Live acts seem to be the great strawmen—and women—of the electronic music industry. Take one look at someone up on stage with their laptop and the mind immediately goes there: "What are they doing up there? Checking their e-mail?" Put a microphone in an electronic musician's hand and it gets even worse: "This would be great...if the annoying guy would stop singing/rapping/yelping over everything."

The struggle for the artist, of course, is to put enough chance for improvisation into the set to truly make it live, but not enough to potentially make things a complete disaster for the audience. Which is why few try. And even fewer succeed.

Our list for 2008's top live acts see a variety of ways of going about it—laptop, hardware, Rhodes piano, vocoder, live drumming—but they all have one thing in common: These artists perform on the edge of disaster and thrive on the chaos. Whether it be Cobblestone Jazz's frequent improvisations into the unknown, Hercules & Love Affair's live band or even Nôze vodka-soaked antics—which our blurb writer hated, but had to admit was loved by just as many—these are artists that take chances and are all the more powerful for it.

Contributers: Bernardo Arrospide, David Berkley, Per Bojsen-Moller, Clovis Bouhier, Richard Brophy, Todd L. Burns, Richard Carnes, Philipp Cerfontaine, Peter Chambers, Richard Chinn, Paul Clement, Thomas Cox, Nate Deyoung, Stéphane Girard, Chris Hobson, Mohson Iqbal, Finn Johannsen, Tom Jones, Eike Kühl, Matt Langler, Will Lynch, Joshua Meggitt, Dimitri Nasrallah, Grego O'Halloran, Siana Petro, Daniel Petry, William Rauscher, Elly Rifkin, Carl Ritger, Piero Ruzzene, Greg Sawyer, Colin Shields, Björn Schaeffner, Philip Sherburne, Lee Smith, Dave Stenton, Samuel Strang, Mark Strauss, Christopher Thomarios, Nik Torrens, Derek Walmsley, Jacob Wright and Sean-Michael Yoder.