Tom Waits
Barfly, beatnik, hobo, hipster, Weimar cabaret singer, Stallone co-star, Harry Partch fan: the chronicler of the American underbelly has been playing confidence games with his identity and music since the 70s. By Phil Freeman

Invisible Jukebox: Arthur Lee
Love's mainman and the orchestrator of Labour MPs' favourite album, Forever Changes, has a bummer in the summer trying to identify tracks by Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and more. Teted by Mike Barnes

William Parker
David Keenan goes into the mystic with the 'mayor or the Lower East Side' to hear how the bassist's channelling of the ancestral pulse has been the catalyst for the most vital free jazz of the last three decades

Lou Harrison
Wrestling his way out of the imprisoning straitjacket of Western tuning systems, the West Coast composer hears the chimes of freedom in a junkyard gamelan constructed out of automobile brake drums. By Philip Clark

Leif Elggren & CM Von Hausswolff
Magnus Haglund journeys to Elgaland-Vargaland for an audience with the Swedish conceptual sound artists whose meditations on the physicality of sound have attempted to redraw the map according to the logic of the cut-up

To Live & Shave In LA
David Keenan meets the philosophically savage personality of Tom Smith and samples his 'white trash electroacoustics'

Boom Bip
The Cincinatti producer bridges the divide between his HipHop past and his post-Hop present. By Philip Sherburne

Tchad Blake
The producer who has worked with Peter Gabriel, Los Lobos, Suzanne Vega and Tom Waits finds inspiration from the locals in Zimbabwe. By Richard Henderson

Global Ear
Marcus Boon finds changing times in Marrakech's Place of the Dead

Epiphanies
Biba Kopf goes daft for DAF and Les Liaisons Dangereuses

In Print
Edgard Varèse, by Alan Clayson; Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside The USA, edited by Tony Mitchell; Ring Of Fire: The Johnny Cash Reader, edited by Michael Streissguth

Cross Platform
Art and electronic music merge at the Pompidou Centre's Sonic Process exhibition, previewed at this year's Sonar Festival. By Anne Hilde Neset
Plus: Reviews of: Cybersonica; Crass: Killing Time

On Location
Sonar 2002, Barcelona CCCB/MACBA/Monjuïc 2, Spain; No Neck Blues Band + Sunburned Hand Of The MAn + Mountains of Matallama, Brattleboro Common Ground, USA; Peter Hammill, London Lyric Theatre, UK; Sounding The Margins: 70th Birthday Retrospective Celebration Of The Music Of Pauline Oliveros, San Francisco Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, USA; Mutek, Montréal Various Venues, Canada; LMC 11th Annual Festival of Experimental Music, London South Bank Centre, UK