When it comes to playing a hand-built Fence Bass and recording it live, there aren’t hard and fast rules or techniques you have to follow. But musician, composer, and sound designer Diego Stocco can certainly make the mysterious timbres of his exotic instruments into evocative atmospheres. In “Dustland,” the performance and effects are all recorded […]

What happens when you try to make bleeping and beeping a business? Meet the Beep-It, a simple but addictive optical theremin, and a fun noisemaking impulse buy for sonic enthusiasts. Then, if you’ve ever fancied developing a new idea into a product, learn a little bit about the path of its creator. We hear a […]

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”300″]http://vimeo.com/20111796[/vimeo] Last week, guest writer Momo proposed a set of semantics and abstraction for making audiovisual collaboration more expressive – starting with ideas as fundamental as describing a kick beat. Now, he returns to show us what he actually means in his work, element by element. -Ed. This is the current version of […]

When I asked what albums readers were loving early in 2011, England-based James Blake’s full-length stood out in numerous reader comments. If you haven’t already seen him plugged on radio and online – and at least some of you haven’t yet – it’s a perfect time to check him out, with the full-length this week […]

A helmet and hand units make up the TRON performance system for a style of music artist Onyx Ashanti calls “beatjazz.” And he’s well on his way to making a reality. All images courtesy the artist. Onyx Ashanti is insane – in the special, essential way that makes certain brilliant musicians. An experienced busker, having […]

Benjamin Rabe, iOS touch artist and avowed fingerpainter, makes a simple but very cute experiment using touch apps. I like this, not so much for the novelty of doing this on iPhones and things, as for the potential it demonstrates in fun, little touch apps as artistic tools. Now I’ll really be pleased when you […]

Elektron’s Octatrack sampler is shipping to producer’s hands, bringing this multitrack, time-stretching, step-sequenced, modulation-packing digital sampling hardware to real-world music-making. The results make comparisons like “Ableton in a box” seem pretty fair – and give you more an idea of what the thing does than Elektron’s bizarre (and wonderful) short science fiction film, which seemed […]

After a delicious multi-course meal of short alphabetic animations earlier this week, here’s more of the charming and inventive work of Japanese animator Mirai Mizue. At top: Various scenes of predation. All creatures have to eat each other in order in order to survive. His first professional work. A complete version is included in [MIRAI […]

What a lovely coincidence that tape, originally a recording medium, works beautifully for distortion and saturation. Whatever the reason, tape saturation is a popular effect. If you want subtle, pristine saturation, there are various meticulous models of high-quality studio equipment. That was one topic in our interview earlier this week with Universal Audio’s Dr. David […]

Strap in – this may be one heck of a ride. Photo (CC-BY) François Rejeté, of Coney Island’s Topspin (perhaps part inspiration)? Like the aspiring artists themselves, there’s an abundance of Web services with big dreams of stardom. Most will fall into obscurity, and wading through them is a big chore. And then, love them […]