Love your audio gear so much you wish you could wear it around your neck, but a loudspeaker on your throat would a) strangle you and b) make you look like too much of a dork to attend high-society functions? Complete Technique jewelers feels you. From sterling silver turntable cartridges plated in gold with embedded […]

Video is increasingly part of performance, and you’ll notice the major VJ hardware makers — Roland/Edirol and Korg — also happen to be musical instrument manufacturers. Roland and Edirol are even building in automatic communication between their keyboards and their VJ hardware, from low to high end. I think video will increasingly become part of […]

No need to brave the Arizona heat: Glitch’n is a course in electronics that even absolute beginners can enjoy, assembling oscillators, generative beats, filters, and noise on breadboard circuits. But it also helps young people to learn crucial skills that can lead to teaching others and getting jobs. And, for that matter, it could do the same for you. Let’s have a look.

Talking granular effects is like talking ice cream — it’s all about the different flavors. So look at what Minimal Audio has given us: Lucid is a pulsing purple granular multi-effect. And it’s capable of everything from bleeding-edge and ambient drones to animated, tempo-synced rhythmic sliced mayhem. It’s in control when you want it — rhythmically, and in key — and totally extreme when you want that, too.

Forty years on from Wind, the Venetian ambient original makes his Sacred Bones debut with the surprisingly rhythmic Movement. In a written exchange, Masin talked about keeping ambient music from staring at itself in the mirror, being heavily sampled, the reel-to-reel he calls an old brother, and why human thought is analog.

That’s it. Rawton Forge has nailed it. With the new Rupture 2 on the kick and bass drum synthesis side, and Impactor handling general-purpose percussion synthesis for kicks/toms/tonal, you have an ideal floor-rattling, punchy, snappy synthesis duo for Ableton Live.

DeafMan’s creations for Ableton Live have evolved from a selection of cool retro themes to a vast library of complete color makeovers — a “visual system.” And there’s an insanely powerful new editor for managing themes, tweaking colors, creating customizations, and assigning color to tracks. It’s more than just customization: it’s a way of thinking about your workspace and music in hues and shades.*

Expression control is integral design feature of each component of Noisy, in each building block of the sound. And now Noisy 2.6 vastly expands the software’s sound palette — just in time to make this a worthy companion to Expressive E’s own Osmose and Osmose CE.

Capital and private equity continue to fly in the music and music tech industries. CVC has acquired a majority stake in the music distribution giant DistroKid, with Insight VC keeping a significant share.

For my semi-regular program POST for Refuge Worldwide this week, I focused on new releases. This highlighted Lebanon in particular and still didn’t cover the flurry of releases there, but it covered other places, too. It’s all recommended, so here’s the full playback and track listing with links.