The glowing glory of the PowerMate, as captured by Casey Fleser aka Some Geek in Tennessee. The PowerMate from Griffin is an affordable, very compact USB knob with glowing blue LED feedback and push-and-turn functionality (so it’s a button, too). But using just one knob may not be all that useful for control. We’ve already […]

There really is something special about Montreal, Quebec’s metropolis just beyond the New York Adirondacks. Having shared our own conversation with Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke with video from their stunning ATOM, here’s what our friends at XLR8R Magazine were up to in May: they were on a tour of Montreal with local Ghislain Poirier. […]

No, this is not Processing. Looking for inspiration only within our computer boxes is limiting. Want a fresh perspective? Check out the physical world. And yes, you’ll find even alien-looking patterns of particles out there. I recently read a post by talented digital artist Golan Levin pointing to the non-digital work of Ward Fleming. According […]

Thanks to those of you who reported a temporary issue with Create Digital Music’s RSS feed. I believe we’ve resolved this problem: you can blame an accidental edit to a configuration file. (WordPress users, if you ever happen to encounter this problem yourself, feedvalidator.org has a tip for you.) We have traditionally used the Feedburner […]

Lusine on the Detroit People Mover, Movement 2009 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. I’ve been a big admirer of Lusine’s adept sound palette, which smartly blends minimal, techno, and ambient techniques. That, in turn, represents to me some of the best stuff the US-based label Ghostly International is turning out. Liz McLean Knight sends […]

I’ve been blogging effectively every day for nearly five years, so it’s hard to avoid novelty – that’s kind of what we publish. The question is, is it the novelty that’s important, or do you see these as little steps toward something greater that hasn’t happened yet? I tend to favor the latter. Here’s the […]

APPARATI EFFIMERI Tetragram for Enlargement from Apparati Effimeri on Vimeo. Apparati Effimeri write to let us know about their latest visualist projection mapping project, “TETRAGRAM FOR ENLARGEMENT.” Watching abstract patterns wend their way across the geometries of the castle-like building is hypnotic, to be sure. But it’s as the visuals make the building seem to […]

The once and future Walkman. Photo: FaceMePLS. July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time. Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew […]

Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer. There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum […]