We’re in a strange time, as we big farewell to a great generation of pioneers of electronic music. French composer Jean-Claude Risset’s work can still tickle our perception and challenge what’s possible. He helped expand the frontiers of what digital synthesis can do for our ears, and brought the technology to the European continent. And […]

If you want a nice, pristine, versatile delay/reverb, then … this isn’t it. It’s called the MotherF***er 2 for a reason. It’s the creation of Ewa Justka, engineer and musician born in Poland and based in London. (Ewa was also nice enough to co-host the MusicMakers Hacklab with us at CTM Festival this year, where […]

Here’s an unexpected twist in the plot: Final Cut Pro, the product that perhaps more than any other earned ire from users for not being “pro,” might be the thing that sells you on the Mac. Why? Final Cut Pro is really, really fast. After all, paper specs don’t matter. It’s really world performance in […]

Assemble, cosmonauts: Dasha Rush is an artist whose musical worlds merit repeat visits. She represents the best of what an artist straddling techno and ambient can be – with ambient sets that pulse and live, with timbral and structural freedom rather than resorting to dreary droning grays. So let’s take a break from her better-known […]

Effortless wireless sync everywhere has arrived with free software, too, thanks to Ableton’s new open source SDK. And it’s incredibly easy – enough so that anyone with even rudimentary patching skills will probably want to try this out. Pure Data, the free and open source cousin of Max/MSP, looks ugly but does great stuff. And […]

Here’s a pitch you don’t expect from an iOS developer: Dot Melody is “kind of weird and limited.” Oh yeah, and how about those glowing hands-on reviews from the first people to try it? Well, reactions “ranged from confused to outwardly hostile.” But wait – we’re in the music making business. Weird and confusing is […]

“The Algorithm.” It sounds like something ominous out of scifi – an AI character from The Matrix, maybe. It’s the name for the proprietary system by which Facebook shows you content. And this element of social media has been under fire lately, even on the global political scale. Computer rules are invisibly determining what you […]

News and information is important, but it won’t focus you on what matters. Checking Facebook might distract you, but it won’t calm you. Only music is wired directly into our mood when we’re alone. And leave the algorithms; there’s nothing like a human mix. So it is that we bring you regular mixes as windows […]

You might have some art history under your belt. Now experimental artists are giving the machines a chance to do the same. It’s called Google Arts & Culture Experiments, and it takes a new angle on machine learning. The concept: let those algorithms find new ways of venturing through the history of art and human […]

Think of it as a Christmas movie for electronic music nerds.