Baltimore’s Maurice Fulton is a man of many guises. The ex-pat producer - currently living in Sheffield - has just released his second album as Syclops: an ambitious blending of live and electronic sounds released under the aegis of a fictitious three-piece band. A Blink Of A Eye is a robust affair, showcasing the producer’s taste for hard-edged, futuristic machine funk and knotty jazz fusion.

But Syclops is far from Fulton’s only outlet. In a career spanning 15 years and innumerable aliases, the famously publicity-shy producer has touched on practically all corners of house music and beyond. If there’s been a recurrent feature of Maurice Fulton records - aside from those irresistibly chunky rhythms - it’s a knack for reframing pop for the club environment. In Fulton’s hands, so-so songs become dancefloor dynamite, their formerly-forgettable melodies recast as rallying cries for dancers across the underground - a fact best illustrated by his 2006 remix of Alice Smith’s ‘Love Endeavour’.

It’s this approach that Fulton draws on for his version of ‘The Fall’, the lead single from maudlin LA Soulsters Rhye. As usual, Fulton’s remix is streets ahead of the original, replacing the dreary politesse of its piano-and-drums arrangement with steely synth bass tones and a mean disco thud, while the vocal takes on a newfound sultry eroticism. After 15 years in the game, it seems Fulton’s magic touch is far from diminished.

A Blink Of A Eye is out now on Fulton’s own Bubbletease label.

The Invisible - the brainchild of Jessie Ware collaborator Dave Okumu - represent an interesting development in the dialogue between contemporary British jazz and the pop world. The trio have released music through Accidental Records, the label run by Matthew Herbert - whose own jazz-electronic hybrids were a highlight of the last decade. All three members have a jazz background, and bassist Tom Herbert is also a member of Polar Bear, whose playful, fearsomely intelligent mongrel music earned them a large crossover audience in the mid noughties.

Of course, jazz musicians have a long and storied history of bringing their formidable chops to bear on pop music with disastrously overblown results. What sets these artists apart is not only the leftfield perspective that their unusual backgrounds afford them, but the lightness with which they wear their influences. The Invisible invite comparisons to Radiohead as much as anyone - there’s a similar ornate approach to chord progressions on display, and a subtle overriding angst - but their brand of expansive pop music has an appeal that’s distinctly their own.

The trio’s second album, Rispah, saw them adopt a more panoramic sound, with synths frequently drifting into the foreground. Its eponymous predecessor, though, feels like a purer proposition: this is smart, concise guitar-pop, draped with delicate curlicues of electronics and presided over by Okumu’s creamy vocals. The previously unheard ‘Into Me’, with its muscular kickdrum underpinnings and dense, gaseous piano lines, has been unveiled to mark the reissue of The Invisible later this month, with new remixes from Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, Micachu, Kwes and Matthew Herbert.

Jamie Lidell’s music has typically balanced impressive software-programming nous with a keen ear for retro soul revivalism. It’s far from an obvious combination, and has earned him a position alongside the likes of Clark and Squarepusher as one of Warp Records’ most distinctive voices. Love him or hate him, Lidell’s singular approach has enabled him to weather the endlessly mutating fad-scape of electronic music for over a decade - no mean feat in a world where few manage to survive beyond their fifteen minutes of fame.

Still, it’s never easy for the auteur. Isolated from a scene or overarching creative dialogue, it’s all too common for such artists to trail listlessly behind the zeitgeist, or else steadily disappear into their own aesthetic bubble. Tasters of Lidell’s self-titled fifth LP have, so far, been mixed. ‘What A Shame’ felt like a belated stab at the dubstep template, while ‘Why Ya Why’ was stumbling, steroidal Rhythm and Blues, playing New Orleans brass off against a glossy hip-hop chassis - pleasing enough, but nothing new from the singer-producer.

So, while nobody’s disputing Lidell’s knack for crafting an arresting hybrid, ‘You Naked’, in its tighter focus and finely tuned pop sensibility, comes as something of a relief. This is contemporary RnB with big ambitions, though its luscious synthetic arrangement owes a debt to the machine-pop template laid out in 80s New Jack Swing. As if confirming the influence, the video sees Lidell ditch the nostalgised 70s he’s known for in favour of a 1980s vision of the 21st century, a hyper-unreal world of sleek dayglo geometries.

Jamie Lidell is due for release through Warp Records on February 18.