The early days of January – the email inbox is still quiet, things are for many still moving slow. But if musical perspective is possible only with hindsight, it’s a moment when the picture of a moment in musical history has first crystallized. The zeitgeist of an era starts to reveal its footprint. This isn’t […]

Pure Data, the free and open source cousin of Max, can still learn some new tricks. And that’s important – because there’s nothing that does quite what it does, with a free, visual desktop interface, permissive license, and embeddable and mobile versions integrated with other software, free and commercial alike. A community of some of […]

You know the person – collecting weird old music gear, from highly valuable to the near-worthless used prices, as an obsessive hoarder. You open their closet and immediately want to grab a mic and start sampling. Well, that’s the feeling of this totally free library of drum machine sounds. You get a 200MB library, with […]

Orphx are simply enchanting – doubly so live. Veteran experimentalists and master virtuosos of live performance, their music is heavy and industrial, but endlessly imaginative and groovy. Onstage, they genuinely improvise – there’s spontaneity and interplay. And that creative energy plays out both in their imposing live schedule and in their prolific studio output. The […]

Grischa Lichtenberger is working with felt and stencils as well as sound. He’s speaking in hyperlinks, and misusing gear and feeding computers into other computers to form feedback loops. In short, he’s finding a unique and creative materialism in everything he does – and that means we really have to talk to him. So we […]

There are things that make your butt wiggle. There are things that make your brain tickle. There are things that get glitched and grungy. Well, here’s something that does all those things at once – it’s a glitchy good time, and it’s free. Merry Sludgemas. And for anyone bored with overly-shiny, overly-restrained, dark fashion-label sound-alike […]

Ed.: If we’re going to see more women or other underrepresented groups in music, one place to start is by creating new spaces. CDM contributor Zuzana Friday is involved in an effort in Berlin that does just that. The idea is an informal one: just have exclusively female-identified artists meet for a couple of hours, […]

These days, there are models of the Moog ladder filter everywhere (hardware and software), but it wasn’t always so. 13 years ago, Bob Moog himself partnered with developer Arturia to model his creations in software form. Now, that developer is giving away the latest iteration of their software filtering tech in a powerful plug-in – […]

“It’s time for heroes” – that sentiment sounds about right. Our friend, producer Sofia Kourtesis, returns this week with a new remix releasing today, and a mix for us. And they’re both richly sentimental and gorgeous. First, there’s Sofia’s inventive remix of “Cool Kids” by Me Succeeds. It’s free-flowing and spontaneous, dense but magical, coming […]

2016 was the year when people said, hey, I want to get in on some of that modular goodness, but … maybe I don’t want to buy a rack and spend thousands of dollars to do that. So it’s great to finally see desktop semi-modular becoming a thing – and an affordable thing at that. […]