Expect there are quite a few blue Blue Mondays in the house, so this is topical – our friend Alex Theakston dives down a rabbit hole straight to Kraftwerk’s very own Vako Orchestron.

Polyend quietly updated their cult hit Tracker with a smartly-designed feature for keeping settings organized as instruments. What might really matter about that is the chance to exchange your instruments with other Tracker users – a big deal in this passionate community.

As Steinberg’s Dorico 4 matures, at last, we’re seeing a single, elegant tool that produces engraver-quality scores, but also the editing powers you expect from computer music.

Whatever you’re doing now, if you want to calm yourself and rediscover the love of slow production, watch this transcendent footage of David Sylvian with Ronny Drayton, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, and Steve Nye.

Vinyl? Done. Tape? Ha, as if. German artist Remute is using obsolete game technology to release music – and the latest is an album released on an actual, playable Nintendo 64 cartridge.

For the year 2022, it’s remarkable how much visual generation is still based on decades-old algorithms. But here’s one to watch – voraciously experimental media artist Robert Henke is into noise as his next jam. That makes it a perfect time to revisit some of the ubiquitous stuff that came before.

Techno is just one angle – the lifeblood of music between Detroit and Berlin is a relentless underground drive that hustles harder. If you need some of that mojo now, here’s both a pay-what-you-will compilation and a free soundpack with the likes of Tyree Cooper, Sarah Kivi, and Eric D. Clark.

It’s next-level chaos – literally. The radical sonic exploration of the original Softpop by Peter Edwards and Bastl has been massively expanded into a new modular analog synth and sound processor. In a chaotic universe, here’s the kind of unpredictability you want to swallow whole — rather than the other way around.

It’s a simple pitch to Windows and Linux users: so long as you have a compatible RTX GPU to render, NVIDIA is going to throw an insane amount of stuff at you for free to create and collaborate. That landscape is growing – and it’s now out of beta.

Ableton Live turned 20 in October, and it goes without saying it’s had a profound impact on music making in intervening years. But want to really see how it’s evolved? Here are screenshots, dated reviews, and even retro installs as proof.