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.

Recent updates for the visual programming environment plugdata (a wrapped for Pure Data) and the powerful object library cyclone are keeping the goodness going. Whether you’re looking to do patching and development in a graphical tool or just enjoy the free stuff people are making with Pd, that’s great news.

Trump’s unprecedented tariffs are starting to hit reality following a Supreme Court defeat over the weekend. Music gear consumers shouldn’t expect any immediate cost relief. But while the picture is complicated and the major problems remains the chaos Trump is causing, there are some hopeful indications for makers and musicians both inside and outside the USA in the longer term.

If you haven’t tried Ardour in a while — or if you’re new to the idea that a DAW could be free and open source — you might be surprised. Major updates and a lot of listening to users means you don’t have to sacrifice features like clip recording and editing (including looping), piano roll windows, and more. Plus you get things a lot of tools can’t do, like region effects. Ardour is worth downloading on macOS, Windows, or Linux — any of them.

The freeware VCV Rack ports of Bastl’s delicious PIZZA family now include the original Pizza oscillator, Crust drum/percussive voice, and Basil stereo delay. Endless patching pleasures await with these (and don’t forget the free and open source KOMPAS “probability navigator,” too).

Do you love drones? I mean, like you’re craving nothing more than aggressive drones coming right into your ears from violin and self-made reed instruments for 27 minutes, 28 seconds straight? The legendary Werner Durand and John Krausbauer have you covered on label-for-the-heads Moving Furniture Records out of Amsterdam.  And then we take a side trip to time crystals, images, and sounds to discover from La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi.

Move Everything is a hack for Move that lets you run custom synths, effects, and controllers alongside stock Move functions. But the truly momentous development is that its creator has added screen reader support, which makes Move the first truly standalone groovebox open to blind and visually impaired users.

Minimal Audio’s Poly Flanger is a “musical” stereo flanger — with tuning options, scale quantization, three modes, and 1-8 voices, plus deep modulation and timbral options. “Flanger” is accurate, but almost unfair — this is a deep 8-voice comb resonator that you can set in key with your project or turn into a liquid, sound-transforming, even glitchy beast. Here’s a deep-dive guide to how to get the most out of it.

1986, meet 2026. Music Mouse from Laurie Spiegel is available now as a new Eventide application — completely faithful to the original, ground-breaking compositional application, but fully modernized.

Revenge of the Nerd: Look Mum No Computer, aka Sam Battle, will represent his country in Eurovision this year. And just like that, 100% of us are tuning into Eurovision and rooting for the UK. (Sorry, ‘schland.)