On Record Store Day, Music in Physical Places – In a Forest, Even?

If you’re heading out into the wilderness to find a record store, why not actually head out into the wilderness – the one with trees – and find music there? Today, a you’ve no doubt heard, is Record Store Day. The official site is a useful resource, today and around the year. Today brings a […]

Learning Max/MSP and Jitter, and Remixing beeple: 50 Recipes, Results

If you’re trying to tackle visual programming to move your art forward, know this: you’re not alone. And so it is that Mike Todd writes us to share Andrew Benson’s ongoing series of Jitter tutorials. I remember reading Andrew’s tutorials years ago, but the guy just keeps going – “recipe” number 50 for Max/MSP’s matrix/visual […]

Live Set of the Week: Generative Set, telematique + u-matic + Sascha Funke, Audionite [Jitter, Syphon]

On a tremendous three-screen rig at Nantes, France’s new Stereolux venue, Berlin-based u-matic and telematique show off their latest custom Jitter rig. By networking their machines, they’re able to collaborate; Syphon lets them separate the generative tools from the mixer (an increasingly-nice solution on the Mac). The results are geometric and abstract, fitting the Berlin-themed […]

Music Making, Shared: Communal Ambient Tracks Explore Instagram Photos, Lisbon, and More

This collection of Instagram photos inspired an ambient compilation at the end of last year – one well worth adding to your listening queue now. Since then, challenges opened to a community on SoundCloud have produced hundreds of terrific tracks – and the latest weekly challenge is on now, with a deadline midnight Monday. Where […]

Open Call: Kernel Festival, Your Audiovisuals, in Italy [Deadline April 30]

Just the mention of Italy tickles the art nerves in a lot of us, from its history to its ongoing culture. If that appeals to you, don’t miss this open call for a terrific festival at the beautiful Villa Tittoni Traversi in Desio, Italy (outside Milan). The Kernel Festival will feature digital and visual art, […]

Borderlands, Amazing-Looking Granular Sampler [iPad, Desktop, Free Source], and Beautiful Sound

How do you visualize the invisible? How do expose a process with multiple parameters in a way that’s straightforward and musically intuitive? Can messing about with granular sound feel like touching that sound – something untouchable? Music’s ephemeral, unseeable quality, and the ways we approach sound in computer music in similarly abstract ways, are part […]

Church-Inspired Electronic Music, in Album and Interactive, Gothic App, from Forss [Listen]

Delicate and dense, melodies and sounds from church contexts, found sounds of bells and voices, are set against crisp, sharply-solid, forward-driving electronic beats. And then, there are the visuals: an archaic architecture of mystical symbols and three-dimensional, evolving forms interpret the music in visual form. Swedish-born artist and technologist Eric Wahlforss, in other words, has […]

Sculpting Sound with Maja Ratkje [Film]

The worlds of sound open to us as musicians seem limitless, endlessly unfolding in variety and possibility. So, even in a series of impressionistic moments from an upcoming film, it’s a delight to see composer Maja Ratkje play with sound. The Norwegian musician and vocalist, an improviser frequent collaborator with artists like Jaap Blonk, is […]

The Erasers: Live Cinema, Made Really Live, in Live Performance Theater Visuals

VJing or live visuals can quickly become simply re-purposed mixes of found video clips, a visual equivalent to a DJ mixing records. Generative and abstract visuals have been one response to that. But in the work of The Erasers, “live cinema” comes to mean really just that. Roving cameras wander the action, as players manipulate […]

FL Studio 10.5 Performance Mode in Beta: Bridge Arrangement and Live, Easy Hardware Control

FL Studio’s live performance functionality has been teased for some time online, attracting enraptured eyeballs and plenty of discussion online. Now, you can give it a try for yourself in the new FL Studio 10.5 beta. My prediction: it’s definitely huge for FL Studio die-hards, but it could also attract some “lapsed” FL users back […]