POST-ROCK. (yup, its an actual musical genre) A simple recipe: take your average rock group, trade the singer's microphone for an old-school Moog synthesizer, instruct them in poststructuralist theory, make everyone swap instruments, and you've got post-rock. It's spacious and cerebral -- a two-part prescription for making 'rock' sound interesting in the wake of deadbeat cliché-bands like Oasis. Post-rock's history is drawn from the psychedelic rock, krautrock, prog-rock, and dub reggae of decades past. Chicago label Thrill Jockey is one to watch. They publish Tortoise, a well-known, oft-remixed instrumental outfit who've inherited the spacey legacy and studio experimentation of 1970s German proggers Can and Faust, respectively.

Post-rock subgenera: math-rock, lock-groove-rock, avant-garage.

ILLBIENT: More a dj mix attitude than a genre, illbient djs uphold experimentation, extreme recombination, and dissonance over danceability. Noise, spoken-word, dub, hip-hop, and jungle are the crucial elements of a dense sound-collage guaranteed to shake off any residual E-bliss associated with 'ambient' and bring back good old Chronic paranoia. Media-soluble DJ Spooky is the illbient posterboy, although other enigmatic figures with names like Olive, Loop, the Bedouin, and Byzar form NYC's core community of "cultural alchemists. " Since illbient is an approach rather than a sound, the available music isn't representative, but it does make for excellent dub-hop-weirdness listening: Aspodel's recent compilation Incursion in Illbience is a high-quality sonic document of this New York scene.

JAPANOISE. Noise From Japan. Like The Gerogerigegege, known for amplifying the sounds of on-stage masturbation. Cheap electronics, microphones, scrap metal, overload, scream. Chaos as vocation. Pick up anything by Merzbow to hear the sound of national pathology. If it's thoughtful schizophonic collage and crafted instability you crave, try Ground Zero's avant-garde remix of traditional Peking Opera (entitled "Revolutionary Pekinese Opera", out on ReR). Everything from pop songs to American film scores to the scholarly disarray of live musicians is collided under the orchestration of Otomo Yoshide, Japan's foremost recombinant noisician. (His instruments of choice: turntables and samplers.)

HARDSTEP. First, a review. Jungle/drumn'n bass dissects hip-hop breakbeats, speeds them up, then re-processes the drums with edgy energy. Bouncy dub baselines and inflections of techno support this addictive rhythmic base. Hardstep takes the frenetic minimalism of drum 'n bass a few steps further with overloaded atonal baselines and scatter-bomb snares in an aural severity that almost precludes dancing. This is dystopia music. Rave culture embraces an idyllic, alien-friendly future while hardstep drum 'n bass is stuck on earth, in the grimly antagonistic density of contemporary urban existence. The fact that 'wicked' and 'dark' are positive descriptive terms says much about the music. Hardstep (aka darkstep, darkside) is too fierce to generate the cross-over appeal of lighter jungle; it is available almost exclusively on 12" vinyl. Where to hear the sounds of blackness'' Local DJ/promoter Al Fougy spins hardstep at his weekly Phuturistic Bluez party -- the name of the event describes the music played.

ELECTRONICA. Men, women, and children working wonders with small black boxes. Oval utilizes scratched CDs to compose beautiful tones haunted by the sound of failed technology clicking and skipping in error. Scanner overlays queasy soundscapes with pirated cellular phone conversations. Local Electro Organic Sound System's "Herbanism" CD draws from diverse influences and successfully defies genre, flowing from graceful ambient to blistering drum'n bass -- during live performances EOSS augments the impressive sonic landscape with real-time video mixing. In short, electronica encompasses all the music made possible through creative use (and mis-use) of modern technology.

BHANGRA. Bhangra emerges from the chopped-up drums of jungle cross-pollinating diasporic Indian pop production. Expect post-colonial dance beats constructed with table and dhol percussive samples, highlighted with sitar licks and Indian vocal snippets. Bhangra ranges from white-boy-with-sampler exotica to serious syncretic beatz, although the syrupy over-produced edge of Indian film scores is always present. There are very few outlets for bhangra in America -- London is where this should be experienced. Check out Multitone's "Deep Into Jungle Territory" for one of the better compilations available in the US.