It’s a new golden age for synth lovers, past meeting the future and so on. At least, we have a stunning number of wonderful toys. And the DIY community is coming up with a number of particularly special creations. Take the terrific open source PreenFM, an original, 6-operator FM synth that’s entirely open source hardware […]

Impulse from gold extra on Vimeo. Don’t wait for the cyborg future. It’s here – embedded more deeply in ourselves than any googles or prosthetic. The words are from 1949 – Max Bense, a Cassandra on technology, talking about “technical existence.” The visuals are part stop motion, part digital effect and glitching edit. And the […]

Techno is no longer new, no longer radical, no longer industrial, no longer trendy, no longer shocking. But it just might be something else: lasting. Famed Köln label Kompakt, as sure a bellweather for techno as anything, turns twenty this year. And in celebrating its birthday, humans and machines meet again. Electronic dance music has […]

The standards for advance promotion of an album may be getting a little … intense. Photos? Track listing? Advance music video? Streaming preview? How about a complete, playable adventure video game in your Web browser, free, with charming graphics and an original chip music soundtrack adapting the songs from the record in 8-bit form? Due […]

For months, many musicians have been waiting to get assembled Push hardware from Ableton. But here, you get it disassembled – down to bare washers and screws – in a massive teardown. It’s a chance to see what lies inside that mysterious black box without voiding your warranty. The video is narrated in Czech, so […]

GrandVJ remains one of the top tools for VJing and live visuals, from the firm that helped popularize these tools. But competition remains fierce. Version 2, now entering public beta, offers some reasons for current users to remain loyal – and could even lure people considering a new tool. Spoiler alert: mapping is arriving. The […]

Sleek and black, sporting a high-resolution jog wheel, the MTRX-8 is a futuristic sequencer the likes of which you probably haven’t seen in hardware before. Even though it’s the product of a boutique DIY maker – France’s Fyrd Instruments, aka designer Julien Fayard – it’s eschews the usual homebrewed, retro aesthetics. And it’s not expensive, […]

Bacon and eggs on a drum snare? Hands-through-the-air gestural control with Leap Motion? Water pianos in ice trays and a hacked Makey Makey, all talking to Ableton Live? Drumactica has a little bit of everything. London-based percussionist Dr. Enrico Bertelli shares with us how he “augmented” percussion for his latest project – with all the […]

“The future has arrived; it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson. Well, that’s certainly true of digital recording. Dedicated producers aside, the masses of musicians in the world are often still at a loss when they want to record their music on the iPads and laptops and machines that surround them. And for […]

Parallax from Incredible Bob on Vimeo. At its best, art can change a perspective, or change the way you see. In the installation “Parallax” by our friend Incredible Bob, that’s meant literally – very literally. Using hacked viewfinders and analog video tech, the Belgrade-based artist shows the viewer what happens when the perspective of your […]