Reformat the Planet, Feature-Length Chip Music Documentary, Arrives on DVD

REFORMAT THE PLANET trailer from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo. The journey to complete and release a documentary is a long one, but Reformat the Planet, a feature-length documentary on the chip music scene, has reached the other side. Focused on the hub of artists in New York and the Blip Festival, Reformat the Planet […]

Android Tablets from Samsung, Others Could Offer Free Software Challenge to iPad

Tab. Delicious. I want the Toshiba Mr. Pibb, myself, however. Photo (CC-BY) Joe Shlabotnik / Peter Dutton. Samsung today teased their upcoming Samsung GALAXY Tab tablet. The mention of “Tab” is forever in my own mind linked to my grade school gym teacher (it was her favorite snack, alongside jelly doughnuts). But hey, it’s better […]

Guitars, Mysteries, and Magic: Inside “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” with Christopher Willits

How do you allow musical ideas to flower – technically, creatively, and when finding your musical voice? The floral images reflected in visuals and sound in Christopher Willits’ “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” are evocative imagery, but also an apt metaphor for Willits’ artistic process. The composer and artist spins unique, organic ambient worlds with layers […]

The Shape of Things to Come: Among Vimeo Upgrades, a Player That Works Anywhere

Vimeo Festival + Awards – Overture from Overture on Vimeo. The future is omni-platform. It’s visual content on mobiles, on desktops, and on TVs. It’s not tied to any one distribution platform, either, whether that’s iTunes (which bizarrely managed to co-opt the open RSS format for its own, with iTunes-specific tweaks), or things like the […]

Quartz Composer in Action: Rhythmic Glitch, Generative Cities

To start our Monday morning right, here’s some nice, rhythmic glitch in the Mac tool Quartz Composer, using a combination of custom and off-the-shelf plug-ins — bless you, modularity. It’s a lovely demonstration of how having an ample set of pluggable tools can help you to produce the results you want. PXN_richterizz from pixel noizz […]

Hand-Mixer “Cappuccino Synths” and Rare Earth Pickup How-To

Cappuccino Synth from Gijs on Vimeo. An oscillator is, after all, just something that oscillates. So it is that a handful of hand mixers can become sound sources, in Gijs Gieskes’ new “Cappuccino Synths.” The sound isn’t much raw, though with some processing it could go in any direction you might imagine, and there’s something […]

Free SoundCloud Sampling with Creative Commons Search, Player; Q+A

Creative Commons button. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Andy Melton. Finding samples and remix-able music — or advertising the availability of tracks you want to release for that purpose — has just gotten a lot easier. As part of a raft of improvements to the SoundCloud service – including some nice non-CC enhancements to search and tag browsing […]

Brian Eno “Small Craft On a Milk Sea” Confirmed on Warp, Preorder Wed.

After a fuss over a leak and then an official confirmation from Warp, Brian Eno has unveiled his next album, “Small Craft On a Milk Sea.” The launch page reveals far more about the packaging than the actual music (though I must say, the packaging is very pretty). But the album does focus on collaboration, […]

Off Topic: A Motorcycle, a Film, and the Sound of Machines

“Off the phovea” thinking describes, using the eye as a metaphor, focusing on a problem by reflecting on what’s not at the center of that problem. On this rainy Sunday, that’s how I’m starting my day, so I thought I would share. This film about motorcycle maker Shinya Kimura fits here, even off-topic, for two […]

Composing for 1-bit Microchip: Tristan Perich

Tristan Perich releases music entirely as electronics, with his 1-bit Symphony, coming out next week. But before we get hung up on the novelty of the thing, take note: there’s some real musical, compositional goodness inside that jewel case frame, locked up in the circuits. To begin the conversation about that music, Primus Luta, aka […]