For more than a decade, Chris Corner has been treading the fine line between commercial pop and electronic experimentation. A tightrope-walk it surely is - but the synth auteur and explorer of the human unconscious has never once lost his balance. In the mid-Nineties, his hits with the Sneaker Pimps climbed the charts on both sides of the Atlantic; more recently, he's relocated to decadent Berlin and released dark, personal electropop albums under the name IAMX (a play, perhaps, on Becoming X, the title of the Sneaker Pimps bestseller?). The IAMX singles have been as irresistible as the Pimps's were - and the album tracks have been every bit as challenging, suggestive, synth-warped, and dramatic.

And Corner is no studio recluse, either. IAMX doubles as a ferocious live synthrock band that has featured members of Nemo and Robots In Disguise. Corner is an acrobatic and energetic frontman with a taste for provocative costuming, and his commanding stage presence - amplified by his outrageous makeup and accessories - has become a thing of legend among fans of ambitious electropop. In his characteristic top hat and black spangles, the IAMX singer cuts an unforgettable figure; this has, as you'd imagine, made him a natural for music video. His subject matter, too, is well-suited for video clips: Corner sings about alternative sexuality, mortality, obsession, chemical dependence, fashion, and lust. Notably, Corner shot two equally provocative clips for "Missile", the lead single from the IAMX debut; in the first, he lay naked in a bathtub, head submerged, with the words "help me" taped over his lips; in the second, Sue Denim of Robots In Disguise sexually dominates him and forces him to ingest a possibly fatal pill.

The Alternative, the most recent IAMX release, is similarly edgy and compelling. It's also been popular in Europe for more than a year, spawning several hit club singles - including the bracing "Spit It Out". Here, Corner marries a dark tale of sexual compulsion and pain to the sweetest melody he's ever written, and just to push the perversity even further, he croons it all in a butter-smooth voice. "If you like it violent", he purrs to his lover, "we can play rough and tumble".

Sue Denim returns to play the girlfriend in Hans Hmmers, Jr.'s combustible clip for "Spit It Out"; her hair and makeup is only slightly less eye-catching than Corner's is. But the IAMX frontman is the star of this show, as he dances atop the crumbling staircase of a Berlin mansion that has fallen into ruin. Graffiti stains the steps, the doors, and the rooms of the building, and shafts of sunlight slash through holes in the walls and ceiling. Corner sings much of the song straight to his partner - but in other shots, he's in front of the mirror, addressing his come-ons to himself. Images of the winsome Denim are rapidly replaced by others of Corner's own face; in one memorable shot, his own head slides up to eclipse hers. Is she simply a substitution for his own destructive desires?; might this entire fantasy be purely auto-erotic?

Immaculate Machine are a Canadian indie pop band from Victoria, British Columbia. The group, which is made up of Brooke Gallupe on guitar, Kathryn Calder on keyboards, and Luke Kozlowski on drums, released two self-published albums before signing with Mint Records in early 2005; their Mint Records debut, Ones and Zeros, came out on September 6, 2005, and they supported the album with a tour of Canada and the United States. The band makes frequent use of two and three-part vocal harmonies; all members share vocal duties both live and in the studio. The band began attracting national and international attention in 2005 when Calder became a sometime member of The New Pornographers, appearing on the album Twin Cinema and touring with the band. Calder is the niece of New Pornographers leader A.C. Newman. The band's name is taken from the lyrics of "One-Trick Pony" from the album One-Trick Pony by Paul Simon. In early June 2007, the band's song, "Jarhand" was featured as the iTunes free single of the week.

A collaboration between one of America's best-loved young singer-songwriters and an inspired director with an inventive, artful, crystal-clear filmmaking style. Over the course of three critically-acclaimed albums and a split-LP with Calexico, Sam Beam of Iron & Wine has developed a distinctive and immediately recognizable voice: hushed, intimate, intense, delicate, but often deadly serious. Lauri Faggioni's work as a sculptor, toymaker, choreographer, and animator is characterized by its beauty, generosity and radiance, and has brought her international recognition as a creative polymath and visionary. Faggioni and Beam share a dedication to emotional detail, and their collaboration - the video for "Boy With A Coin", lead single from The Shepherd's Dog - bears the mark of both artists' startling sensibilities.

At first blush, Jamie Lidell doesn't seem like an iconoclast: his brash, confident electro-R&B sounds as chart-friendly as anything this side of Maroon 5. But dig a little deeper, and you'll discover a truly unusual artist - a digital snake-charmer talented enough to coax the soul out of the cold machine. Jim, his latest set, is, as the title suggests, a personal work for the talented producer-singer - it's fresh, organic, kinetic, and crammed with incipient summertime hits. Think of it as this year's answer to Feist's The Reminder: a collection of pop explorations from an offbeat indie songwriter that nevertheless connects with a mass audience

Electronica fans on both sides of the Atlantic know Lidell as one half of Super_Collider, an experimental dance-music duo responsible for some of the cleverest IDM (and mash-ups) of the late Nineties. Airplay on Gray's Anatomy - and inclusion in the second iteration of the show's celebrated soundtrack - has familiarized American audiences with Lidell's solo work. Multiply, his 2005 release, introduced Lidell's skewed electro-soul to a new generation of dancefloor explorers, and drew rave reviews from stateside critics. Calling the British singer "far more daring than Daniel Bedingfield or Craig David", Robert Christgau goes on to report that Lidell "knows how to launch a falsetto, his beats... should not be played within earshot of anyone wearing a pacemaker".

Jim has, if anything, been received even more enthusiastically. PopMatters called the album "an absolute pleasure to hear, from start to finish"; most tellingly, Vibe raved that the artist "makes retro sound futuristic, without changing a note". The magnificent "Another Day" is a perfect example of what the urban glossy is talking about. Here's a bouncy piano number that sounds like it could have been exhumed from Motown's vaults - yet there's something undefinable about the mix that stamps it as irrefutably modern.

Perhaps it's Lidell's own electrifying soul shout that makes "Another Day" feel timeless. Lidell has a voice that oozes personality and enthusiasm; here, his radiant performance brightens every corner of the track and propels the song forward. On camera, Lidell is charming and scruffily personable, too. Director Timothy Saccenti specializes in augmenting the personalities of leftfield R&B performers - he shot the arty, gender-bending "Downtown" clip for Peaches, as well as the award winning Animal Collective "Peacebone" and Battles "Atlas" videos - and with "Another Day", he's come up with another bizarre winner.

The "Another Day" video opens with Lidell shot from above, reclining on an array of parcel-sized light boxes. Once he's up and singing, the camera pulls back to reveal where he is: in an alley between two warehouses in a grim-looking industrial district. Two mimes dance on either side of him - they arrange the boxes into a path for the singer to step on (the visual reference to the "Billy Jean" video is savvy, and wholly intended). As he journeys through the back street, he encounters three strange girls - one missing a mouth, one missing ears, and another without eyes. Jamie Lidell has an answer for each, producing an array of facial features from his pockets and fitting them to each young woman. Healed, they spring up and join the mimes in dance - and by the end of the clip, they're gyrating in a circle around the Cambridge singer, who croons away with a chain-link fence and an electricity generator in the background. The contrast between the fantastic happenings in the clip and the grim, quotidian setting echoes the play of old and new elements in Lidell's visionary music. Just as in the rightly-praised "1, 2, 3, 4" video, the choreography is warmly human, theatrical, and spontaneous: real enthusiasm from genuine people, moved to rapture by an irresistible song.

Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Jarvis Cocker, Mike Skinner, Alex Turner. To that list of great English storytellers, you can append the name Jamie Treays - or, as he's better-known, Jamie T. Most statesiders aren't hip to him yet, but it's only a matter of time: in the U.K., he's stormed from obscurity to the pop charts in a matter of months, and the U.S. release of Panic Prevention, his revelatory debut, is happening this September. Zane Lowe, Britain's most influential deejay, loves him. Lily Allen is a fan; she's already appeared on a remix of one of his songs (the US bonus track "Rawhide"). Jamie T has ridden three singles into the U.K. Top 20, and Panic Prevention hit #4 on the album charts. He took home the Best New Artist trophy at the NME Awards this year, and best of all, Panic Prevention has been shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. Why has Jamie T's ascent been so steep? Start with his delivery - conversational, instantly identifiable, smart without resorting to cleverness, tough without being brutal. Like Skinner of The Streets, Treays seems to speak for disaffected working-class youth, but he's the possessor of a skewed, fatalistic, and darkly humorous perspective all his own. Then, there's his bass playing, which anchors his grime and rap-influenced music in the rock tradition; it's unstudied, sure, but it's aggressive and melodic, and Treays coaxes a tone from the instrument that scratches a very deep itch. Finally, his pop smarts are unquestionable: his songs invariably feature big, infectious beats, and a madly-catchy chorus. Take, for example, "Sheila", his first U.S. single, and a song with a hook massive enough to hoist it up the British charts not once but twice over the past year. But irresistible though it is, "Sheila", like most Jamie T numbers, is deadly serious and often downright moving. Here's the tough, articulate urban realism that Treays has become known for - it begins with a story of the drowning of a drunk woman, segues into a tale of a drug dealer on the run, and culminates in a late-night shooting. Jamie T delivers his stories with empathy and understanding, but there's a trace of criticism in his young voice, too. Just like the aforementioned giants whose shoulders he gratefully stands on, his social observations, however witty, are awfully poignant. The clip for "Sheila" is strangely moving, too - especially considering the fact that it stars a pair of baboons. The two trained monkeys turn in remarkable performances as a typical suburban couple living together in an entirely ordinary city apartment. We know one is male and the other is female because of their color-coded keychains; when the "man" grabs his briefcase and heads for work in the morning, he takes the blue ring off of its hanging and leaves the pink one there for his mate. She pushes a vacuum cleaner and cleans up after him - but mostly she waits for him to return. When he does, he puts his arm around her and watches the telly, but he also hits the bottle hard. As the days flip by, the male baboon's drinking gets harder and harder, and often the blue keychain is missing from the wall hangings for nights at a time. The sadness of the female baboon is startlingly rendered; some of the shots of the neglected wife, staring out the window, are positively heartbreaking. Finally, she has enough of him - gathering her courage, she packs and marches out, leaving him alone to tear up the flat.

But for all their experimentation and boundary-pushing, January Jaunt is a rock band - and a pretty damn ferocious one, too. Most of the songs on Echoes & Stills build to towering climaxes: "Love Of My Own Design" and "Plateau" begin as whispers, and culminate in torrents of guitar and piano. Gundahl's voice - an instrument of remarkable expressive power - glides effortlessly over the top of the storm. His falsetto projects ambivalence and vulnerability, but when he needs to compete with the pounding drums and scalding guitars, he drops to a anguished wail that strikes with the force of a snare drum beat. Guitarist Stig Morek is a master of six-string effects processing, and on tracks like the stinging "Seeking With Eyes Closed", he conjures a psychedelic symphony of reverb, distortion, and phasing. The quartet's mesmerizing show have made January Jaunt one of the most popular draws on the Northern European club circuit, and this summer, they'll be streaking through Denmark and Sweden and making new fans wherever they play.

Like many January Jaunt songs, "Try", the lead single, begins with a simple piano pattern. But by the time Ole Gundahl begins to sing, the track has already combusted: it's a swirl of hi-hat, glittering guitar, and high synthesizer. Surely it must be a hypnotic thing to encounter in a concert hall - and director Andres Steen Sørensen has captured some of that energy in his colorful performance clip. Sørensen, who has also shot clips for Mimas and Stanley K, has made a name as one of the more technically-gifted video directors in Denmark (he's also a celebrated band photographer), and with the "Try" clip, he again demonstrates his interpretive skill. The group is shot in action, delivering their song with studied fury. Sørensen projects bars of blue light on Gundahl's face and body - they streak across the darkness like reflections thrown between bars. As the camera slides from left to right, the flashing colored lights move too; restless, they flit from body to body, creating a sense of destabilization. Finally, a stage-light behind Gundahl breaks the reverie, exploding into rays of vibrant color. They stream over the singer's shoulder, blooming as the song reaches its conclusion, and fading to gold-dust after that.

Hailing from the great Sunshine State, Jay Seidl is a born performer. He wears his influcences on his sleeve unapologetically and has painstakingly mastered a variety of pop, rock and country idioms. He grew up as a troubadour, performing songs about people's everyday lives, and he hasn't lost sight of that as he's matured as an artist. Jay's strongest point on his self-titled debut CD, "Jay Seidl Singer - Songwriter", is his understanding that great artists are defined by their versatility, not virtuosity. "Anything", the signature single of the album, was written by Jay to a special friend of his a number of years ago and is reminiscent of the style and sound of David Gates of Bread fame. On "Hollywood Days", he gives a nod to Ray Davies while interpreting the theme in his own way - and we can't help but think that Craig Fuller would be proud of "Something 'Bout A Cowboy" or "Love's Here To Stay". "Beach Life" combines the New Wave tension of The Cars and Blondie with the laid back Floridian sensibilities of Jimmy Buffet and has a nice looping guitar lead as a bonus. He manages to incorporate the sounds of CSN, Roger McGuinn, Gram Parsons and even Robyn Hitchcock in subsequent tracks. Jay offers a compelling bid to become the successor to another late and lamented great, Lowell George, as the custodian of all that's good and pure about Southern music, and that would be a good thing. "Singer - Songwriter" opens with "Grand Man", a tribute to John Lennon, one of his early influences. The track is complimented by a truly gorgeous and sensitive video. The clip is all stills and dissolves featuring John, and it is a very moving clip, to say the least. John's death diminished us all, and the song and the video capture that in a way that hasn't been done before. Say what you want about Elvis, or Michael Jackson, or anyone else.....THE most important and influential rocker of all time was John Lennon, and this is a fitting tribute. The term "singer - songwriter" is often used as a broad stroke to define many artists of wildly diverse sounds, all the while never pinpointing the quintessential singer, songwriter. Make no mistake, however, by combining all these influences, Jay Seidl has crafted a sound that is all his own, and his music is accessible to a very wide spectrum of listeners. This singer, songwriter has taken cues from the very best, and the end result is a collection of songs that has something for everyone, and displays Jay's skill, passion and precision for his own music...