Teenage Engineering’s hotly-anticipated synth / music-making hardware OP-1 finally got an official release last week. Early stocks promptly sold out, but new waves of deliveries should refresh availability. We’ll have more from TE on the launch and the instrument soon. In the meantime, you can thank early-adopter Ludwig Mueller for being brave enough to post […]

Techno-wizardry and eye candy aside, make no mistake: as artists, we engage every day the essence of truth and deception. So, while magician Marco Tempest’s hands are fleet, his magician-trained choreography slick, and his coordinated mobile screens impressive, it’s the message behind the medium that’s most poignant. To me, at least, Marco has something to […]

Techno-wizardry and eye candy aside, make no mistake: as artists, we engage every day the essence of truth and deception. So, while magician Marco Tempest’s hands are fleet, his magician-trained choreography slick, and his coordinated mobile screens impressive, it’s the message behind the medium that’s most poignant. To me, at least, Marco has something to […]

Drawing from historical lightbulbs, powered by creative code (the open source, C++ tool Cinder), “So… I was at a party last night” is a symphony in responsive electric lights. The reactive portion is relatively simple – sound analysis switches lights off and on in clusters – but the objects themselves move to the fore. The […]

Alder Soundplane prototype with blanks of reclaimed redwood and Doug Fir. Photo by Randy Jones; used by permission. On tablets, on displays, multi-touch control these days is calibrated largely as a software interface – more Starship Enterprise panel than violin. As such, it works well for production tools and exploring compositional ideas. But it falls […]

Patching together unique sounds on the classic Buchla 100 was an impetus for a new software instrument by Randy Jones – just released for Windows. Photo (CC-BY) guiltyx/roll_initiative. Software can easily enough emulate, down to each knob and patch cord, a vintage synthesizer. But can a genuinely new software synth incorporate the ideas about instrument […]

CDM regular Zaxx Davros sends word of a new, sprawling compilation to benefit Joplin, Missouri in the aftermath of that town’s devastating tornado. Charity compilations seem to be growing in number, but perhaps that in itself is worth mentioning. As social networks and (ahem) blogs spread, increasingly crowd-stimulated micro-donations drive charity. One-click giving is no […]

Seen at Mutek, Comaduster’s piece “Scrape” is a sumptuous, sensual photographic feast of macro imagery. Amidst audiovisual work that has tended to narrow aesthetic bands like minimalism or slick 3D futurism, I find work like this stimulating as a suggestion of the kind of explorations to come. With digital media wide-open by design, there’s really […]

Let’s get this out of the way first: if you’re looking for a tool for composing and editing scores on your iPad, Avid Scorch isn’t it — not yet, at least. But as a score reader, Scorch could be a glimpse of a future in which tablets create a new marketplace and exchange for notated […]

Electronic musician, vocalist, and inventor Tim Exile is back; while the Google Doodle today of an interactive Les Paul inspired lots of people to invest some time fiddling and hacking, in Tim’s case, it inspired a whole song. And, to my knowledge, it’s the first time the homepage of Google got its own ode. Bet […]