If you need sonic architecture to hold emotions beyond words, look no further to this poignant sampler by the underrated Facade Electronics, the label by FAX out of Mexicali, Mexico. It’s brought together by feeling as much as something superficial like genre. I had the same sense of connections to producers I care about in contributing a mix this fall.

Late last week, we learned of the passing of a legend of electronic music production, Mexico’s Álvaro Ruiz Mayagoitia. His wide-ranging talent across various aliases (Balboa, Ruisort) should have gotten far wider recognition outside of Mexico. It turned with ease from glitchy experimental minimalism to hip-hop electronica to soundtracks, his imagination simply refused to be confined to a single form of expression.

Lofi Oddity for macOS and Windows features a unique set of sonic degradation filters – and makes an excellent tour of the work plugin maker aberrant dsp is doing on modeling nonlinearities and destruction.

Make your transition into this: it’s the intersection of a love of custom DIY USB keyboards, computers and mobile devices, turntables, and vinyl mixing. Yamamoto Shunichi shares their creation, C4NDY KeyVLM, an ortholinear-layout keyboard for combining mobile digital and vinyl sets.

LANDR’s machine learning-powered mastering service is now more than a simple web tool. The quality of the results has matured over years of development, and you can opt for a plug-in version with a complete set of tweakable controls. So, is the current offering worth considering, even if you know what you’re doing with mastering tools?

In difficult times, paying attention to music can be an act of humanity. We turn to music not because it attracts attention, but because we want to fill our ears and souls. From Indonesia-to-Mexico collaborations to resurfacing legends, Mongolian hip hop to rethought AI, David Abravanel is back with a personal set of selections to round out the year.

Creator Orllewin didn’t just produce a magical minimalistic modular in glorious black and white on Panic’s Playdate mobile system. There is beautiful music to go along with it – and an upcoming free port to Lua (meaning support for other platforms).

Want to fill your YouTube feed with basically all synthesizer legend Suzanne Ciani, all the time? Now’s a great time to click subscribe, as she’s uploading an incredible amount of music. (Eat your heart out, Aphex Twin.) Also, can we pause and just consider that she wrote an incredible composition for a beeping GE dishwasher?

System Flow for Reaktor 6 features a 32-grain, two-sample-slot granular engine for producing drones and textures – and it’s completely free. It was all born at Synthesizer Studio Berlin, a rentable studio full of classic vintage analog and early digital synths.

Teenage Engineering’s fecund design imagination has yielded inventions wonderful, ambitious, sometimes prohibitively expensive, odd… but can the company reinvent the lowly field recorder? And was the “field system” just marketing vision or pipe dream – or does it bring those pieces together for something genuinely musical and productive? We turn again to CDM’s at-large Swedish gear tester (and tester of Swedish gear) Andreas Roman for a proper review. -Ed.