Thanks to Mikey for letting me know about HighAndes - a Dublin-based product design company who have developed three strange "musical interface products". The one you can buy is the £90 StikAx, a little thing that looks, in use, like a shrunken space saxaphone covered in buttons which trigger samples, loops and effects on your PC. It's been licensed by the Ministry of Sound* in the UK, so there's a huge, elaborate Flash website to let you 'experience StikAx online' and 'join StikAx Tribe'. Next up will be PikAx, a guitar-shaped thing with strings and a pickup, but which seems to trigger samples and loops in the same way. There's also SynthAx (not to be confused with the wondrous SynthAxe) which is a more straigtforward keyboard, "aimed at the Asian market". 
