Watching the bleeding edge of new musical instruments often means having to see new designs in tech demos, in proof-of-concept experiments as artists first try their hands on a new object. If you can use some imagination and see potential, that’s fine, but it’s a bit unfair to the instrument – you don’t get to […]

I hope you liked music while it lasted, because me and a bunch of nerds are about to replace it with … this. Photo (CC-BY) João Trindade Music celebrities have given CDM words to live by over the years — strange, yet strangely profound, reflections on the evils of modern technology. Sure, they’re trying to […]

Hardly a day goes by, it seems, that someone isn’t talking about the death of the album, replaced by singles. When they say “album,” however, they tend to mean “pop album,” using as their primary metric sales of the very top end of the spectrum. In electronic music, the album has never been about sales. […]

Moving over the face of the Earth Timelapse from Laww Media on Vimeo. Greetings, planet Earth. Remember when exquisite timelapse photography was the exclusive domain of expensive cameras, bottled up and sold by the likes of the BBC Motion Graphics library? Now a Canon SLR camera well within the reach of mortals is more than […]

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay on Vimeo. In an extended video that begins with Radio City’s Rockettes and kettle drum players, Stephen Ramsay explains a litany of technology’s most elusive topics, in terms anyone could understand — no, really. I dare you to ask anyone to watch a few clips of […]

the Books – A Cold Freezin’ Night from Paul de Jong / Nick Zammuto on Vimeo. The Books do sound sampling cut-up like no one else, so visuals sliced up via the same mad genius come as little surprise. Heavily indebted to the work of pioneers like Emergency Broadcast Network, their videos still have the […]

Champagne Valentine/ Black Material Video from Champagne Valentine on Vimeo. Amsterdam-based Champagne Valentine is Geoff Lillemon (oculart.com) and Anita Fontaine (anitafontaine.com), injecting fantastic otherworldly insanity into your audiovisual everyday. I’m lucky enough to have learned about their work through hyper-talented cross-media artist Sougwen, who worked with them while holing up in Amsterdam earlier this year. […]

Yeah, for a lot of the northern hemisphere, one of these kinds of weekends. Photo (CC-BY) Frenchman Julien Haler. (Oh yeah, we really don’t say it enough – thanks, France! In fact, jeez, double thanks!) Summer days and evenings for a lot of us are a perfect time for buying new records, listening to new […]

Guitarist Joey Mariano is making a unique hybrid sound, blending guitar chops with sonic techniques borrowed from 8-bit chip music. His latest adventure filters the sound of the guitar through pulse width filtering, the likes of which are used to modulate the sound of pulse/rectangle waves in chip music composition. The invention he’s devised to […]

Those crazy Amiga artists were ahead of their time. The lightweight real-time music engines and formats they began were uncommonly efficient, and allowed the exchange of elaborate electronic music using a minimum of resources – with some accompanying compositional and sound design ingenuity required, as well. As a result, getting a phone handset to reproduce […]