As part of the evolution of our editorial structures for Volume 6 we were delighted to be able to establish a post on our Editorial Board for a representative of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA). We hoped to support the ICMA in a fruitful way, and I am now delighted once again to be able to announce that Organised Sound will be devoting its third issue annually to an ICMA theme and the work of the association's members (from Volume 7 Number 3). We hope that this will provide an additional dissemination vehicle for the organisation, allow its conference papers to be developed and expanded, provide an opportunity to publish work based upon the ICMA special interest groups and the association's affiliates. A representative of the ICMA will become a Guest Editor alongside the Organised Sound team of Editors and international referees for the third issue in each year.

K-k-k-k-k-k. Boof. Chhhhhhh. Hiss, whirr, pfing: 12k's is an onomatopoeic music. The audio equivalent of concrete poetry perhaps, where the sign (there, a letter or a word; here, a click or thud or tone) is elephantised, blown out of proportion, simultaneously stripped of reference and fraught with multivalent meaning. (Is it any coincidence that 12k founder Taylor Deupree is a graphic designer? You can almost hear the flip of a serif in 12k's grainy whoosh, or the nuzzling of kiss-kerned type in the cool brush of two bleeps.) In the releases of this Brooklyn label, notes, pulses, textures bear no immediate relation to the world around them, to a language of melody or tonal narrative, but in their careful melding of pulse and grain, they sketch an abstracted narrative of the development of several phenomena: electronic music, desktop DIY, and -especially -minimalism.

In this article Thaemlitz posits that the current state of digital audio production's borders are not determined by battles between academia and the marketplace, subsidy and enterprise, nor high-brow and low-brow. However, such binarisms continue to frame our efforts in ways which fuel rhetoric of transformation and revolution, while diffusing our material ability to impact a cultural mainstream. Rather than attempting to resolve such divisiveness and hypocrisy in our behaviour, Thaemlitz proposes an increased awareness of the cultural processes which facilitate our simultaneous participation in such seemingly irreconcilable arenas. In other words, celebrating diversity sometimes means throwing a party for a friend you are not particularly fond of.

The Spring sunshine makes the blind a perfect glowing square, clearly much later than the twenty-three minute duration of the live recording I set in motion, as I lay on my friend's bed alone, drunk on vodka and tonic and giddy with big city kicks after the very . . . Manhattan evening I was taken on. It was dark, I was too full of it to take the subway back to Brooklyn, I remember the cab ride over the bridge, no dog to greet me as I unlocked the heavy steel door. I was laughing at Alan Vega complaining about not being allowed to smoke, there was booing . . . ‘Frankie Teardrop’ had been glitching over Brussels for hours.

When we ask what noise is, we would do well to remember that no single definition can function timelessly - this may well be the case with many terms, but one of the arguments of this essay is that noise is that which always fails to come into definition. Generally speaking, noise is taken to be a problem: unwanted sound, unorganised sound, excessively loud sound. Metaphorically, when we hear of noise being generated, we understand it to be something extraneous. Historically, though, noise has just as often signalled music, or pleasing sound, as its opposite. In the twentieth century, the notion of a clear line between elements suitable for compositional use (i.e. notes, created on instruments) and the world of noises was broken down. Russolo's ‘noisy machines’, Varèse and Satie's use of ostensibly non-musical machines to generate sounds, musique concrète, Cage's rethinking of sound, noise, music, silence . . .

Milch is taken from Nicolai's first solo exhibition in the UK (shown in 2001) and is a special commission for Milch's industrial space. The minimal installation is a repetition of the same groups of objects four times over. There is a CD and amplifier connected to four 9″ speaker cones by thick coils of black cable. A shallow 2 × 1 m tray containing water is placed on top of the speaker cones and sonic frequencies constantly stretch and bend the water's molecules. The surface shifts from absolute flatness through spirographic swirls to geometric grids, effects which are recorded in a series of photographs hung around the gallery.

This article attempts to place the dynamic of popular electronic music, evident since the late 1970s and extending to the current situation, at the forefront of developing both a strategy of critique and a medium for critical reflection. The genres covered include electronic music in and around the time of punk rock, subsequent moves to the forcing ground of pop music with the era of synth-pop, the dynamic upheavals created through the surging form of techno, up to the prevalent genres of micro-sound and electronica. The essence of both the body of critique formulated by the music, and the critical reflection of such critique (as developed in works when a genre of music is said to have ‘passed’) is not pinned to a rigid model of assessment. Instead, the strength of popular music's ability to strategise and conduct a critique is considered in the self-same music's ability to subvert the definition and ‘metric spaces’ of critique as accumulated through previous genres.

The label Mille Plateaux focuses on concepts like virtuality, noise, machinism and digitality. In the most simple case, digital music simulates something that does not exist as a reality; it generates something new. It is the result of the teamwork of numerous authorities such as the 'musician', the programmer and the authority of the software program. Today, computer digital music can be seen as screen-based music, i.e. sounds become visible and images audible, but one can often forget that there is no mutual correspondence; and that this is simply a mechanism whereby a given program secretly directs the programmer towards significant ways of performing, creating apparently absolute relationships between image and sound. On the other hand, with the increasing complexity of software, the programmer loses insight into internal communication structures. Such complex programs are full of errors and can even act on their own initiative. Programmers and musicians who navigate through today's systems function as designers. But this is less a question of the design of a program's operation surfaces but of the programming of software and the navigation by its logic. One has to discuss the medial conditions of digital music, the more user-friendly the software, the less transparent is the medium itself; i.e. the more transparent the functions of a computer or a synthesizer (say, with the use of preset sounds), the stronger the medium proves to be non-transparent. Digital music is more about opening up given program structures; internal ramifications and program hierarchies are to be discovered.

Complete Listing for Volume 6