Every so often, something comes along that’s just irresistibly lovable. So it was with the Korg monotron. With a price of US$60 (or far less), a pocketable size, the ability to run on batteries, a nice, glowing red LFO knob, a delicious filter, and toy-like playability, everyone loves the monotron. People who have racks of […]

Even from the birds-eye view of larger genres, the interrelations and ongoing transformation of music is dynamic, complex, and inter-connected. That’s the view in The Evolution of Western Dance Music, a map of musical styles in five-year chunks across the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The project is the […]

Big pixels, enormous screen: watching the latest LED wall spring to life from basic materials, with a lot of effort, is a sheer delight. Reader Konstantin Leonenko sends in this work, by technical producers YBCOZ, for the Dutch artist Giny Vos’ cinematic installation. The sheer quantity of LEDs aside, it’s the ability of that cinematic […]

If you do want to get religious about this, you may want to wear this around your neck: Open Source Hardware logo as jewelry! Photo (CC-BY-SA) MAKE’s Becky Stern. We’ve followed open source hardware – and generally hardware that is more open to user customization and modification – on this site since the beginning. As […]

Apple’s GarageBand music creation and amp simulation on iPad is now also on the company’s handhelds, with iPhone (3GS, 4, 4S) and iPod touch (3rd-generation and better) support. You only have to buy GarageBand once; the app runs on all those platforms, so if you had the iPad version and also own a compatible device, […]

Microsoft appears to be taking the step some of its rivals – the likes of Sony and Nintendo – failed to do, and that’s to acknowledge that something it made has been re-imagined beyond its original purpose. The above video pretty much says it all. Remember, it might not have been this way. Aside from […]

You know they’re enjoying this. So you will, too. Photo: Ragnar Schmuck Studio, courtesy Modeselektor. Absorbing the earnestly-nervous urgency of Thom Yorke’s rhythms, Modeselektor dial in a perfect collaboration on “Shipwreck,” a highlight from their latest full-length. Tony T. Datis directs the music video adaptation into a dark narrative. Wandering children set the scene, but […]

In case you haven’t yet seen it make the rounds, the upcoming indie game Parallax deserves special aesthetic mention. A kind of monochromatic take on Portal, its slick, cool, understated world opens windows through space, producing inverse chromatic values that give cues to the overlaid spatial dimensions. It’s a glimpse of the kinds of visual […]

How can visualists and venues begin to forge a closer relationship? For one look at how the two can converge, we look at New York’s Brooklyn Bowl. Now, sometimes, I simply get things wrong. When CDM contributor Annapurna Kumar wrote about Brooklyn Bowl’s Eye Candy for Strangers open call, and its lack of compensation, I […]

Instruments like the Theremin may be trying to shake off their association with fear, dread, and the unnatural. But the synthesizer has no such concern: after all, the Moog is pretty much a rock star, literally. So, for anyone fiddling around with the Animoog – hopefully including iPad owners who are newer to synthesis – […]