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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

Mobile devices are here, they’re powerful — get used to them. Now, could they just connect to the rest of your noisemakers and studio rigs? That’s the potential of new iOS SDKs for MIDI I/O and keyboard docking. But aside from some restrictions imposed by hardware support on iOS, what many developers are publicly wondering […]

Dancing in the park at Decibel, ca. 2009. Photo (CC-BY) zenobia_jo. Seattle’s Decibel Festival has announced a packed lineup of artists, events, and workshops for its 2010 edition. With growing events across the continent of North America, maybe it’s time to stop claiming the “only” event of the year is Mutek. (Nothing against the spectacular […]