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Forty tracks. Forty years. One song per year.

Episode 4 of 40 Years of Schoolin’ moves from 1950 to 1989 along less obvious routes — Cajun laments, Western swing, early avant-jazz, hi-fi futurism, teenage garage noise, folk pushed to breaking point, dub mutations, post-punk machinery and late-’80s DIY misbehaviour.

These are not canonical histories or greatest-hits shortcuts. Some of these records were widely heard; many barely travelled beyond their region, label, or moment. Taken together, they trace how music kept mutating anyway — through accident, obsession, cheap tape, stubborn belief and the occasional wrong turn that turned out to be right.

One year at a time.

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Forty tracks. Forty years. One song per year, reshuffled again.

Episode 3 moves from 1950 to 1989 by way of honky-tonk confessionals, jump-blues swagger, tape-loop miracles, devotional electronics, dub as architecture, and pop that accidentally invents the future. Some records were global hits, others barely escaped the room they were recorded in — but all of them say something about where music was, and where it was heading.

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Episode 2 keeps the music bicycle moving — forty songs, one for each year, 1950 to 1989.

This time it’s everything from Baltimore doo-wop to Ethiopian accordion soul, Cajun-surf hybrids to Scottish nutter pop.