It’s striking how audiovisualism has broken into maximalist and minimalist streams, toward DJ-style cut-ups and mash-ups of video at one end of the spectrum and geometric generative animation at the other. Firmly planted in the maximalist, Emergency Broadcast Network-descended sliced-and-scratched popular culture, we have Eclectic Method. The duo does audiovisual pop-fragmentation better than anyone right […]

“Drum Machines Have No Soul.” Wait — “Drum Machines Have Soul, Ableton Has No Soul.” Photo: Leo-setä. Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on. It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really […]

Commercial developers are now releasing music creation apps for mobile game systems, in the form of the KORG DS-10 for Nintendo DS and Rockstar’s Beaterator for PSP. But some of the best ideas still come from the homebrew community. What’s most impressive about ToneSynthDS is not so much what it does as its interface, fitting […]

I think that live streaming will play a big part in the future of music performance. Having spent an entire year of my life driving and flying around just to be able to reach new audiences in a single country, it pains me to think how comparatively simple it would have been to organize streaming […]

Speaking of live production and projection, French audiovisual festival Visionsonic 2009 starts today, kicking off with a live music/foley performance of The Odyssey of Rick the Cube. L’Odyssée de Rick le cube (extraits du spectacle) from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo. This year’s festival has an awesome international lineup, streaming for 20 hours in the next […]

Ron from Indamixx has a mobile music making setup for a reason – it can run on Venice Beach, literally. Netbook + Renoise means this rig is a capable music production workstation. It’s nearly Election Day again here in New York. But it’s also Musical Election Day worldwide for the Efficient Music Competition with CDM, […]

What if, between the original classic Tron and the upcoming Tron 2: Legacy, there were another Tron movie, lost forever in cinematic history? Between the soaring score by Wendy Carlos for the original and Legacy’s Daft Punk music, what would the soundtrack have sounded like? Of course, it would have absolutely had some Journey in […]

Yoo sends along this charming animation from CalArts Animation program student Miwa Matreyek, entitled “Dreaming of Lucid Living.” Merging digital effects with a silhouetted character, Miwa creates elegant shadow play. It’s not hard to imagine this kind of technique being applied to live performance – just look at the centuries-old tradition of wayang shadow puppet […]

I have a pathological dislike of lists masquerading as blog posts. Too many “bloggers” spend a couple of minutes googling around on a random subject, find a couple of links, and then decide that they’ve collated the “Top 10 Best Navel Lint Collections“. That said, I’m all about the community-voted lists of awesome stuff, especially […]

Imagine a nightmarish, dark-world, alternative-reality version of Wii Music, one that sends Miyomato-san screaming. That’s what you get from tokoloten, in a very un-Nintendo noise performance, as found on comments. The Wii is just one of his tools: tokoloten uses a variety of objects such as magnet motors, infrared devices, game controllers… in order to […]