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 […]

On Create Digital Music today, I note the availability of Warp’s 1991-2002 collection of Autechre EPs. With prices at US$30-50, every single version – even the MP3-only download of the set – also comes with music videos. That elevated the release to must-buy for Motion readers, too, because it includes three landmarks of music video […]

Max for Live, in action: a graphical programming environment inside Ableton Live. Photo (CC-BY-ND) akihiko.japan Max for Live, now into its second year, is a tool with an ambitious goal: take the custom music software creation, visual-patch-programming powers of Max/MSP, and put them inside live performance and production host Ableton Live. It’s not the only […]

Rob Brown and Sean Booth, aka Autechre, remain one of the most forward-thinking acts in electronic music; going back to their work from a decade or two ago feels less like history and more like futuristic artifact, a musical seed from space unearthed in a cornfield somewhere and about to rip your throat (or ears) […]