Pigments 5 from Arturia adds the ability to route audio input into soft synth, opening up new sound design possibilities and turning Pigments into a multi-effects plug-in for any source. Here’s a detailed guide on how to use it, with notes – and some presets to get you going.

The musical revolution led by underground Black artists in Detroit has brought Roland back to the source. An editorial team from the Japanese gear giant goes inside the story of Submerge and Underground Resistance.

Noise Engineering continues to revive beloved and now-unavailable modules from their back catalog, thanks to their updateable firmware platforms. But Sinc Legio is more like a sequel, with internal modulation, new algorithms, and stereo chorus atop the original’s formula of phase modulation, hard sync, and wavefolding.

Palestinian multi-instrumentalist and experimental DJ Falyakon has long been an inspiration to anyone who’s met her – for her energy, her vision, and the depth of feeling and activism threaded into her music mixes. We were fortunate to have her in the Refuge Worldwide studio over the weekend, in a mix that says what no opinion piece or social media post can.

Imagine polyphonic modular patches – but now imagine that with polyphonic patch cables. Announced in May, Tiptop Audio’s ART system and patching approach arrives now as modules, a system, and a whole mess of videos exploring patching with this paradigm for polyphony and integrated expressive data, all via analog connections.

Turn the clock back to 1995. It’s the era of Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet.” Detour Magazine asks Spike Jonez to photograph Björk, and he’s as smitten as all of us with her creative imagination. Now we get to see still more photos of that day, plus words and a complete chifa wonton recipe – for free.

The STP16 is a 16-step trigger/gate sequencer for Eurorack, with a twist – hocketing! It’s on preorder now for worldwide shipping, coming directly from Kyiv, Ukraine, where MachineRoom remains a haven for sound.

It samples! It slices! It dices! The legendary Sampleslicer was due for reinvention with current-generation chips. Now the MKIII is up on crowdfunding site IndieGogo, with a load of new features and an all-new USB keyboard companion.

Selestium Modular isn’t quite like other modular makers – creator Adriana Knouf imagines an extraterrestrial dig on which this creation was unearthed. Add rubber bands and pluck away: the results are otherworldly.

With insistent phasing tones ringing in your ears in phasing, tense microtonal tunings, sawing timbres in the background, Sote’s Ministry of Tall Tales for SVBKVLT opens immediately with deep-inflicted wounds. The artist Ata Ebtekar talks to us about desperate mental states as we try to share that pain with the video for “Lips Seeking the Forbidden.”