Our friends from Venezuela are facing a horrific reality. Wednesday night, the country was hit by two back-to-back earthquakes, each among the strongest in a century. As I write this, the official confirmed death toll is well over 200 and rising, with thousands injured and many more trapped under rubble. Here are some resources for supporting the relief effort, including a wonderful book.

We live in dissonant, uncertain times, and maybe our consciousness struggles if we try to make it fit square corners and easy forms. So now is a perfect time to feature long-time favorite label Facade Electronics out of northern Mexico. Their opening releases of the year, from artists dotting different parts of the world, flow into a narrative — one uncomfortable, sublime, beautiful.

I missed this when it dropped earlier this month — Synthtopia was there! But now is a perfect time to chill out to the smoothly gliding sounds of this original Trautonium-inspired synthesizer design in progress. Flexur can cool down an overheated Europe.

Sleepwalking? Unexplained seizures? Neighbors have a rodent and plague problem? Don’t worry, and don’t be spooked by what some nuns told you! You just need the handheld, open-source Scaepe – Noiseferatu DIY kit!

This has to be peak 2026 music tech. Across every feed, producers I follow are posting the same revelation: they’re finding their own music in training sets used by AI. Investigations by Alex Reisner at The Atlantic are making this more visible — and visceral. And the findings are actually much worse than I think […]

Juneteenth is about emancipation, and it’s expressed in musical joy across the USA today. Here are our friends from Black Techno Matters with their community calendar of events today — one might be near you — plus two recent releases you should hear wherever you are.

Your sequencing gets upgraded — including cameos by Pac-Man and the LOGO turtle. You get even more secret weapons for drum synthesis. You get the hot new RANDOM8 collab from Befaco and Mylar Melodies, cloning their new hardware. There’s just so much goodness in VCV Rack that covering the free stuff has me dizzy. Here’s your June update, with some sound examples.

“I’m not particularly interested in typing prompts to make stuff, I’m interested in breaking them and dissecting them,” writes Jasper Shuoyang Zheng as he introduces Latent Terrain. Now using an intuitive, elegantly designed open-source Max external and UI, you can play the weird world of neural audio codecs like an instrument, transforming your own sounds into new textures.

Following GForce’s official renditions of Oberheim instruments, now we’re treated to an official Sequential synth in plug-in form. This Prophet-5 combines painstaking recreations of the various revisions with new features like MPE, a dual-layer architecture, and lush effects. I’ve been testing it and got some behind-the-scenes details from the devs. It’s such a total pleasure to bring that Sequential sound into the box.

The most exciting add-on for Ableton Live this spring for me is actually not an Ableton Extension. It’s warpradius, a Max for Live device by Jon Doe One that transforms the entire grid into a single expressive percussion surface. It employs a Bessel membrane resonator model, a modal synthesis method that produces realistic, varied percussion sounds. And it’s free.