You can’t watch the Orville Brothers and Amelia Earhart go to your local airport. But you can watch music pioneers revisit the first Buchla 100 modular.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of apps on iOS, which brought a handful of interesting experimental noisemaker toys and some simple standalone tools. Now, you’ve got powerful DAWs, full-blown synths and effects – basically, the same sort of virtual studio you get on your desktop. What you tend not to get […]

Presumably, very smart people are working on Artificial Intelligence, and soon even my clumsy prose will be replaced by a bot. Until then, though, readily available bot code spits out random text like a combination of magnetic poetry, William S. Burroughs, and a feline on catnip walking across a laptop.

There seems to be an extraordinary amount of resentment, in my social media feed, at least, directed at SoundCloud. That may be because the service as originally launched was aimed mainly at small-scale file sharing, and bears little resemblance to the much larger, more public-facing service that evolved after round upon round of investment. Or […]

There’s a famous line in business by Tom Peters, in his book The Circle of Innovation: “you can’t shrink your way to greatness.” But shrinking is exactly what SoundCloud now has to do, with its survival – let alone any ongoing greatness – at stake. As founder Alex Ljung puts it in a blog post […]

Elektron’s Analog series are getting the OLED screen, updated pads, and new aluminum enclosure design that the Octatrack MKII and Digitakt did. Bonus: new Analog Four synth circuitry, and Analog Rytm for the first time does sampling.

This is about as affordable and easy as gestural interaction with music can get. The powerful Geco music controller app pairs with the $80 Leap Motion hand tracking hardware – and now the app is free. But it could be just the beginning. For its part, the Leap Motion is now sort of yesterday’s news. […]

One’s more compact and cheaper, one has deeper sampling capabilities and a longer history. Which Elektron drum machine/sampler/sequencer is the one to buy? We now know the flagship Octrack’s follow-up, the just-announced Octatrack MKII, shares the software and workflow with the original model. So it’s really a question of whether you want Octatrack or Digitakt. […]

Dance or die? Some kind of robot with killer lasers? Well, if you happened to be in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands round late April 1996, that’s what was promised. There’s so much to love in this VHS vintage gem. There’s the retro Wolfenstein-styled 3D opening with the dramatic threatening voice over. Or the extensive footage […]

Okay, so we know you can keep remaking classic instruments and give people a good time. But what if you want something new and crazy? Can you bottle sonic weirdness and make it work for other people? The first time I saw Peter Edwards play live was at an event we hosted in New York. […]