Watch: McRorie, Legend of Wearable Music Instruments, Still Rocking

The one-man band from the future, McRorie, is still going, it seems. Unbeknownst to us, the artist – real name, Stuart McRorie Tait – revealed a new live electronic show reel at the beginning of the year. See top: he’s still tapping his shoes for drums and beating his chest for toms, but he’s swapped […]

Sonic Imaginings, Assembled Live: Max Cooper’s Sound World, in Mixes and Images

Entering Max Cooper’s sonic world is always a delight. And in a new mix, we hear it pieced together as he imagines his own sonic connections, constructed live. In turns, the Belfast-born, London-based artist can be cinematic and moody, chilled-out and groovy, or angular and glitchy. But everything remains in definition, each sound there for […]

Folk Dub: Listen to Greg Gives Peter Space, Imagine Futures Past [CDM Presents]

Greg Gives Peter Space – A Clear View (Video Teaser) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo. Left with the artifacts of the analog age, the digital revolution now fully commonplace, artists are treating vintage techniques and musical materials as creative colors. Freed from the iron grip of nostalgia or historical accuracy, a record can be simply […]

Your Demoscene Moment: Organic Geometries, Acoustic Sounds, Beating Heart

Ah, so it turns out that demoscene animations don’t all have to feature bad trance music. (Sorry, had to be said.) Srdce is simply exquisite, fluid animations of blades of grass, waveform vibrations, geometric tangles, and the exploding fragments of a beating heart set to a touching song. It came in second at the Outline […]

Staying Mobile, Imperfect; Music and Talk from Robert Lippok, To Rococo Rot

It’s festival season, a time for pre-packaged artists, album-perfect live sets, pristine digital worlds that sometimes literally come from the folks at Google. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe now is a good time to look to the other avenue – to keeping things rough and loud, flawed, live in the sense that […]

From Bluetooth MIDI to Easier, Faster Graphics, New Goodies for Creative Apple Development

Watching new operating systems is always a potent mix of “what new treats will we get?” and “what are they going to break?” Fortunately in this case, it seems Apple is mostly crossing items off users’ and developers’ wish lists on both iOS and OS X, though further details will come in coming developer sessions. […]

All Live, Nonstop, for 24 Hours: How Krautok Berlin Ticks [Listening, Gallery]

Six-hour, eight-hour DJ sets? Okay. How about a 24-hour live set? How about not one artist, but six, or thirty-two, or more? Sometimes it’s techno; sometimes it goes ambient. There’s singing, there’s dancing – just no DJing. That’s the kind of too-much-is-not-enough attitude that has gripped Krautok, a wild 24-hour live jam held together only […]

Behringer Has a Corporate Anthem; It’s Kind of Beyond Description

Way behind the times on this one, because it seems not to have gone viral – yet. But it’s a song about audio equipment manufacturer Behringer – the official corporate song. It’s not a joke. It has a big modulation and “doot doots.” Maybe someone can transcribe the lyrics. That’s — all I can say […]

Watch Mechanical Techno, Dance Music Made Organic, Physical by Graham Dunning

Even in hardware, the repetitive patterning of dance music remains invisible to the eye. Sure, you might get a blinking light here and there, but otherwise, the process is virtual, whether the sound process is analog or digital. Graham Dunning’s Mechanical Techno project is different. Every pattern is made physical and tangible, every machine rhythm […]

Pianoteq 5 Improves Piano Modeling, Without Eating Up Your Hard Drive

If you want a fake piano, you can have a fake piano. You can have increasingly-good models and samples in hardware, but you can really get a fake piano on your computer. You can buy entire hard drives just to store the gigabytes of samples. You can load massive instances of Kontakt with different recorded […]