It makes some people cringe each December as much as the appearance of WHAM! and Paul McCartney (oh, “Wonderful Christmastime”). It’s the end of year lists in electronic music. I have no particular problem with them, except that they’re limited in what they tell us. We get surveys that allow people to learn what the […]

Record releases are old and tired. So are jewelry. Let’s solve this: with a wearable 8-bit necklace and pendant that takes audio input and turns it into weird visualizations – of course. DU-QVJ is a collaboration between Detroit Underground, the fantastic tastefully strange label, with Russian engineer Alexander Zolotov. Add a tiny battery, plug in […]

Culture can be a different construction in our inter-connected age. We can draw on traditions from a distant past – or imagine a distant future. We can more easily connect with the people around us, or the people on the other corner of the world. So, as I host CDM’s fourth Hacklab with CTM Festival […]

patten has gone from CD-R releases to Warp, remaining anonymous all the while. But these secretive artists told us about where they find inspiration.

There may be an Ableton logo splashed on it and integration designed specifically for Live. But one of the nice things about Ableton’s Push and Push 2 hardware are that, at their core, they’re open. Everything sends and receives standard MIDI messages. As we’ve seen, even the display is hackable. And that is admirable not […]

For a lot of us, hands-on sequencing control is a boon to playing, even alongside a computer. So then there’s the question of which sequencer. The reason Arturia’s BeatStep Pro got so interesting this year is that it’s a right-down-the-middle option: not too expensive, not too complicated, and not too weird, but very capable of […]

Triple Sun – Sprint from Martin Blažíček on Vimeo. From Bratislava, the duo Triple Sun are making spontaneous, ethereal music with a combination of modular and computational tools. Against a flickering black-and-white film, this video last year is one of my favorites. We’re inviting Triple Sun this week to Berlin along with Jonáš Gruska as […]

As more people bring home hardware, the next question is how to get that running smoothly with software – for recording and control. We just saw a really great tutorial for doing it in Reaper, using our MeeBlip synth. Now there’s another unsolicited MeeBlip tutorial (really, I had nothing to do with this), this time […]

There are a lot of hugely powerful things you can do with an environment like Reaktor. But that doesn’t necessarily suggest where to begin. The best way to get into a deep tool is often to solve a simple problem. At the Native Sessions installment on Reaktor 6, Nadine Raihani showed us a simple example […]

It’s a marvelous time to be a musician. You can imagine a musical instrument, a compositional invention, and then realize that idea in short order. So I was glad to get the chance to emcee an evening of discussion with Reaktor experts, including the folks who built the tool, last month in the software’s hometown […]