New Gold Panda Full-Length: Hypnotic Craft, Deep Feelings, as Always

Gold Panda is back with another full-length masterpiece. Here, any gauzy soft-focus fuzz is stripped away. The music is still warm, focused on chopped-up samples, and delicious, meditative repetition. But it’s more focused than ever, with a dry directness that lets his musical craft come further to the fore. There is some narrative and program […]

Inter-app Audio in iOS 7 + Audiobus? Think Big Plans

Apart from the text we copied yesterday, audio developers can’t say anything about the contents of audio APIs in Apple’s new iOS 7. It’s all under NDA. So, instead, since Apple is all about feelings this week, let me convey the emotion I’m hearing about audio in the iOS update, in the form of a […]

DJ, to Go: A Compact Controller-Interface for Traktor on iOS or Desktop

Native Instruments – among other developers – has now given you a DJ app you can load onto an iPhone or iPad. But that mobility is only useful in a club situation if you can cue tracks through headphones and comfortably control your mix. Lug along a lot of hardware, and you might as well […]

Apple Adds Inter-App Audio, With Not-Before-Seen Features, to iOS 7

It’s official: iOS 7 is adding inter-app audio functionality, for streaming sounds between different software. And whereas this appeared on a slide at last summer’s WWDC, this time, it’s really happening. What does this mean for Audiobus and JACK? Well, Apple is promising some things those tools don’t do, just as those tools do things […]

Sougwen Chung's Chiaroscuro Installation Breathes with Light and Hand-drawn Imagery

Chiaroscuro is an installation work by Sougwen Chung, the Canadian-born, New York-based illustrator/media artist. Veering far from the mechanical minimalism of so much projection mapping, with its hard edges and rectangular conformity, Sougwen instead uses light and animation to draw outside the lines. Shimmering as though refracted through a digital ocean, the animation lights up […]

Sougwen Chung’s Chiaroscuro Installation Breathes with Light and Hand-drawn Imagery

Chiaroscuro is an installation work by Sougwen Chung, the Canadian-born, New York-based illustrator/media artist. Veering far from the mechanical minimalism of so much projection mapping, with its hard edges and rectangular conformity, Sougwen instead uses light and animation to draw outside the lines. Shimmering as though refracted through a digital ocean, the animation lights up […]

iTunes Radio, and Apple’s Solution to the Future of Music: Stream, then Buy

While they were busy not killing the Mac and the Mac Pro, it seems Apple also had some ideas about how to not kill music. Amidst hair pulling and gnashing of teeth over how streaming will impact the future of music business models, Apple’s answer is spelled out in their press release: “It’s the music […]

From Apple, No Lack of Commitment to the Mac, Pros, Creation [WWDC]

Here’s a quick way to sum up the revelations in today’s Apple event: “Oh, so that’s what was keeping them.” It’s certainly true when it comes to OS X and the long-awaited Mac Pro. Critics of Apple and concerned loyal users have worried that the growing success of iOS and consumer platforms would erode support […]

Raster-Noton Gems, with Alva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Emptyset, Aoki Takamasa [Videos]

What’s remarkable about German music label Raster-Noton is not simply its staying power. Rather, it’s the way the aesthetic direction of the label, across visual and sonic media, has remained on course — and how that vision is just as relevant today. The label, founded in the far southeastern German town of Chemnitz by Carsten […]

Bolsa Bass: Critter and Guitari Bass, in Trippy-Cute Animation

Bass makes boys and girls happy, like sugar-y cereals and adorable cute animations. So, it seems only natural to round up the kids, pour yourself a bowl of Honey Smacks, and sit on the beanbag in front of the television set to watch the goodness of the boutique Critter & Guitari Bolsa Bass in an […]