Crystal Castles: now under fire for abusing a Creative Commons license on a chiptune track. Photo by Oliver J. Lopena: oliverlopena.com. (And CC-licensed, via Flickr.) As using sounds produced on unusual 8-bit systems and game consoles grows in popularity, some artists are appropriating the music as their own. Sometimes, as with Beck, a well-known or […]

Nine Inch Nails are back with another free release; this time, it’s an upcoming album release called "The Slip". And NIN continue to give us the kinds of formats we like, with the income this time coming entirely from physical sales: the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or […]

For all the access we now have to online commerce, items like music instruments sometimes demand real-world interaction. (And you know how much I love Real World things.) Tom at Music Thing has polled readers there to find out where surviving music shops live around the planet. You can take a look at the map, […]

CDM traffic has taken a sudden plunge. Now, it could be all those digital DJ stories (um, sorry about that), but based on past experience, we tend to see a dip in readership whenever the weather turns lovely (which also happens to coincide with the end of the semester, a big deal for the many […]

Visual Berlin have just announced their “µ:avit”, a one-day vj meet amongst their ongoing shenanigans at the DMY design fair. Expect a community-led, do-it-yourself feel and a day full of faces-to-names and interesting works. I’ll be there running a full-day Quartz Composer workshop, and the action is sure to run till late via club gigs […]

Visual Berlin have just announced their “µ:avit”, a one-day vj meet amongst their ongoing shenanigans at the DMY design fair. Expect a community-led, do-it-yourself feel and a day full of faces-to-names and interesting works. I’ll be there running a full-day Quartz Composer workshop, and the action is sure to run till late via club gigs […]

Since this week has become Unplanned Unofficial Vinyl Week, I might as well keep going. Vinyl with printed timecode is just one path. Here are two examples (one recent, one upcoming) of products that have found other means of connecting digital sound to the turntable. If a product like Traktor Scratch or Serato Scratch Live […]

Scratching with a mouse just doesn’t feel right. One solution, as in FinalScratch and other products, is to print timecode onto the vinyl. But then there’s the direct approach: strap that mouse right onto your turntable and hit the club! That’s just what the DIY-oriented community of users of terminatorX have done. terminatorX is a […]

Scratching began as a practical means by which DJs could cue records. (So say originators like Grandmaster Flash; if you’re interested in the history, check out the fantastic documentary Scratch — trailer above.) But something about the gesture, the mechanical feeling of scratching, and all that history has made the turntable compelling as a controller. […]