Those keen on synthesizer acts Free Choice Duo, Matthew Brown and Hochman and Hopkins will appreciate Brooklyn's Oneohtrix Point Never; one Daniel Lopatin, who similarly deals in ululating tone fields, but with added science fiction ice and eeriness. Lopatin moves DIY trend-interests in 70s space mysticism towards more 80s-tinged, isolate territories in which the overall feeling is less of cosmic peace than of alien unknowing - Zones Without People, as one album is named, cut with dark, Tokyo-skyline type sublimity.

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Mimicry and facsimile reproduction are common and heavily coded devices in gallery art but not traditionally in music, where ‘rip-offs' and ‘copyists' are often exactly that and rightly derided for it. Band rooms aren't used to 'reading' performers, or guessing they need to - though this is changing fast - so arty appropriation-play and contextualised copying usually goes over brilliantly, as ‘crazy', when intended (Bowie, Ariel Pink) and awfully, as ‘derivative', when it's not (Interpol, Luke Steele).

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Love of Diagrams' third album gives more away of the band personally than we've heard before at the same time as burying their new, intimate sleights in virtuosic geyser-blasts of instrumental anaesthetics. This most beloved of Melbourne groups speak memories of cornerstone rock-reflective feelings - euphoric meltdown, blurred recognition, bottled emotions bursting as melody and time-warping, repetitive rhythms - of being literally 'Nowhere Forever'; caught in a mirrored room of tremolo and scourging self-knowing effacement; close as possible to wall-of-sound heaven.

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For a time in the early 2000s, Baltimore's Ryan Kidwell was the most innovative figure in electronic music, both as aliased producer Cex and co-founder of the Tigerbeat6 label: home to Kid606, Electric Company and others helping define now-commonplace ‘glitch' editing styles and mash-up sampling technique.

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New Zealand's The Bats are mild-mannered, look-off music epitomised, and twenty-six year veterans of the art. Their influence, and that of the famed 'Dunedin sound' with which the band's members are variously associated, casts its unmistakable shadow over all late style 'indies' - from Superchunk to Panel of Judges - both in terms of their inviolate, post-Velvets under-playing and definitive expression of this music's end feeling: a contradictory, dreamy mixture of disenchantment and pleasure at once, sustained over and again in same-but-different songs without ever resolving the contradiction between the two.

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Wigging, frontiers-wide and triple-smoked instrumental brilliance from New York-defectors Blues Control on their third and most accessible album to date, Local Flavor (sic). While second passes at the best of exploratory music from the 70s is mode default for American bands right now - Wooden Ships, Endless Boogie, Emeralds - this Virginia duo go further with the notion of Eno's best German work (specifically Bowie's 'Warszawa') than you'd believe possible: compressing its reedy sci-fi tones with the lessons of today's underground pop; anti-ostentation, pummelling repetition and deliberate mis-registration of signature historical sounds.

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In the game of who is Melbourne's finest art-hardened, ex-pat musician - of who best represents our internationalist lust for experimental pop-art success - favourites Nick Cave, the Liars and HTRK all spectacularly lose to J.G. Thirwell, aka Foetus. Since immigrating to London in 1978, Thirwell has worked unceasingly and never far from the centre of exciting music - from late '70s London's Swell Maps and synth groups, Lydia Lunch and Swans' '80s New York rock underground, Industrial production during the '90s and more recently soundtrack projects for the Cartoon Network and solo as Steroid Maximus.

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