• Fiona Garden
• Flux Pavilion

As one of the purveyors of the wobbly and staticky glitch sound known as dubstep, Flux Pavilion's contributions to contemporary electronica cannot be denied. And with dubstep's dominance in today's mainstream music scene, it's not surprising that his music recently caught the ears of Jay-Z and Kanye West, resulting in the use of his song "I Can't Stop" on last summer's Watch the Throne album. Working on an album of his own for release next summer, Flux Pavilion returns to Atlanta this weekend after a performance last June at the Quad. This time the Circus Records co-founder will be rocking a more expansive stage at the Tabernacle. As the U.K. favorite prepares for this tour, he takes a moment to talk about the Kanye/Jay-Z thing, dubstep's overwhelming popularity and his last show in Atlanta.

Flux Pavilion with Terravita and Brown & Gammon. $30-$42. 9 p.m. May 26. The Tabernacle, 152 Luckie St. 404-659-9022. www.liquified.com. www.tabernacleatl.com.

You're probably best known for your contributions to the current dubstep movement. As someone who has been responsible for helping create this movement, what do you think are some of the main reasons dubstep has exploded into the mainstream so much over the past couple of years?

Not only have the 25-year psych-rock icons been busy with these collaborations, but according to leader Wayne Coyne, he and fellow Lips songwriter Steven Drozd have come up with a new album and a sound they like to call "heroin new wave." While Coyne recognizes the hyperbole, he feels it's one of the most personal, cohesive, and perhaps best sets of music they've ever created. On the eve of headlining Atlanta's Party in the Park, Coyne spoke about the thrill of working with these artists and how it helped seed the new album, expected for a fall 2012 release.

Party in the Park. With Flaming Lips, Young the Giant, Awolnation, Dawes, Ponderosa. $25-$75. 3 p.m.-11 p.m. Sat., May 19. Centennial Olympic Park. ticketalternative.com.

How did all these series of collaborations get started?

Wayne Coyne: During the record that came out in 2009 (Embryonic) we were in the studio with our producer Dave Fridmann and he had been working with MGMT. We'll sometimes come up with these songs that we would say, "Wouldn't we be cool if, like, MGMT could sing on this?" And then lo and behold, we called them up, they say yeah. We're working in New York and getting done about midnight. We email it to them. They're working in L.A. building a bonfire in the studio, and taking drugs all night, and we wake up next morning and they've helped us do a track... Over half the things we've done, these are just people I've still never met. Like Justin Vernon from Bon Iver. That's one of our great collaborations. I've texted with him probably 10,000 times. We've recorded things but I've never been in the same room. I've never actually seen him play up close

Now we just never shy away from anything. And I don't take no for an answer. I can tell you for certain — not everybody, but probably half of the people that are actually on the record, the first contact they said, "I can't do it." I'll keep trying and that's really the key. It's the key to any relationship really. You just need to keep saying, "This is fun, we can make this work." People with less experience — someone like a Yoko Ono — would say no. And you'd say, okay. I go, "Well, let's try again." And that's exactly what happens. Because I know from past experience that people say no a lot — they don't like getting into new things. I like getting into new things, so I say, "This will be great, let's keep trying." That just comes with doing it doing it and doing it.

I have heard from other musicians that collaborating with others, when you come back to the band it feels fresher.

• Ernest Greene of Washed Out

Time on the road as been a learning experience for Greene, and while making his way back to Atlanta with a mostly new band lineup in-tow, he's still planning his next move with Washed Out, all the while ruminating on the Internet's unruly ways, and how he's grown as a performer.

Washed Out. With Airbird, Dog Bite. $15. 9 p.m. Sat., May 19. Terminal West, 887 W. Marietta St., Studio C. www.terminalwestatl.com.

Chad Radford: So are you living in the city now, or are you still somewhere in the outlying communities?

Ernest Greene: Yeah, my wife and I have a house in East Atlanta — just a couple blocks from the Earl. We've been here for about a year now, I guess. I did most of the recording for the last record in Eatonton, Georgia on Lake Sinclair, but that’s been over a year now. We still feel pretty new to Atlanta. Everything is very spread-out, and I'm still wrapping my head around the different neighborhoods and stuff. We’re excited for the show coming up on the West Side at Terminal West. I haven't spent much time over in that part of town at all.

You're at a point now where the excitement surrounding Within and Without has tapered off. Are you playing new stuff these days?

We’re wrapping up our summer tour in Atlanta, and surprisingly enough, it's the first headlining tour we've done for this record. When it was released, we headlined a handful of shows here in Atlanta, New York, and a couple on the West Coast, but then went straight to Europe, did a bunch of shows there, then came back in the Fall for a tour with Cut Copy. I wrote a lot of this record with the live show in mind, but didn't have the experience to know how to pull it off. At this point, we've played the songs enough now, and I've changed things around enough to where, after a month of rehearsing, we're pretty comfortable with the songs.

Since it’s a headlining tour, we have more money to invest in the visual side of the things, which is important. It's hard to put on a really entertaining show when you're stuck behind a synthesizer — in a rock band with guitars and everything, you're free to move around, and for the audience it makes a more entertaining show. But when you're playing soundscape synth music, any kind of visual effects really help. So that’s something new, and I'm hoping that by the time we get to Atlanta, we'll have our shit together, and it'll be a better performance than anything we’ve done here previously.

A little more than a month ago, California-based soul songstress Sy Smith released her latest CD: Fast and Curious. Since dropping the acclaimed album, she — along with her frequent collaborator musician/producer Zo! — has been on the road, performing tunes from the new project (and probably a few old ones as well) at venues across the nation. This weekend (May 5 to be exact) Smith and Zo are slated to bring the tour to Apache Café — and one track we’re hoping she unleashes onstage is her version of Billy Ocean's 1981 dance classic “Nights (Feel Like Gettin' Down).”

Back in March, we actually chatted with Smith about her remake (a duet she does with Rahsaan Patterson, which can be found on Fast and Curious) of Ocean’s dopest cut ever … and here’s what she had to say:

Creative Loafing: Listening to the new album, one song in particular I thought took a lot of balls to remake is “Nights” by Billy Ocean.

Sy Smith: Ha! Thank you! It did take a lot of balls, and I’m glad you recognized my balls!

• Bret Constantino (second from left) talks everything under the Sleepy Sun

When San Francisco psych rockers Sleepy Sun debuted in 2009 with Embrace, the band earned bear hugs from other well-established and burgeoning acts, including Arctic Monkeys and Black Angels. One connection they lost in the process, however, was vocalist and sole female member Rachel Fannan, who up and quit in October 2010, right in the middle of the tour for Sun’s sophomore release, Fever. According to Rachel, her bandmates were "a very difficult group" to work with, she wrote in a statement that detailed elements of her volatile romantic relationship with vocalist Bret Constantino. Hell hath no fury, right?

Apparently Constantino hasn’t missed those boy/girl harmonies too much, because he handled the vocal duties on his own for the third album, Spine Hits, which dropped April 10 via The End. The result is one of focus: Jams have been slimmed down to a minute or so, and there’s no trace of Rachel to be found. We did, however, find Constantino in the middle of Sleepy Sun’s current tour, and for the first time he told his side of the story regarding the whole Rachel debacle: why he was intimidated by her talent, why it's been easier without her, and why it's still a difficult matter for him to articulate. Constantino also opened up about the emotionally-draining characters he created for Spine Hits, and the book he's gonna bury himself in the next time he's sitting on a porch in Atlanta with his beverage of choice.

Sleepy Sun. With White Hills, Sleepy Genes. $10. 9p.m. Fri., April 27. 529, 529 Flat Shoals. 404-228-6769. http://www.529atl.com/

So this is the first record since Rachel left. How has it been without her?

Bret Constantino: Oh it's been a little bit easier, to be frank. It's also a challenge. It's a challenge in the sense that we're — [sighs] — I don't know. There's a lot of people talk, you know? People liked Rachel a lot, and we liked Rachel in the band, too. It's been sort of skewed as far as what the band is about. It's always been this line-up, the creative process hasn't changed that much. Umm, it's good. It's forced me to step up my game a little bit. I've been a much better singer since she left. I was very intimidated by Rachel — and her talent. She'd always tell me, “You're not singing!” Always giving me shit, [saying] I'm not singing on key, and I'd say “I'm just tired.”

You sing the same melodies for sixty days in a row and you sort of forget what you're actually doing. But then you also develop this psychology like, “What does this mean what we're singing?!” It's so weird to sing the same thing over and over again. But it got kind of exhausting for both of us. It was a strange relationship. But I ran into her- we didn't talk for almost like a year and a half. We were in L.A. staying with some friends and Rachel came up to the van [and said] “Hey!” [and] gave me a hug. It was the first time I'd seen her since she left the tour, you know? And that was almost two years ago. And so things are fine, you know. I think, I don't know, maybe I'm happy with the way things have gone because I've learned so much from her and the relationship that we had.

What did you learn from her?