The exhaustive new "Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century" has just been released digitally on Editions Belsona.

Starting with the guerrilla media tactics of Industrial music in the late 1970s, author Thomas Bey William Bailey charts an ongoing trend in electronic music: an increasing amount of sonic quality, recorded output and international contact, accomplished with a decreasing amount of tools, personnel, and capital investment. From the use of laptop computers to create massive avalanches of noise, to the establishment of micro-nations populated largely by sound artists, 21st century sound culture is expanding in its scope and popularity even as it shrinks in other respects.

The text of Micro Bionic is built up from exhaustive research into the world of audio extremity, including physical travel to the various ‘hot spots’ where these new sounds are made, and thousands of hours listening to live and recorded music. Numerous exclusive interviews with leading lights of the field were also conducted for this book: William Bennett (Whitehouse), Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle / Coil), Peter Rehberg (Mego), John Duncan, Francisco López, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Bob Ostertag and many others weigh in with a diversity of thoughts and opinions underscoring the incredible diversity to be found within new electronic music itself. Other topics under discussion include electronic music and synesthesia, digital-age silence, sampling in the age of congestion, and more.

Micro-Bionic unveils a host of audio phenomena that range from the whimsical to the terrifying, and provides a perfect gateway into this parallel universe for the previously uninitiated. Over 330 pages of text- perhaps the first book of its kind in the English language.

NOTE: This is currently available in digital format exclusively for Amazon's 'Kindle' reader- print and audiobook formats are pending.

Some excerpts are available here, and here is the link to the full edition.