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Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses and plaintive organs. Let us break out!

That's Luigi Russolo, writing in the 1913 manifesto "The Art of Noises." He was only 28 at the time, so perhaps we can forgive his purple prose as a tic of youth. (Or maybe it was a tic of Futurism: his colleague F.T. Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" is also riddled with explosive punctuation.) The rhetoric seems to have struck a chord, however: Russolo's influence has dominated electronic music's history, which is largely a story of new noises and new musical realities. Today, we're awash in the sounds of, well, anything you can hold a microphone to, as fans of Matmos, Mathew Herbert or Amon Tobin's recent Foley Room will be well aware.

But as electronic music has matured, so has a willingness to return to those staid old violins, pianos and plaintive organs. Maybe it's just that I need a break from a steady diet of minimal techno (not to be confused with a Steady Diet of Nothing) but I find myself increasingly turning to electronic music — that is, "programmed" music, heavily dependent upon computer editing for its construction — that favors acoustic instrumentation as its source material.

One of the year's more surprising records falls in this category: September Collective's All the Birds Were Anarchists, a collection of sketches by an improvising trio of laptoppers. If their music sounds particularly spontaneous for something made with computers, there's good reason. The group — Barbara Morgenstern, Mapstation's Stefan Schneider and Paul Wirkus — was born out of a 2002 tour where each artist performed solo; growing restless with the nightly show sequence, they began ending their sets with a group improvisation, and their loops gelled well enough to propel them into the studio, where improvisation remains at the heart of their practice. Morgenstern's melodic piano lines run like a gold braid through many of the songs, and elsewhere a Rhodes or a spindly electric guitar takes the lead. But what's most interesting is the commotion in the background, as fleeting combinations of sounds make furtive walk-ons, deliver tossed-off lines that completely shift the direction of the drama, and melt back into the wings. There's something about acoustic loops — judging from Wirkus' bio and artist's statement, he relies heavily on samples of strings and piano — that lends itself to this kind of Silly Putty play, elongating shapes and smooshing them back together, violently. You get ghost images where two sounds fuse to create another that might or might not actually be there. A track like "Das Meer" sounds a lot like something Talk Talk might have done had they been using similar tools — not only for the poignant piano melody and brushed drums but also for the way the structure seems to dissipate into thin air.

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The ballad has become a kind of slow-motion fugue, heartbreak in four dimensions.

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Mark Templeton's music, if made of fewer interlocking pieces, operates on similar principles. Standing on a Hummingbird sounds a lot like its title suggests, as individual notes lose their outlines and distinct tones blur into a scarab's smear. His processing — cutting and looping sounds at odd intervals, so that an elliptical sense of repetition gets jostled by all kinds of random potholes — has left a digitally cobwebbed air about everything (the now-canonical "glitch" sound familiar from Oval). But glitch music has seldom sounded this supple, as piano reverb washes everything in watery ambiance and nervous guitar figures crabwalk across the skipped digits. Again, it's not without precedent: the way the movements phase slowly into each other in "Amidst Things Uncontrolled" owes a fair debt to Gastr Del Sol's reconfigured roots music, and the fizzy "Difficult to Light" isn't all that far off from some of Loren MazzaCane Connors' one-note meditations. But again, it's in the way the acoustic material seems to crumble into vague new shapes that's so arresting; a track like "Roots Growing" unfolds like a sheet of paper being crumpled into a ball and lovingly smoothed out again.

Templeton's label Anticipate is run by Ezekiel Honig, whose own work — both solo and with Morgan Packard — offers similar pleasures. Scattered Practices takes the warm, cozy sound of the Rhodes keyboard and rubs it 'til it shines like a drop of beach glass. Melodies are drawn out — and dubbed out — until all of the notes of the scale smear into something gaseous. The Rhodes never makes anything like a "pure" tone. Every note bends and bobs of its own accord, so that when they pool together, everything gets limned in ripples.

Colleen has taken a more straightforward approach on her new album, Les Ondes Silencieuses. Her first record was made entirely of samples of (mostly) acoustic instruments from old records, and her second featured her own playing — on acoustic guitar, mallet instruments, music box and the like — spun into a gentle buzz. On Les Ondes Silencieuses, though, the instruments hold their ground and the edits become more or less invisible; there's very little that suggests this is an "electronic" album at all. No longer mussed with a shaky Super-8 patina, her music now evinces a patience akin to Morton Feldman's. The title track, essentially a duet for viol de gamba, might have been made with nothing more than two people drawing bows at the same time. "Past the Long Black Land" is trickier. It begins as a simple duet for acoustic guitar and violin; the two voices circle each other slowly, with incredible sadness. The arrival of more voices comes without warning; suddenly the space is full of delicate counterpoints as hard to fix as the floating shapes on your retina; the ballad has become a kind of slow-motion fugue, heartbreak in four dimensions.

Colleen has commented that she was particularly interested in turning to forgotten instruments for Les Ondes Silencieuses, and she cites both the viol de gamba and the martinet (a kind of harpsichord) as examples. The payoff is clear. Not only are both instruments imbued with the warm tone colors of most acoustic instruments; their very scarcity in contemporary music-making means that their limpid timbres virtually jump out of the speakers at us, ever so slightly alien — certainly more alien than your garden-variety glitch might sound. The result is something very much like… a "new musical reality," at least for those of us who have had our heads in the silicon for so long. I suspect that Russolo would be pleased.