Director Joseph Kahn lives in one crazy world. It’s a world in which sci-fi, comics, pop culture, and movies implode on one another into an insanely mashed-up mixup of media, delivered with a strong dose of digital effects. (Holy metaculture, Batman!) If anyone could save music videos, Kahn is your man. The Korean creative’s latest […]

Resolume have just released Beta 2.4 for public consumption. My favourite addition so far is BPM sync for clips and effects, but this version also includes DMX control for lighting equipment, opening up a whole new level of possibility for staging events. New in version 2.4 beta: BPM Clock With the BPM clock in Resolume […]

You may have heard a lot about the InterWeb, a new network that magically connects people around the world through their Compute-trons. You might have heard about its powers to promote music, perhaps by an ill-researched story yesterday where I stupidly pointed to a UK artist who will go unmentioned here. (As it turns out, […]

CDM2 (named a la a new cruise ship) truly is not a figment of my imagination. As we put in late hours working on it (or early hours, as much of the team is Australian), one of the issues we face is how to design the new forum. Now, of course, there are plenty of […]

VJing and jamming with Pitfall, controlled from MIDI drums? Heck, yes!Max/MSP/Jitter is a multimedia environment that also happens to be a development tool, the upshot being that you can do bizarre things like emulate the chips of Atari, Sega, Nintendo, and Coleco game systems (covered previously). Now imagine you could turn those emulations into a […]

Updated: Fixed broken link (my fault). 7.1 surround sound organs? Check. Saxes painted with porcelain-skinned, Rococco women? Check. Laser beam metronomes? Guitar picks with faces that morph into skulls? Mic stands with drink holder attachments, or (my personal favorite) Pepsi bottles that double as mic stands? A guy playing his bass upside-down? Obscenely-painted and warped […]

Régine of Near Near Future has some more interactive strings, along the lines of last week’s laser harp: Interactive strings (Cellists out there are probably wondering why the idea of “interactive strings” is new. Well, clearly you don’t und. . . um . . . okay, you’ve got me.) Anyway, this stuff is big business. […]

Ben Dove’s String Thing is a cello-like instrument with four metal bars that can be struck or stroked. Like a fretless instrument, pitch is continuous. Building String Thing: Laser Pointers and Vibrating Rods: What’s great about the String Thing is two-fold: first, it’s an ingenious design, and second, Ben rigorously documents how he did it, […]

What happens when engineers and laptop musicians collaborate, brought together by love for a 16-ton steam engine? Something like Steam Driven, a site-specific music performance at the Brighton Fringe Festival last month. Laptop Jams, the laptop performance collective we’ve covered previously on CDM (see story on European laptop performing), got together with the British Engineerium, […]

Here’s more on Steam Driven, the interactive performance that mixed music and steam-powered machines, from composer Stuart Smith. Stuart writes: The show went well and also sold-out. A nice piece of theater as every visitor had to manually stoke the fire with a chunk of coal, thus waiting for enough “steam” pressure to begin the […]