More like this, please. Novation’s Launchpad 2.0 updates (for Launchpad Mini and X) are a great example of how manufacturers can make it easier to adapt hardware to your setup. Now they’ve added keystrokes to the custom faders and melodic and drum widgets you can lay out on your custom controls.

Roland just dropped a huge update for their SP-404 MKII, with a bunch of new features for playing and processing sound – including TR-REC step sequencing. Here’s your guide, if you’re lucky enough to have one of the units.

It’s the ultimate music gear you can swallow. Sorry, make that carry in your pocket. And now the TX-6 starts to make more sense.

It’s official: video games, or certainly their leading icon Atari, have crossed the half-century landmark. But maybe that’s why the aesthetics of some of Atari’s earliest greats now sound newly fresh – not only retro, but as something elemental no deep in music, art, and culture.

“Picked up this machine at a local garage sale. The owner said he picked up in the 90s and it was not working. Poking around and fixing the power board, it fired up and it turned out to be a tracker sampler. Looks very similar to a modern tracker?”

When it comes to chilly polar sounds, it’s tough to top the incredible Antarctic Weddell seal. These creatures live in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth, above and below sea ice – and scientists are discovering more and more about their audible and inaudible vocalizations.

Acoustic instruments we think of largely in wood, string, gut, metal. Terje Isungset has spent decades making music out of ice.

It’s the unsung software modular platform – Voltage Modular has an eminently usable interface and now some 1500 modules. And now a bunch of rare Moog-derived effects, oscillators, filters, and vocoder they created with MRB arrive where they belong: natively in the Voltage Modular platform.

What a week – the Juneteenth commemoration in the US, Chicago house music interest trending as it’s repurposed for new big-name pop, and the death of disco legend Patrick Adams. Every day is a good day to know your roots, so let’s do this.

Forget for a second industrial and techno and “queerness” as social media fashion and commodity. Don’t even worry if you particularly like the music on this EP. Berlin’s Gegen remains a bastion of opposition to norms – and in spite of that, perhaps its greatest feat has managed to be successful anyway.