Through political change, people keep making art – whether overtly political or not, finding some home in the landscapes that shift around them. We now find ourselves able to map the work and ideas of artists across space and time, to a greater extent than ever before. Amidst international obsession on Berlin, for instance, it’s […]

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never witnessed a hotcake sale. I can’t say how “selling like hotcakes” goes down. Now we’re seeing more details of the affordable analog stompboxes from Moog. Looking like the ideal stomp effects for both musicians on a budget and the guitarist/bass player, these Minifoogers should sell as fast […]

SONAR, Cakewalk’s flagship Windows DAW, receives a significant update this month as SONAR X3. There are a number of improvements, but what may be the most significant is a deep integration of Celemony’s toolset for manipulating pitch and time. DAW tastes will be forever personal, so you can be forgiven if you simply don’t like […]

American retailer Sweetwater leaked news of Maschine Studio yesterday; today, it’s pocket-sized, affordable versions of Moog effects that seems to be out of the bag. Yes, it’s a rumor, non-official, unconfirmed, yadda yadda – but this one’s hard not to believe at face value, it makes so much sense. The units, many of which appear […]

Projection … visuals … video … VJs … pixels. What we’re really talking about is light: light, manipulated in three-dimensions as dynamic digital medium. So, it’s fitting that as the draft form of educational programming for the Moscow International Festival of Light was being passed around, I noticed the following edit on a panel title: […]

Here’s a word not normally associated with music editing: histograms. We’ve been waiting a long time for Bitwig Studio, once announced, to actually ship something. The latest video reveals a bit of what they’ve apparently been up to: they’ve been going a bit wild building an obsessive-compulsive MIDI editing suite. Whatever happens with Bitwig, it […]

Native Instruments’ groove-centric production studio Maschine today gets its most significant update ever. The software has been completely rewritten from the ground up, bringing expanded editing and sound capabilities and enhanced performance. And alongside the software release, there’s also a new, “flagship” controller, called Maschine Studio (above) – a big (but lightweight) beast with bright, […]

Techno icon Marcel Dettmann has just released a second full-length. While associated with insistent-symmetrical dancefloor rhythms and phrases, it may be sound and timbre that are worth appreciating here. Dettmann did a wonderful interview for Electronic Beats (released in the summer, shot last winter, below). And the timing of that release makes it a perfect […]

Born in a very different Berlin in 1934, Hans-Joachim Roedelius is an elder legend of electronic music and piano, having helped establish the voice of German krautrock and ambient music. (Think Cluster, Harmonia, Aquarello.) But today, he is as active in international tours as artists a fraction of his age, freely pouring out music. And […]

monome, the iconic grid controller that launched them all, has always been a device tethered to a computer. Without a USB connection to your machine, it is an attractive but functionless box. The latest monome project, the result of a collaboration between Brian Crabtree and musician Ezra Buchla (yes, there’s a relation) is different. It […]