Ian Maleney visits a new interactive sound installation in Dublin, with contributions by David Blamey, FM3, Mattin, Sarah Pierce, Steve Roden, Wolfgang Voigt, Mark Peter Wright, Miki Yui and others

"As Big As The Sky is essentially a 21st century comedy of errors, an ideal genre to portray such a grotesque reality." Marinus de Ruiter attends a premiere of an opera eight years in the making

Robert Barry braves the unscheduled diversions of the London St Pancras to Margate line, upgrades his dumb-as-it-gets phone and listens to the composer's new app-based musical journey piece

Ceci Moss looks at an exhibition of the interdisciplinary art of Julia Heyward who came up in New York City’s thriving 1970s–80s downtown scene

If the world's only Tandy Deskmate computer music specialist Ben Zimmerman didn't exist, would nerds like Dan Lopatin have to invent him?

"I’m in hell now. Welcome to hell if you love it too." Yan Jun reports from the Land Of The Dragon on Makoto Kawabata, the Chinese Bureau of Culture and doomsday cults

"In the very early days, when all film came from the US, benshi could explain the projection technology and also mediate strange western customs to the Japanese audience." Clive Bell on the narration of silent cinema in Japan, the Burmese record industry and Ugandan Video Jokers

"When artists bring underground musical subcultures into seemingly more legitimate spaces, whatever their intentions, those subcultures are easily reduced to the merely symbolic."

"No one is saying anyone ought to sleep through music – just that you might as well make the best of it when the inevitable happens." Philip Clark on the pleasures of Francisco López, Bruckner and blindfolds

"Compositions based on data run the risk of sounding less interesting than the descriptions of the conceptual thought gone into their construction." Emily Bick journeys to the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research in Plymouth

"Today it’s almost impossible to think of music as anything other than immediately audiovisual." Robert Barry reads between the lines at a new exhibition about graphic scores

Clive Bell ponders the fragmented London music audience

Richard Thomas on minted petit-bourgeois pugilists, the end of year chart and the class politics of Black Friday

"The marketing narratives laid down by the likes of Red Bull and similar have helped beckon forth an enveloping haze of meaningless positivity, creating a world that’s happy yet contentless, adult but toothless." Nathan Budzinski assumes the lotus position, breathes deeply and becomes mindful of Eternal Bliss™

Yan Jun gets more questions than answers when he asks himself what happened in 2014

You read correctly: the sage Mr Bell buffs his crystal ball (well, his laptop screen), peers into the fogs of 2015 and sees double

Clive Bell on plunging one's head into a brazier of burning coals, playing for the angels and the legacy of Ostad Elahi, reclusive tanbour master

Philip Clark on JS Bach, Jimmy Lyons's ear for architecture and the poetic metaphor of the line

Yan Jun blows up knock-off speakers, bids Mother Nature farewell and embraces life and death in The Machine era

Clive Bell muses on the biwa as vehicle for Japanese epic, and finds parallels in Irish folk ballads and beyond