem impossible to many. Several years ago, Jay and I traveled to the other side of the Earth. We left a piece of ourselves there. In exchange, we brought back something entirely new, and the images that follow are a glimpse into that magic for everyone who’s curious.

Traveling across strange lands, we were invited to attend sacred ceremonies of sacrifice and parading celebrations of ancient descent. We trekked together towards the horizon and explored crowded monasteries, solitary mountain top temples, slums of filthy laughing children, and rivers running with blood and flower petals.

The experience in itself was a perfect circle. A question with no answers. Full of laughter and tears, but no love story or plot twists. We searched for absolute truth in life, and the only undeniable answer we found was death.

Into The Light is due out in early 2015. Jay Electronica’s album is not.

Veteran cartoonist Ralph Steadman has provided some typically manic caricatures of the Breaking Bad cast for a new Blu-Ray edition of the series.

Here’s Steadman on how he got pulled into the Breaking Bad universe:

I watched the Breaking Bad whole series in two weeks and now suffer withdrawal symptoms. At first, I thought ‘this series is going to be all about death and desecration,’ but instead became a more complex landscape of human relationships. I hope I put something of these feelings into the portraits that I made of the characters, which were landscapes in themselves. An irony in the subject of crystal meth is how beautifully it resembles the desert sky.

The limited edition “Blu-Ray Steelbooks” go on sale in April.

The nominees for this year’s Welsh Music Prize are out and among the usual (though always welcome) suspects, there are a few names that are new to me.

• 9 Bach - Tincian
• Cate Le Bon - Mug Museum
• Euros Child - Situation Comedy
• Future of the Left - How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident
• Gruff Rhys - American Interior
• Gulp - Season Sun
• Joanna Gruesome - Weird Sister
• Manic Street Preachers - Futurology
• Samoans - Rescue
• Slowly Rolling Camera - Slowly Rolling Camera
• The Gentle Good - Y Bardd Anfarwol
• The People The Poet - The Narrator

Let’s check them out together.

9 Bach are a Welsh language folktronica duo signed to Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. The way singer Lisa Jen’s voice is sometimes employed as another instrument reminds me a bit of Julia Holter or Sweden’s Wildbirds & Peacedrums.

Samoans are grungey alt-rockers from Cardiff. This song is really good – I like the way it periodically threatens to go mental, but doesn’t. Remember cult 90s Glasgow band AC Acoustics? No? Well it sounds a lot like them.

Slowly Rolling Camera make trip-hoppy soul with double bass to the fore, and as such can’t help but remind you of Red Snapper or Cinematic Orchestra. Very nicely done, but perhaps a bit too tasteful.

The People The Poet is my least favourite of the bunch. Fairly sure the world doesn’t need another Coldplay clone.

I’d probably give it to Gulp myself, but then I’m not Welsh so it’s really none of my business.

Ever since seeing the (fairy) light in Scrooged, Bill Murray has basically been Mr Christmas. So much so that this year he’s making a TV Christmas Special with his Lost In Translation director Sofia Coppola.

We’re going to do it like a little movie. It won’t have a format, but it’s going to have music. It will have texture. It will have threads through it that are writing. There will be prose. It will have a patina style and wit to it. It will be nice.

Added Coppola:

We’re working on a Christmas special. Not sure when it will air, but my motivation is to hear him singing my song requests.

I request Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer in the style of his karaoke rendering of What’s So Funny About Peace Love And Understanding.

…Nine-year-old Gabriel Evans bust out a pretty fierce rap about flatulence-inducing vegetables on BBC2’s The Kitchen last night. Click here and scroll to about 54:30.

“Brussel sprouts, yo, you’re my worst enemy / Eating you should be a felony.” Word.

Morning all. How do righteously furious rap duo Run The Jewels become even more righteously furious? By teaming up with Rage Against The Machine’s Zack De La Rocha, that’s how. Marvellously, the track is called Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck). If you’re not fully awake yet, you will be after this.