Brainfeeder at work. Photo (CC-BY-NC-SA) Theo Jemison Photography. Writing about music may indeed be like dancing about architecture, so why not give music a listen? If you’re not already familiar with the terrific Los Angeles label Brainfeeder, founded by Flying Lotus, now’s the time to discover its artists. If you are familiar with them, you […]

Photo (CC-BY-NC-SA) Henrik Berggren. De:Bug is one of my favorite reads in music technology. And while I can fake my way through French and Spanish, De:Bug is also the one non-English publication I read daily. So I’m gratified to get to write a byline for the publication, which someone was nice enough to translate into […]

The Rutt-Etra modular video synthesizer may be an early-1970s relic. But it’s an expressive visual instrument that seems even more contemporary and timeless today than when it first appeared. So it’s fitting that a new music video makes its intricate generated analog eye candy the star. Set to Nalepa’s track “Daytime,” the work – by […]

The Rutt-Etra modular video synthesizer may be an early-1970s relic. But it’s an expressive visual instrument that seems even more contemporary and timeless today than when it first appeared. So it’s fitting that a new music video makes its intricate generated analog eye candy the star. Set to Nalepa’s track “Daytime,” the work – by […]

Photo: Marsha Vdovin for CDM. Remember when electronic sound gear hid in hulking, rack-sized cases? Korg’s Kaossilator series had already begun shrinking the desktop KAOSS Pad gear, but even the first-generation Kaossilator wouldn’t fit in your pocket, given its square shape and corners. (Well, unless you were wearing overalls.) The Kaossilator 2 and Mini Kaoss […]

processing to MadMapper via Syphon [Test] from espadaysantacruz studio on Vimeo. Wish you could get Modul8 to take an input from some other tool, so that in addition to playing videos, you could “insert” custom visuals as you play? Wish you could VJ with Processing – without giving up your VJ tool, too? Wish you […]

Music is deeply tied up with motion; seeing that in a machine is somehow satisfying. Soundmachines, from the enigmatically-titled Berlin studio TheProduct*, is an interactive physical installation made from optical turntables. By moving the “tone arm” – really in this case an optical sensor attached to an extended mount – you can change rhythms and […]

We’ve seen lots of fancy projection maps, sculptural creations, and elaborate architectural facades. But sometimes, you just want to get rid of those awful seams when using a couple of projectors. And that can make all the difference. Enter Blendy. This friendly, simple Mac tool sits between two visual applications and gets rid of those […]

Continuing our insight into this view into electronic music performance and art through the lens of BodyControlled in Berlin, we’re joined by guest writer Kristin Trethewey. Kristin, a Canadian-born video artist and curator, takes another look at LEAP and BodyControlled, on the eve of its second installment. She gets straight at the question of what […]

With a nod to the forms and shapes of analog-generated imagery, but fully digital, here’s another digital type project. Buchstabengewitter (perhaps translated “Letterstorm”), by Ingo Italic, uses generative patching to imagine type that emerges from three-dimensional clouds of geometry. It comes to us from the research laboratory at Letters are my Friend, the Berlin type […]