"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

Derek Walmsley journeys through the new worlds sketched out by jazz from the mid-1950s onwards

"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

The Argentinian guitarist on performing with musicians with learning difficulties and what they bring to the experimental music scene

Copenhagen's experimental online radio station The Lake points to some sources of adventurous sound emissions

"Is there some synergistic link between UK improv and comedy? To the headphone-clad listener deeply immersed in an AMM album, the answer might be no. To the audience chuckling at an Alan Tomlinson trombone solo, it’s clearly yes."

"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

Flute player and pastoral electronics producer Katie English shares online and offline sources of inspiration

"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

Join Derek Walmsley on his journey through the jazz that imagined liberation through distant places and spaces, from Africa and the Far East to the cosmos.

Derek Walmsley picks six columns from our archives by Kodwo Eshun in which the future Turner Prize nominee forged a new style of writing about dance music and club culture

Clive Bell ponders the fragmented London music audience

Derek Walmsley journeys through the jazz that imagined liberation through distant places and spaces

Biba Kopf guides us through some of his Round Up The Usual Suspects columns from the 1980s, in which industrial culture's most wanted were tagged and bagged

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™

Films on experimental music need to nuance the relationship between sound and image in order to communicate emotion and provide a true cinematic rendering of their subjects, says Stewart Morgan

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