For any tool that has “live” in the name, physical control will always be important. And so even with a broad market for controllers targeting Ableton’s flagship software, now including the slick Push hardware from Ableton themselves, AKAI’s re-vamped APC line earned intense interest when it debuted at Musikmesse this month. Let’s make sense of […]

Enough gear. Let’s get some music to hear. From the UK to Cambodia, Rob O’Hara is making beautifully-crafted music we never want to miss. So a new record is absolutely time for attention – and time to bring in our friend and regular columnist Matt Earp, aka Kid Kameleon, to give a listen. I’ve written […]

“O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done –“ Yes, Andreas Schneider is an ideal gentleman to lead you through a trade show, to show you what is genuinely interesting in new musical inventions. The famed (notorious?) synth guru from Berlin behind Schneidersladen and now distributor ALEX4, he is a fierce and fearless champion […]

Okay, After Effects fans — Ahem. Yo Dawg, I hear you like Syphon, so I put Syphon in Your After Effects. Or something to that effect. Say what? Well, Syphon, for those of you who have, um, never read this site, is a technology for connecting textures between apps on the Mac. And that includes […]

Light Installations Show Reel 2013-2014 from Licht.Pfad Studio on Vimeo. Seeing the future of light in performance, installation, and clubs doesn’t necessarily mean waiting around for some fantastic, new kind of lighting instrument. That requires big manufacturers making mass-market products, and their priorities don’t always align with artists. Instead, what we’re seeing is often traditional […]

It’s not enough to just release sound hardware. You want something different, something with character. French builder OTO Machines did that with their Biscuit, a gorgeous combination of 8-bit crunch and analog filtering, then later turned it into a synth and step sequencer with nothing but firmware. But now it’s time for a follow-up, and […]

This shouldn’t work. A video full of lasers, mountain ranges inexplicably floating through space, and endless shots of cats should seem a cloying, annoying play for eyeballs. And yet … Can’t … take my eyes … away … somehow. (And I’m a dog person, darnit.) Thank Immo König. The solo director / motion graphics house […]

Symbols in on paper can be realized as music, so why not turn a tattoo on your arm into a musical score? That’s what artist Dmitry Morozov (“vtol”), Moscow-based media artist and musician, has done with “reading my body.” It does more than transform his body markings into sounds. He mounts a machine on his […]

The beautiful thing about modular synths is making connections physically – each link with an actual cable between them. It is, really, the whole point. Of course, you need somewhere to put all those cables and keep them organized. There are various cable racks available, but they’re generally mounted to walls and such. Synthtopia this […]

Vuo 0.6 normal+specular mapping demo from Steve Mokris on Vimeo. Vuo, aka “that visual development environment that isn’t Quartz Composer, continues to march forward. Just a quick tidbit, but this looks like a tasty morsel: normal and specular maps on 3D objects mean more photo-realistic lighting. As the demo video puts it: Vuo 0.6 supports […]