It’s easy – and partly appropriate – to appreciate the bleeps and blips of homemade and bent circuits as noise-making insanity. But as Peter Edwards (casperelectronics) and E-Squared walked us through their creations at the April installment of Handmade Music, it was clear that compositional exploration was at the heart of the work. Edwards talked […]

The Roland JUNO-G has attracted some interest from CDM readers since I mentioned Roland’s YouTube contest and talked a bit about the JUNO line’s history. (See previous story.) One of you by the name of “made” even asked comments addressed “Dear Roland.” I had to admit I was curious about those answers, so Roland responded. […]

The ReMOTE SL Mk II series is on its way, an improved version of a controller keyboard of which we’ve been big fans at CDM. In an ideal world, there would be a truly standardized specification for control of music production software – and I still dream of mainstream OpenSoundControl support as a way to […]

A quick note – this weekend, Propellerhead is running part of its ongoing series of Producers Conferences, educational events focusing on music making with their flagship tool. It’s really about production, not just about Reason per se; looks like the previous installments have been quite nice. There are some really terrific artists in the lineup, […]

Eno had Music for Airports. It’s fitting that Monolake would do Music for Jet Lag. Robert Henke writes about this month’s free download: Since I also have been flying a lot recently, I named it after one of the most annoying side effects of modern transportation and mixed it in a way that reflects that […]

Photo (CC) Becky Stern, also of MAKE / Craft. Calling Nam Jun Paik a video art pioneer would be too narrow to describe his impact. In exploding the idea of what television and television processing could be in his art, he helped create a conceptual revolution that cleared the path for today’s ubiquitous and always-dynamic […]

Going ultra-mobile: Korg’s nanoKEY controller plus a svelte, two-and-a-half-pound netbook running Linux and energyXT. Laptops for music are nothing new. But better versions of Linux make no-hassle music production easier and more powerful – and new netbooks make it cheap and ultra-portable, too, for times when even that 15” laptop feels clunky. Netbooks aren’t for […]

Guitarist/composer/musician Christopher Willits is on faculty for the dubSpot series. Photo (CC) Buzz Andersen. dubSpot, the West Coast + East Coast music technology training center is doing an eight-city tour of the US to talk about Ableton Live 8 and the Akai APC40 controller. They’re enlisting some of my favorite people to do the workshops. […]

Photo: Sascha Pohflepp (bottom), watz (top). I’m now headed to Newark Airport to fly to Portugal for the amazing OFFF conference. Don’t be jealous, though, if you can’t make it – expect plenty of coverage for both CDMs. (My talk Saturday will actually be more music-focused than visual, though as you know, the lines are […]

Putting complex political issues into the form of art sometimes falls on its face. But art’s unique power to personalize and make big issues specific can be a powerful asset. We were already big fans of the animation work of Beeple, but the latest, hand-animated digital creation is especially poetic. It’s an essay on consumption, […]