Tune in live to sound experiments, performance, bent Game Boys, more from Radio AlHara

Bethlehem-founded international sound platform Radio AlHara is celebrating their collective involvement in CTM Festival with a don’t-miss program today of adventurous sonic exploration and talk. Tune in (live or we’ll add archives as available)! No FOMO, because you just don’t MO.

Scatter: a granular cloud plug-in with minimalist controls and lovely shimmering pitch

Amidst many granular tools out there, Scatter is nicely focused – intuitive controls plus elegant pitch modulation options. It can be a shimmer reverb as much as a granular cloud effect, marrying grain soundscapes with classic digital pitch effects.

Pirouette machines: sound and computation from screw cans and fluidics, with Ioana Vreme Moser

What would electronic machines be like without our usual resources? What about sound from old screw cans and radiosensitivity, or the reclaimed science of fluidics and swirls of water? Romanian-born, Berlin-based artist Ioana Vreme Moser asks those questions in her work, today at CTM Festival, in a discussion you can catch live online.

The latest TouchDesigner roundtable comes to us from inside Berlin’s Zeiss-Großplanetarium

It’s an even rounder roundtable – inside an epic planetarium dome. The latest TouchDesigner roundtable falls in a major couple of weeks for the world media art scene as it descends on Berlin for Transmediale and CTM. That means a very special edition on TouchDesigner and spatial imagery and sound.

Soundwide, parent of Native Instruments and iZotope, lays off approximately 8% of staff

Soundwide on Wednesday laid off approximately 8% of their employees, across their stable of brands. That means at least one major music technology company follows layoffs in tech and media starting this year.

Surge XT hybrid synth is now a free set of modules for VCV Rack

Free meets free: in a labor-of-love community project, soft synth Surge XT is now available as an exquisitely designed set of modules for VCV Rack. It combines two of the best open-source projects for software synthesis lovers, bringing new ways of patching to both. And that means all this power is on macOS, Windows, and Linux, all three.

New Noise Engineering: Jam Jam trigger, polyphony-friendly envelopes, more swappability

Noise Engineering has added new Eurorack hardware: Jam Jam 6HP trigger-and-gate with clock phasing and delay, and Quantus Trajecta 10HP quad envelope modules. Plus if you’re using the swappable-function Versio and Legio modules, you can now buy ready-made overlays.

In Berlin, a gathering of Detroit Underground artists live, and evocative 3D DEFASTEN visuals

Thursday night, as part of Vorspiel – the lead-up to CTM Festival and Transmediale – we’re gathering like-minded creative souls at Berlin’s Urban Spree. It’s an all-live electronic night with visuals by DEFASTEN, marking an AV release (on VHS!). Virtual and in-person immersive sounds and imagery collide, whether you’re in the club or watching a screen, which is just how we like it.

Tuning into Arabic music: electronic-vocal duo Rust and Hany Manja (with Bitwig Studio download)

Making instruments work in tune with musicians and singers means making them work with more than 12-tone equal temperament alone. So it’s great to see this profile of Hany Manja and his duo Rust with Petra Hawi. Plus Bitwig Studio users can get your hands (and ears) into the action – with a Micropitch download.

Here’s Jan Hammer in an 80s power suit rocking his Miami Vice theme on the Fairlight CMI

I swear this isn’t a parody. It’s just Jan Hammer going full-on Miami Vice to his own theme. There are still gratuitous swimwear shots, but now the camera lingers over the Fairlight CMI interface.