Kraft test drummie & Robert Plant from NormanBates on Vimeo. Sorry, keys and switches and buttons: it’s all about sponges now. Using metal sponges, a houseplant (Swedish Ivy, to be specific), and a circuit-bent toy, Cristian Martínez and companion perform whimsically-wonderful music. And, of course, it’s dubbed Kraft Test Dummy and Robert Plant. Cristian, aka […]

In the world of VJ apps, CoGe is an intriguing upstart – a semi-modular design, built around integrating Quartz Composer patches, lets you create customized VJ rigs on the Mac. Hungary has produced both the app and a passionate community of users. It’s time to catch up with this app, including a round of new […]

Watching a skyscraper go up is always fascinating. For a long time, the thing basically looks like a bit pit in the ground. After some time, you get the beginnings of a skeleton. Suddenly, the structure rises at a near-impossible pace, climbing into the clouds faster than you’d imagine. Then, it’s at a point when […]

Why is The Moogist playing in a pantry? It’s … unclear. (mmmm… Vanilla Almond Clusters.) But this performer, aka Tim Tsang, demonstrates that with some modulation, you can turn you keyboard shredding into something much wilder. Expect explosive flurries of atonal melodic flourishes and timbral mayhem. Using a Moog Voyager, he modulates those pitches into […]

Beyond the viral-ready novelty, listen to the serenades of defunct hard drives, flatbed scanners, and garage sale-rescue computers and you might just hear a sense of urgency. As the discs whir, the chips bleet, and the solenoids ping percussion, this chorus of obsolete electronics seems to plea, save us from landfill doom. The latest breakout […]

German maker Mode Machines has been busy in the cloning laboratory. The latest hardware melds the classic chip sounds of the SID chip with an x0x sequencer a la the Roland TB-303. That surely qualifies as the synth nerd equivalent of combining chocolate and peanut butter.

Animator Clement Picon, best known for producing a video for Radiohead’s Reckoner, here weaves a beautiful imaginary digital landscape, in textured storybook layers. Leaves explode into rectangles, and the music wends its way from mountainside to underwater sea. We’ve seen some music video charm from j.viewz before in a 2000-photo stop motion masterpiece, and they […]

“Blah, blah, I use Acme MusicStation Pro because it sounds completely dope – I love that compressor.” Okay. Before we begin, you’re not alone. Yes, a lot of artist profile endorsements, even some well-meaning ones, can wind up being rather useless. But at the risk of being redundant – since many of you get their […]

In speaking about iPad apps this week, I mentioned the possibility of music made by cats. And, of course, today we look at the possibility of going inside Machinedrum’s musical technique. So, it’s only appropriate to offer you the opportunity to produce music with a sonic toolbox … developed by a cat. (Apologies, Mr. Stewart […]

Making new sounds means doing more than just making new sounds. Artist/composer Mark Fell (also known as half of SND) dives directly into the thorny question of form. And when he looks for new forms, he literally looks. The visually-trained artist speaks about making “non-representational” music in the same way an abstract artist might. (No […]