Japan’s Open Reel Ensemble has been active continuously since 2009, with collaborations from Issei Miyake to Ryuichi Sakamoto. But there’s a special magic that some of their most experimental performances — bows flying over tape — are what has earned a fresh wave of attention.

Spectral tools are all the rage. Ever fancied trying to play with those techniques under the hood? Umut Eldem aka Hearing Glass has a great set of video tutorials. They’re implemented perfectly in Max, but they’re even worth following along from other environments.

In dark times, music and sound can go from seeming irrelevant or empty to becoming a lifeline. The artist Bernisaun from Tehran has been brewing music that can, in his words, “engineer the frequency of your well-being.” It’s healing for headphones. And I know almost everyone I know is going to need to turn to that at some point this week.

EboSuite and SenSei, live visual add-ons for Ableton Live, got some nice updates this week. SenSei, the tool that puts the power of Unreal Engine inside Ableton Live, gets a particularly major expansion, with some 27 new plug-ins, including mesh loaders, 3D video effects, visualizers, dynamic surfaces, and a video overlay.

Glitchy but driving broken beats are what’s for dinner. Hannover’s tilde (~) is a font of knowledge on topics from Pd/plugdata to Bitwig Studio Grid FX to mixing and mastering. And those skills translate to some genius grooves. Listen up to this full-power montage of all original music.

Éliane Radigue in full, uninterrupted motion, is breathtaking in her thoughts. So it’s wonderful that the filmmakers behind the documentary short Échos have put that film up for free to honor her memory this week. Get ready for sprawling shots of the ARP modular synthesizer and deep reflections on the meaning of music, sound, and […]

Escaping the rigid, repetitive grid helps to make gestures the way we would on instruments. I’ve been talking to Tomavatars as he developed this one, and the MGenBend Max for Live Device lets you create elegant, multi-point curves for notes, strumming, and arpeggios.

A 1024-step, multilane polyphonic sequencer sounds overwhelming. But the latest Manifest Audio polymetric sequencer, Polyfold, offers a palette of various patterns and shapes that you can deploy across that vast canvas, easily and quickly. It opens up sequencing in Live 12+ Suite, free from the usual constraints. It’s a compositional playground, with full MIDI and OSC (!) support, for music and visuals alike.

Applied Acoustics Systems’ flagship modular, Multiphonics CV-3, gets four powerful modules in “the FM+ update” out this month. Here’s a dive into what those modules can do — and if you’re pondering picking up CV-3 for the first time, it’s discounted now, too.

Who but Éliane Radigue could work with sound as a medium seemingly in the air and environment itself; whose presence spanned every epoch of electronic music and contemporary acoustic composition quite like her? Radigue has died at 94, as reported today by her label and publisher.