Imagine your Dad/Granddad. Imagine the corner home office. Now imagine he’s got an Elektron Syntakt and he’s making the most brutal EBM and techno. You’re getting the picture: meet Nick Hayes, aka The Last DJ.

What happens when ChucK, the free elegant and fast sound coding environment, comes to Unreal Engine, the free-for-most-users game engine that’s also a motion graphics and live audiovisual tool? Nerdy magic, that’s what — a reason to turn off your phone alerts and hide and make the immersive AV world of your dreams. Or pretend you’re a Stanford student. It’s … Chunreal!

Spectral Plugins, a relatively young plugin maker, has announced the end of its business. They’re making their three excellent plugins available for free download, complete with macOS and Windows VST2/VST3/AU/AAX support, so grab them while you can.

Demoscene culture continues to produce more with less, producing elaborate audiovisual worlds from tiny amounts of code. Revision is a hub for these kinds of creations, and in 2024, it delivers as always – including, incredibly, an animation made just from HTML scrollbar code. (Seriously.)

Dedicated Amiga lover Paulee Alex Bow is back with another terrific episode of Magical Synth Adventure – and this time, they’re using Amiga software as live processing for guitar, with delicious results.

Lithuanian composer and musician Andrius Mamontovas has a chillingly beautiful LP on the Ukrainian-run label I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free, under the project name Dots On The Sun.

Kalide Systems’ unique effects playground and custom effects toolkit Collage got a nice update recently, full of user-requested features—some from comments here on CDM. Here’s a look, plus a couple of quick effects to download and play with.

Just when you think you can’t hear any new noises from a delay, along comes Sinevibes Integer, drawing on classic bucket brigade delays to create something retro and futuristic all at once. We’ve also got an extra CDM-exclusive preset bank to explore more.

Apple has released macOS Sonoma 14.4.1. As verified by some plug-in developers, this includes fixes for an issue that could cause plug-ins to fail. It also includes important fixes for USB hubs and Java.

There’s no need to imagine the history and conception of music as beginning and ending in western Europe. The history of music is far older, richer – and stranger than that. Here’s a glimpse of some of that and more resources to help broaden our sense of what music can be.