When you think Christmas, you envision floating cyborg skulls with glowing wires and then let yourself drift off to some dense ambient pads, right? Well – this is for you. And stick around for a Notch download, visualists!

Okay, this is not a drill – time to hit the studio, load up all those firmware updates, hit the books, hone the chops, work on the tracks, finish the tracks and new jams. Invite friends (uh, once the chops are up). And so we’ve got a new Circuit Tracks update (the dark gray one) with musical workflow updates from Novation, right on the heels of the epic Circuit Rhythm update (the silver one). Go!

What if you could take the early reflections part of a digital reverb, and turn it into an undulating, stereo-phasing, diffusing blurring granulating unison alchemic wonder? And what if you could give it an easy-to-grok UI? Sinevibes did just that, and the results are unlike anything else.

Pulsing with electronic punctuation, fuzzy layers and distorted pianos across expansive introspective surfaces, Emmanuel De La Paix on Terre brûlée charts richly imaginative narrative ambient. We caught up with the Zurich-based artist to premiere the cinematic “Heathen” video, reflect on life and December breaks, and get an eclectic end-of-year playlist refresh.

The KORG MS-20 has long been the cure for the common filter. Arturia has now made their model of it available as an independent plug-in, packed with extras, so you can use it anywhere. And for a limited time, it’s free, so let’s grab it and have a look and how to get going.

Some of that brain-bending research from Paris’ famed IRCAM is coming your way in plug-in form – even (partly) for free. It’s a spectral remixing, sound morphing, audio shaping powerhouse that landed from some advanced alien civilization, but it’s usable by humans, whether we’re ready for this power or not.

The latest plug-in from Swedish boutique maker Klevgrand takes their idiosyncratic instrument line to a new level. Tomofon is wave/sample based, but not a wavetable synth or sampler. And the sounds it makes can be realistic, quirky, expressive, and bizarre.

What a way to go out. Mutable Instruments discontinues production this month, but leaves a reshaped modular landscape, a real legacy for open source design, and – oh yeah, still one more Plaits update new synth models and DX7 patch compatibility, too?

The situation in Ukraine grows literally darker, colder, and more urgent even as the world might want to move on. So it’s worth spreading the sounds of Kyiv’s Standard Deviation, which unites an array of adventurous and imaginative Ukrainian artists with friends like Marcel Dettmann, DJ Stingray, and Setaoc Mass.

In this episode of 1Uesday, let’s talk about the 1U module I’d easily tell people to buy first. It’s a perfectly elegant combination of clock, random pulse, analog noise, sample and hold, and slew – and here’s why that’s so essential.