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Look to the Defunktion Audio Player (on the right) and click play to check out some new music, then read on to find out more about what your ears are loving.

Sweden seems to be quickly redefining its status as a purveyor of fine music - not content with proffering quality Chip Music and Metal,  there are bands and DJs spanning every genre emerging on to the global scene at an astounding rate. It’s no surprise then that The Donk Boys hail from that part of the globe, Malmö - southern Sweden - to be specific.

The boys have been collaborating since October last year, having found previous success solo. Martin Abrahamsson, aka Bauri, has released a deluge of tracks over the past decade or so and been featured on labels such as City Centre Offices and, more recently, Expanding Records. Thomas Jaldemark had his inaugural release on net label Thinner and, earlier this year, was featured on Norway-based techno label Lordag.

The music Thomas and Martin make as The Donk Boys is stripped-back, spiced occasionally with freakish sounds and utterly accomplished: both boys have been busy and both boys certainly know their techno. It’s almost painful not to groove along, their tunes are chunks of pure electronic chocolate - your brain unwrapping the glistening packaging before your body devours the moreish contents. It’s that damn yummy.

This is the beginning of something really good then - the live shows are causing a major stir over in Sweden and they have forthcoming releases on a couple of labels, including Kreatur Musik. It seems that The Donk Boys don’t need too much to keep them happy either, “Our plan is to do some more live shows, release a bunch of kick ass records and drink some beer .” So if you enjoy the live set on Defunktion, contribute to making The Donk Boys happy - all you have to do is catch their live show, listen to their records and buy them a beer.

Somebody somewhere once said, “Truth is Stranger than Fiction.” In actual fact, it’s probably one of those quotes that no one ever actually said but that everyone simply accepts. Like, “Beam me up Scotty;” these words were never actually uttered by the good Captain James T. Kirk, apparently, yet ask anyone in the street and they’ll guarantee you’re wrong. They’ll lay money on it. Or they’ll simply shrug and walk away, checking anxiously behind them to see if you’re following.

So is it? Stranger than fiction. Well, we at Defunktion think not. Fiction, we would argue can be pretty damn strange. Take the work of decidedly lunatic Frenchman Georges Perec for example. For those unfamiliar with his madness, his novel A Void consists of a wildly creative narrative written in French without ever once using the letter “e.” This is a completely normal novel in every other sense, it has a story, and a good one at that. It has characters and events and everything else you’d expect. Just no “e’s.” Quite strange n’est-ce pas?

So what of truth? How strange is truth in general? Well, not very. It’s true, for example, that the harder you kick a can of coke, the further it will travel. Yet, that’s not particularly strange. It’s also true that sewage systems are boring. Except that they aren’t. Drainage systems are staggeringly beautiful and interesting things. A bold claim, but one that we at Defunktion are ready to make, now that we’ve seen the G-Cans Project.

Whomever is responsible for this subterranean-tour-de-force has a very fine eye for composition, coupled with a subtlety of touch probably not encountered that often in the humdrum world of water drainage. These sci-fi worlds seem to have been plucked straight out of Blade Runner; perfectly illustrating that photography can be at once ordinary and sublime. The subterranean spaces are lovingly shot, the light in each exquisitely revealing detail where required and throwing masks of darkness across to intensify drama.

This is photography that makes us look again at the ordinary, that makes us approach and question the aesthetic of the world around us in entirely different ways. So what’s the stranger? The world as it truthfully is, or the world as we imagine it to be? Well surely they’re both the same thing after all…

The G-Cans Project can be , or, for more adventurous readers in Tokyo, there are free live tours available (note that one of your tour group must be able to speak Japanese).

Two years ago, now defunct Live-Shot.com - a Texas-based hunting company - began offering paying visitors the opportunity to shoot (and kill) real deer online. Live-Shot eventually closed its doors, but not before diversifying the business model - the original company’s legacy now remains in the form of Live-Paintball.com: pay some money and shoot live people with a paintball gun controlled via the Internet.

The opportunity to experience this form of remote violence, either via direct interaction or just observing others, is enticing. We have an opportunity not only to gratify and indulge through control and affect, but to examine and explore ourselves. The problem, aside from the shooting and killing of actual animals, is that Live-Shot commoditised the experience, removing the opportunity for a certain kind of introspection - a cultural analysis free from the notion of something so utterly distasteful as killing and maiming.

Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, now based in Chicago, certainly won’t be free from criticism either, despite creating an installation that explores the concepts of control and interaction, via remote shooting, in a completely different context. Bilal has set himself up as the centre of an installation in which he lives in a single room under the gaze of a user-controlled webcam and paintball rifle. The work, entitled Domestic Tension, has Bilal living 24-hours-a-day for a month in one space, constantly connected to his audience, who can observe, chat or just shoot at him through the installation’s website.

Some 40,000 rounds were fired in the first two-and-a-half weeks of the work, and the project has already drawn the attention of a group of hackers who managed to fire the gun 20,000 times in 24 hours. Unsurprisingly, almost everything in Bilal’s living quarters is now covered in the yellow paint of the gun.

The level of audience interaction means that the online participants are as much the subject of the work as the reactions of the artist. His fate relies on these observers, be they understanding, unsympathetic or simply idiotic. In addition to the ever-present threat of the paintballs, Bilal only eats food donated by strangers, which has produced an audience reaction at the opposing end of the scale: people have donated food, items, and have even taken turns at firing the gun away from him so as to deprive those who wish to target the artist himself.

Bilal probably did not predict his own reactions to the varied forms of audience participation, and is clearly shaken and touched by his experiences. He shares his thoughts on a daily Youtube video blog, which will continue until the end of the installation on June 4. Although you may have your own idea of how you’ll approach interaction with Bilal, the interesting part occurs when you’re at the controls - faced with this man and this gun. Visit now as there are only a few days left to find out how you’ll behave on Domestic Tension.