The main room upstairs is throbbing with the ceaseless bass of house music, that four-to-the-floor boom-boom-boom-boom that has been dance music's go-to sound for ages. The tourists are into it, as are the curiously made-up girls from New Jersey and the few lady-slaying sailors in town for Fleet Week. There's a big-room purposefulness to the music upstairs, a workhorselike aspect to its time-tested thump. It's the kind of music people want when they drop $20 every now and then to do the dance-club thing.

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Alongside Oasis, Elastica, Pulp and Blur, Radiohead were one of five candidates to head up the so-called British Invasion of the 1990s, and if Blur's Damon Albarn isn't choking on his press cuttings right now, I for one will be surprised. Like Blur, Radiohead took one look at "success" and decided to rewrite the rule book.

Think about it. Elastica? Six years to follow up their debut album, and they come back with ... more of the same. Pulp? The inspiration for a thousand sad bedroom soliloquies have been silent for over two years. Oasis? Their implosion was as ugly as it was predictable. Only Blur and Radiohead have lasted the course; and their tactics, like U2 before them, consisted of following up a brace of smash-hit records with a barrage of dirty, spaced-out noise.

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Electronic music's soft spot for shoptalk has never been its sexiest attribute. While hardcore devotees get all philosophical about the genre's relationship with technology, detractors write the whole thing off as a soulless dalliance between programmers and their machines. No matter your allegiance, it's hard to get too wrapped up in the music's post-human mystique while flipping through dance magazines made fat by ads for the newest decks and effects.

Still, all forms of electronica owe a good bit of their conceptual subtext to process. In terms of expressed intent, it's what separates dance-floor techno from mindless disco, and ambient experimentation from the New Age.

Oval's Markus Popp has built his whole career out of toying with the notion of process. When his landmark "Systemisch" album hit the racks in 1996, its twisted, ambient mix of skipping CD sounds and slow-rolling static exposed the entire techno template by freeing it from its musical duties. Thin, brittle click tracks worked to mark time and meter, but not in a way that had any real rhythmic presence. Similarly, any recognizable features from the traditional ambient soundscape were notable more for their almost narrative shifts than their suggestions of melody. Popp was undoubtedly working in the realm of "music," but he seemed more concerned with exposing the limitations of the term than acknowledging its accepted role as a medium.

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Just in case her thigh-high schoolgirl skirts and navel-on-parade routines are too subtle, Britney Spears asserts that she's "not that innocent" on her new single, "Oops! ... I Did It Again." As a don't-go-there anthem from teenie pop's most forbidden fruit, the song makes for a sweetly sadistic companion piece to the masochism lite lurking beneath her debut, "... Baby One More Time." "It might seem like a crush, but it doesn't mean that I'm serious," sings the cattier Britney 2000.

Yet even as she invites her would-be suitor to talk to the hand -- "I'm a goob magnet, man," she told Cosmo Girl magazine -- she rubs up against her words, crossing her tease and batting her eyes with arched-back growls and cool space-kitten purrs. Sung so suggestively, a line like "To lose all my senses/That is just so typically me" comes off less as a lamentable self-realization than as a lip-licking appeal to the sordid powers of imagination. And in spite of its exclamation point, her hardhearted cry of "Oops!" sounds more like a conscienceless dismissal than a conscious apology.

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Andy Battaglia: Digging into Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" means grappling with the shadowy realms of alchemy and black magic. If mindful folk music collided with mindless rock 'n' roll to form a sort of perfect storm in the '60s, then Smith was without a doubt the mystic rainmaker. When his original three-volume "Anthology" was released in 1952 it gave the folk scene a swift kick in the jeans by exposing strumming idealists to what Greil Marcus called the "old, weird America." From the collection of rural shakedowns, murder ballads and possessed hymns of the '20s and '30s came Bob Dylan, who tired of folk's insularity and traveled rockward to move the people, change the world, etc.

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Green's power as a gospel singer, heard again and again on "Greatest Gospel Hits," begins with his history as one of the consummate soul men of the 1970s. As he poked around R&B's G spot, his holy trinity had more to do with sex, love and desire than fathers, sons and holy spirits. His quintessential soul hit, "Let's Stay Together" (1972), was an earthy opera delivered at an overwhelmingly sensual pitch. But even when his libretto was heavy on libido, his voice sounded as if it was searching for resolution well beyond mere earthly delights.

Green's relationship with gospel has always been a stormy one. At 18, he was thrown out of his own family's gospel group when his God-fearing father caught him listening to a Jackie Wilson record. (So secular!) Years later, after his remarkable success on the soul circuit and much wrangling over conflicted allegiances to both Saturday night and Sunday morning, he turned back to his religious roots.

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The matter of age pokes at Oasis' fourth studio album, "Standing on the Shoulder of Giants," like a needling young punk ready to write off the band as gray and gone. It's a strange matter to raise about a band that released its first album in 1994, but pop music moves fast, especially at the grand level Oasis tries to operate on. Given their self-aggrandizing histrionics, brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher would look silly the day they fail to be at least a candidate for biggest band in the world. Even if it could be argued that such a day came and went after the underwhelming "Be Here Now" (1997), the same result applies even more so when Oasis starts to sound like the parents of kids who don't know the Stone Roses from the Big Bopper.

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It's a sustained conversation that hears subtlety as giddy screams -- and one that helps the new album sound both exactly like and not at all related to any Yo La Tengo record before it. The familiar reference points are all there: Ira Kaplan's guitar dramas, Georgia Hubley's finessed drumming, James McNew's loudly understated bass, the trio's shared wistful vocals. But cast in a newly consistent atmosphere -- all lazy dusks and distant, cotton-pulled cloud masses -- they articulate more than the band has ever attempted to translate.

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Underlying that spirit, though, is a conflict over the importance of the music's dance roots. Fans of the unfortunately named IDM (Intelligent Dance Music; ugh) consider danceability a sort of blight on their new language, while dance-floor populists dismiss the former as obnoxiously cerebral and pretentious.

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That Stockhausen pulled off the project is, in the very least, staggering. (As is what it says about the supremely cool state of European arts funding.) But more shocking is how well the, uh, high concept pays off in purely musical terms. The piece certainly benefits from the novelty of its crazed ambition -- and the winsome image of baffled pilots staring at a color-coded flight chart/musical score -- but "Helicopter String Quartet" resonates even more for its peculiarly nimble pairing of man with machine.

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Of course, none of the above is true. Or rather it is, in a sense, but expert musicians and casual listeners alike will tell you that what comes out of the blues form is altogether different than what goes down on paper. Musicologists talk about "blue" notes and diminished chord structures in tracing the music's evolution, but they're also the first to point out that blues announces itself as blues on its own terms.

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In the hip-hop world, where beat-writing producers share star status with rappers, Fresh is the foundation of the Cash Money franchise. Harking back to the days when a central figure presided over the proprietary sounds created by in-house record label teams (Booker T. & the MG's at Stax, Willie Mitchell at Hi, Berry Gordy at Motown, to name a few), Fresh's good-time mix of Southern electro bounce has given Cash Money a string of chart hits and a bank account to back up the name.

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This is the main knock on Korine as a filmmaker. While his supporters see tailor's marks behind his tattered on-screen images, his detractors argue that they're nothing but empty gestures. As for Korine himself, he says his visions are the result of putting different elements in place and, like a chemist, making sense of their explosions after the fact.

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Save for a few raucous numbers on the Foo Fighters' "There Is Nothing Left to Lose," Grohl has grown out of his punk past and moved closer to the realm of the singer-songwriter. Armed now with a guitar and lead vocal duties, he's staking claim to a more casual presence. Though the dated sound that marks Nirvana's rock residency today speaks more to the almost terrifying rapidity of pop culture's powers of assimilation than to the band's original noise, it certainly has been aided by the band's sudden and tragic disappearance.

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For the High Llamas, music is a gilded artifact to be venerated for its most elemental qualities -- harmony and melody. These are self-evident means to a musical end, but in the hands of such deliberate artisans, harmony and melody serve more as finishing tools than hammers and nails. If Phil Spector was building from the ground a wall of sound, the High Llamas are hard at work fashioning its decorative molding.

"Snowbug" shows the Llamas servicing much the same style they've plied since their beginnings in 1991. But whether by sheer force of time or some tick of measurable progress, it has become harder to cast off the group as just placeholders in the long line of Beach Boys fetishists. (The band's mastermind, Sean O'Hagan, was once approached to work with Brian Wilson on a since-aborted project.)

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A bold line separates the two disks of "Woodstock 99." Maybe with a cheeky nod to the Beatles' hits collections, they are referred to as the "Red Album" (for our purposes, the flame) and the "Blue Album" (as suitable a color for hydrogen as any). As postcards from the land of ceaseless sweat and $4 water, they deliver disparate messages: One says something along the lines of "Fuck you! And you, too!"; the other, "Honey, I've met some of the most interesting people here."

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This weekend, at a Q&A session at downtown Manhattan's Anthology Film Archives, Korine's mother raised her hand with a question for the speaker -- Harmony's father Sol. "I just want to know how you think your work influenced Harmony," she asked. A charmingly humble Sol Korine laughed. "Oh, I don't want to talk about that," he said. Harmony, seated in a row up front, turned to his mother in melodramatic sheer horror. His red-faced look and rolling eyes said something along the lines of "Maaa-om!" It was a tender moment.

And a surprising one, taking into account Harmony's reputation as anything but bashful. Asked to curate a series of films by an art house expecting the works of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard, Harmony Korine used the opportunity to come clean about his family by showing the films that his father made.

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The circus happening just outside the circus gearing up inside made one thing perfectly clear: For all its progress in methodically creating a new cultural language, electronica still knows how to stage a good old-fashioned spectacle. This was reassuring throughout the course of the night, because while the music's language can be fascinating to hear, it resonates with little more than a markedly unsubtle command to "Dance! Dance! Dance!" when spread out over more than four hours of opening and headlining acts. Selectively whittled down to snippets, though, it made for some interesting conversation. Like that carried on by two young teenagers bounding into the theater during DJ Paul Oakenfold's opening set. The boy, his head all but completely swallowed up by his oversized hood, heard a sound drifting through the doorway and turned toward his girlfriend. "No shit!" he said, before curling his mouth. "Diiiiuurrrrrr, niiuuuurrr, ruuuiir," he muttered, presumably "singing" along with what seemed to be his favorite song. Maybe even "their" song. He put his arm around her shoulders. Her eyes lit up. She smiled. They'd just had one of those moments.

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From either direction, Sukpatch's "Tie Down That Shiny Wave" -- the band's first for the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label -- is a boundless pleasure thanks to its allegiance to both camps. Breezy as only an 18-minute EP can be, it may be this fall's best summer record.

Tape-loop and beat literate, Chris Heidman and Steve Cruze know their way around trip-hop's lethargic come-hither nature. But their sounds have a kitchen sink-type charm that recasts that style's darkly suggestive pull as a playfully innocuous tug. Sukpatch is more concerned with pop music's ephemeral levity than with electronic music's tendency toward purposeful precision.

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