Snatching cohesion from the jaws of chaos can't be as easy as Andi Toma and Jan St Werner of Mouse on Mars make it sound on Idiology. Their weirdly off-kilter brand of skittery, IDM song-craft always depends on uncommonly interesting melodies, even while those melodies swim in digitised madness. It's a trait that also shows up with a vengeance in Werner's other band, Microstoria (with Oval's Markus Popp). Most shockingly, with their recent work, Werner's penchant for tuneful warmth and relentless experimentation have led the band to-get this-use actual instruments. MoM's last proper full-length, Niun Niggung (the late-2000 release Instrumentals was originally released on vinyl in 1997), included ever-so-slight leans toward more acoustic instrumentation, and the music here continues to bring in occasional bits of French horns, clarinets, even the odd guitar chord. "The Illking", for instance, contains only the barest electronic morsels among the lazy lull of a lush string section. Still, the flipped-out drill-n-bass of songs like "First: Break" go the opposite direction, dissolving and re-emerging in Squarepusher-esque bursts of computerised sonics. Along the way, there are avant-garde(-ish) oddities such as "Unity Concepts" and the hyped-up beat salad "Doit", which sounds like carnival music as performed by malfunctioning robots. When all the pieces come together for Mouse on Mars, as they do on this release, it's a peculiar musical beast, but one that's still absolutely loveable. -Matthew Cooke.

This album is 26. 38 minutes of sonic, digital overload. Recorded at the end of a year long world tour fraught with psychosis, illness, drugs, legal problems and exhaustion, it features the electronic post-riot girrrl trio of Alec Empire, Carl Crack and German-Japanese noise goddess Nic Endo at their most intense. Amps overload, voices scream in distorted agony, Roland Space Echo's and Moog Prodigy's are pushed way beyond endurance. There is one track, no let up. The sheer density of the sound pulverises and polarises the audience into submission and aggression. Unrelenting, malevolent and oddly energising, Atari Teenage Riot's Live At Brixton Academy sees this Berlin-based punk/dance collective's sound taken to its logical extreme. -Jerry Thackray.

Unsavoury Products sees Parisian beat poet Black Sifichi illuminate the words of the original Dog, the reclusive Ken Downie's Book of Dogma, a tome of all things conspiratorial which takes in everything from the illuminati and Egyptology to musical academia and globalisation. As ex-Dog's Ed Handley and Andy Turner have enjoyed considerable success deconstructing the artificial intelligence movement as Plaid, so Downie drifted further and further into the outer limits of leftfield electronica. Downie and Sifichi prove ideal sonic sparring partners, with growling lyrical cut ups morphing into post-techno audio-the occasional flourish of brilliance drifting from the aural confusion, "Invisible Things" and "Someone at the Office" as irresistible as anything from the seminal Scanners or Bytes albums. It's inspirational. -Kingsley Marshall.

With more than two hours of music, this is a hard-core Orb experience. However, fans and newcomers alike should not be intimidated, because Live 93 offers coherent, wonderfully recorded versions of some of the band's greatest moments. Indeed, many of the tracks included here are even better than their album versions ("Towers of Dub," for example, is absolutely devastating). While no one has ever accused the Orb of condensing their music, the tracks here feel even less constrained by the notion of time. Free to wander up, over, and around the music, the Orb let no thought go unexplored. Bass lines rumble like tectonic plates, melodies echo and float gravity-free, and all the while samples drift in and out of view, as if "Dr. " Alex Patterson were scanning the universe with some jerrybuilt, deep-space radio. Tune in, turn on. [+]

The only thing wrong with Mancunian Jon Brooks, aka King of Woolworths is his ill-advised funny-funny choice of moniker. It doesn't prepare you for Ming Star's mood of sustained ambient noir. Brooks provides us here with that old ambient chestnut, the imaginary soundtrack, with the track "Bakerloo (Ma in Titles)" reprised as "Bakerloo (end Credits)". There are a number of electronic tone poems here to areas of London ("Kentish Town", "Kite Hill", "Theydon"), recalled through the grainy filter of nostalgia. However, these aren't wistfully fragrant musical recollections, a la St Etienne but shadowy and sinister ones. "Kentish Town", for instance, with its swelling, scratchy guitar chord approaching like a distant, giant wave, is shot through with a sense of indefinable menace, while "The Watchmaker's Hands", though based on some half-remembered Friday afternoon TV show from the 70s, is evocative but more reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe in its lurking chimes. "The Stalker Song" is more explicitly disturbing, with what sounds like Channel 5 police documentary tape of a police counsellor advising a victim. Comparisons with Air frequently spring to mind but there's something nasty in this particular air. It's chill-out music that gives you the shivers. -David Stubbs.