Interviews

Of the all free spirits making up New York’s downtown artistic nexus, pianist Matthew Shipp has come closest to finding the superchord that will blast conventional harmonies wide open. By Howard Mandel.

On the streets and in the subways of New York, the spirit of black free jazz lives on in the music of a few true believers – musicians like Charles Gayle; homeless, neglected but still burning with the passion to be free. By Howard Mandel.

Earlier this year, Radio 3 sent a package of tapes to Karlheinz Stockhausen. The tapes contained music by Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner and Daniel Pemberton. Then in August, the station’s reporter Dick Witts travelled to Salzburg to meet Stockhausen and ask him for his opinion on the music of these four “Technocrats”. But first, they talked about the Geman composer’s own youthful experiments in electronic synthesis…

Digital composer Yasunao Tone's paramedia assault on old paradigms has led him from Tokyo to New York, via Japanese Fluxus pranks, work with Merce Cunningham and Yoko Ono, and destabilising CDs with Scotch tape

A decade ago, Kathleen Hanna's Bikini Kill heralded the days of rage that led to Riot Grrrl, one of the few 90s movements that felt like punk actually happened. Now, Hanna's new trio Le Tigre (and side projects ranging from plunderphonic IDM to conceptual art stunts) are spearheading a rapidly spreading network of feminist flavoured electropunk while defining new parameters for politicised noise in their search for an electronique feminine. Words: Joy Press. Photos: Jake Walters

Who are the robed figures in pixie caps who travel the globe singing space-songs? Does their leader really come from planet Saturn? And were ancient Egyptian sun priests the first jazzmen? Graham Lock sets the controls for the heart of the Sun Ra cosmos

Roll over Beethoven, it's Vorsprung Durch Technik time! The most visionary - and least understood - of modern European composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen talks to Brian Morton about the 'time bombs' he has created to escape from the 'graveyard' of the Western classical tradition

Are Stereolab the perfect pop group? By combining a rigorous DIY aesthetic with a playful reverence for the arcane relics of musics past, they have managed to make a reality out of that most elusive of notions: experimental music that actually sells

Exotic Easy Listening, analogue Techno, martial arts movies, Bollywood soundtracks, Tex Avery cartoons, cult TV, New York Improv - David Shea samples the lot. Report by Clive Bell

So you thought Royal Trux were a pair of strung-out rock 'n' roll junkes? Wise up. From their remote Virginia ranch, avant garage's First Couple are astutely playing the media and the stock market. Words: Louise Gray