Ready to blow your mind with a little vintage electronic experimentalism? Thought so. UK producer, filmmaker, and light-show artist (among other things) Ian Helliwell decided to crate dive some early pioneering efforts in recording, and Tone Generation, a ten-part podcast series, is the result. So far, Tone Generation has landed in Great Britain and France. […]

Don Buchla is another special pioneer whose impact on music technology has been far-reaching. (He turned 71 last week. Happy Birthday, Don!) He’s best known as the Chevy to Moog’s Ford — that is, the other rival US modular synth system in the 60s. Moog and Buchla were so close, in fact, in introducing their […]

$26,000 at the time, the Fairlight CMI was the commercial product that really launched the notion of computer as musical instrument to the general populous – along with various electronic cliches in its wildly-popular preset bank. Our friend James at Retro Thing alerts us to the fact that none other than Fairlight co-founder and co-designer […]

While Moog is a household name, the UK’s Electronic Music Studio is a kind of "forgotten chapter" of electronic music history, as the documentary above suggests. EMS is significant not just for technological innovation, but musical experimentation — not to mention their cheeky British sense of humor and topless nude women crawling toward synths in […]

The UK electronic music scene lost its pioneer Tristram Cary this week, so it’s the perfect time to look back again at the marvels of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Low-budget but long-running Doctor Who is unlikely to be remembered for breaking new ground in, say, fancy props, sets, or visual effects (though they did plenty […]

This brief video, uploaded to YouTube by Fairlight co-founder and designer Peter Vogel himself, gives a brief history of the development of Fairlight’s legendary video hardware, the CVI. The CVI was a theoretical (in name, at least) visual counterpart to the ground-breaking CMI digital sampler instrument. And, like the CMI, the CVI had a major […]

As the Monome, the sustainably-produced open controller hardware, spreads, it’s going from one-person gimmick (i.e., “look what I’ve got!”) to club and community (“let’s get together and monomate!”). Laptop circles like Share in New York have already introduced the digital drum circle, but Monome owners may soon be converging, as well. Last weekend, Monome users […]

It’s been a rough week for electronic music — having lost Bebe Barron, we’ve now lost one of the other great early pioneers of electronic music, South Australian Tristram Cary. Tristram is credited by some as the father of tape music, originating tape music techniques in World War II. He’s notorious to the general public […]

artificialeyes are keeping us updated on the impending release of 3L (current status: Soon), and while I’m still in “getting my studio in order” mode in the lead-up to the “2008 massive VJ geek-out and CDMoFest” and unable to play with new toys, CyberPatrolUnit has posted some great demo videos (and followup), showing us some […]

There’s a simply insane amount of electrified music happening here in the US this week: Bent Festival NY: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights are concerts at the Bent Festival in NY, not only of circuit bending but other DIY sound, as well. Stop by Saturday during the day for a day full of workshops. (also […]