This might just be a real spiritual successor to the Cracklebox. (That’s the classic – and very nicely unpredictable – creation of Michel Waisvisz, one associated with the research program at STEIM and many of the ideas about expression and nonlinear sound ever since.) STEREO FIELD is a sound box / controller centered around touch […]

Demian Licht’s music is frenetic and frightening, but precise, cinematic sonic thriller with an insistent pulse. And the Mexico City-based artist has done it again, following up in less than a year the first installment of her Female Criminals with Female Criminals, Vol. 2. CDM is talking to Demian this week, but I wanted to […]

Digital signal processing is some futuristic stuff. It may not be able literally to let you traverse space and time as relative dimensions, but it can treat time and frequency separately and mash them back together. And that’s already freaky enough. Now, Eventide – the folks you know probably for their classic hardware and reverbs […]

If you just want a nice MIDI keyboard, frankly, you’ve got loads of options. So Native Instruments’ Komplete Kontrol S-series of keyboards has got to do more. The 1.8 release that came out yesterday takes a step in the right direction, with enhanced scale and mode support and enhanced integration with both Reaktor Blocks and […]

Those of us in music more or less noticed today, “hey, my SoundCloud audio isn’t loading” — while the rest of the Internet went crazy because lots of things were broken. But the reason was Amazon S3, the “cloud” storage service provided by the retail giant. Early indications appear, though, that SoundCloud’s audio playback and […]

One postlude to the Bitwig announcement – yes, someone at Bitwig has forked Ableton Link support. Have a look: Thanks to one sharp-eyed Twitter reader for catching this one! https://github.com/bitwig/link The reason is interesting – ALSA clock support on Linux, which would make working with Link on that OS more practical. Now, Ableton has no […]

German YouTuber “studentsmusic” has come across the Nintendo Power Glove mod used by none other than Eurorack originator Dieter Doepfer. And he had a hell of a client – Kraftwerk. Now, whether you have any desire whatsoever to don some gloves and wave your hands around, the peculiar category of music glove has a long […]

Go go gadget DAW. That’s the feeling of Bitwig Studio 2, which is packed with new devices, a new approach to modulation, and hardware integration. Just a few of these on their own might not really be news, but Bitwig has a lot of them. Put them together, and you’ve got a whole lot of […]

There are apps, and then there are apps with a studio soul. Modstep feels like it uniquely qualifies as the latter. If you’ve just got your iPad, it’s built with lots of interoperability with other apps in mind. And then combine it with hardware, and out of the box, it makes all that outboard gear […]

Ableton Link has already proven itself as a way of syncing up Ableton Live, mobile apps (iOS), and various desktop apps (Reason, Traktor, Maschine, and more), in various combinations. Now, we’re seeing support for live visuals and VJing, too. Three major Mac apps have added native Ableton Link support for jamming in the last couple […]