Sound 42 succeeds in making a cross-section of new and often unfamiliar music sound intimate and feel personal. After all, there’s no way to present the newest music from every corner of the globe without having a lens, a viewpoint, some criterion for selection. This sort of filter is often unstated but clearly detectable. (For BBC Radio 1xtra, for instance, there is a certain politics of representation that goes into creating a sonic analog of post-imperial Britain. The result looks like programming blocks that correspond to certain…
