What if you would strip away the latest fashions, the murky layers of effects and gimmicks, and just get out to the otherworldly pleasure of listening to machines transport you into outer-space grooves? The solo debut of Detroit-based artist Erika, Hexagon, could give you just that liberating feeling. It’s arrestingly minimal in its materials, not […]

If you haven’t heard it yet, you owe yourself a listen to Moderat’s II, the second outing from the combination of Berlin electronic superstars Apparat and Modeselektor. A preview has launched on Spotify, but the best option to try before you buy is NPR Music (America’s listener-funded public radio tastemakers): First Listen: Moderat, ‘II’ First, […]

Today, we review the new Moderat LP, II, on Create Digital Music. Teaming up with fellow Berlin-based visual collective Pfadfinderei — that ubiquitous boutique of electronic visualism — Moderat devised a unique way to tease the album. They allowed Web visitors to remote-control a micro projector online. There’s a sense of musical fog in the […]

Various third-party apps have turned your iPad (or, occasionally, Android) into a control surface for DAWs. Many simply emulate the features of Mackie Control, a popular inter-app control protocol. Steinberg offered its own tool with the awkwardly-named but powerful Cubase iC Pro. Killer features: keyboard shortcuts, visual arrangement overview for navigation. Then, came Apple with […]

If Push’s whites have been giving you the blues, everything’s better down where it’s wetter. And while some readers happily dove into the Live 9 waters right on release, recent bugfixes have made this software significantly more mature. (Uh, read: yeah, some stuff was rather broken for a bit there.) First off, just for fun, […]

For all the years of “classical” electronic music performance from academia, the experience of entering a club or dance music program can be awfully avant garde and surreal. There’s a barrage of sensory input – flashing lights, strange, repetitive sounds. The Spanish/British duo Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp, aka EVOL, have taken that […]

What differentiates visual performance and live visuals is the notion of composing imagery in time – producing structures that flow in the way music does. Vezér is an app that focuses solely on the control and temporal aspects of visuals, by providing facilities for you to construct compositions of envelopes. We last checked in with […]

“Analog versus digital” – the discussion, it seems, is everywhere. The problem is, many people simply don’t understand what these terms mean. In one 25-minute video – engaging and entertaining to watch straight to the end – the biggest myths all get busted. In short: 1. 16-bit, 44.1 kHz really is okay for many tasks. […]

Only Berlin would go this dark, musically speaking, in second half of … July. Atonal Festival, an event founded in a very different city way back in 1982, has been resurrected. And the sounds set to echo through the concrete cavern of a former power station represent the cross-currents of an international scene of experimental […]

Disney Research is apparently releasing all their latest inventions at once. The most dazzling, atop the air-interaction-feedback project we saw earlier this week, uses captured light field data to transform ordinary photography into the basis of three-dimensional scenes. Say wha?: This paper describes a method for scene reconstruction of complex, detailed environments from 3D light […]