Netaudio London is an organisation dedicated to showcasing the work of artists “who use digital and network technologies to explore new boundaries in music and sonic art”.

The 2011 edition of their annual festival encourages participation in all its forms, while also providing a programme of unmissable performances.

The main event takes place at Koko on May 15 and is headlined by Nurse With Wound. Stephen Stapleton’s troupe are true legends of underground music; though frequently and erroneously lumbered with the “industrial” tag, their experimental, ruthlessly singular sound is ever-changing, and has yielded such disparate works as their collagistic avant-rock debut Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979) and the dark ambient epic Soliloquy For Lilith (1989), and led to collaborations over the years with the likes of Stereolab, Whitehouse, Current 93, Coil, Jim O’Rourke, Faust and Sunn O)). They began performing live again in 2005 after a 21 year absence, but shows remain sporadic at best, so you won’t want to miss this.

We’ll be particularly intrigued to witness the live collaboration happening that night between Mika Vainio and Bruce Gilbert. Vainio is the Finnish genius behind Pan Sonic and Ø, whose music generally exist at the crossroads between techno, industrial, power electronics and abstract sound-art, and who has released on such esteemed labels as Touch, Raster-Noton and Sähko. Gilbert is co-founder of post-punk legends Wire, and arguably its most innovative member, with a long-standing interest in electronic music that has yielded such classic solo albums as This Way and The Shivering Man (reissued this month by Editions Mego). We don’t know what to expect from this meeting of minds, but as with anything that involves Vainio, we can assure you that it will be stomaching-upsettingly loud. Support comes from Thrill Jockey’s excellent Radian.

The festival’s opening concert, presented in collaboration with Penultimate Press, takes place on Friday 13 May and features solo sets and a collaborative set from Robert Piotrowicz and Valerio Tricoli. Acclaimed Polish sound artist Piotrowicz has worked with the likes of Oren Ambarchi, Lasse Marhaug and Kevin Drumm in the past. Later that night, The Apiary Studios (Netaudio’s Hackney base) plays host to an intimate party with Dave Congreve, Alex Fisher, Chris Box and more TBA.

Netaudio Open Platform is a community programmed event on Sunday 15 May aiming to showcase new and emerging musicians, hosted by Tony Nwachukwu. The Open Platform will be programmed by the Netaudio community by public submission and voting via a customised SoundCloud page. On the same day the Netaudio conference takes place, with three scheduled discussions: Politics, Protest and Sound (with speakers including Matthew Herbert and The Wire‘s Mark Fisher), Creativity and Collaboration in the Internet Era and Digital Futures and Analogue Survivals. For the more tech-minded among you, workshops are planned on procedural audio, iOS apps and open source radio software.

Look out too for sound art and audio-visual installations and an interactive live broadcast from The Roundhouse. For more information on all of the above, visit Netaudio here.