Years ago, when the phrase “controllerism” was still yet-to-be-coined and there was no official hardware for Ableton Live, DJ Sasha had one hell of a custom piece of kit. The Maven featured oversize, hard-to-disconnect plugs and beautiful metal hardware. Years later, it’d still make any Ableton user drool. What’s a Live user to do? Stop […]

Think we live in a “visual” culture? Maybe not so much – watch what happens, or, rather, listen to what happens if you remove the music from a music video. Foley, that ingredient in filmmaking that winds up being as important as light, is essential. And the results are oddly compelling, perhaps more so without […]

Projection mapping live performance art – The Alchemy of Light by a dandypunk from a dandypunk on Vimeo. “The Alchemy of Light” makes projection mapping more than a sculptural, light-painting illusion. It allows the digital motion image to interact with the performer. And the human performer is a big part of what makes this work. […]

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 […]