Playing with laptops can become performative in conventional ways, just by adding instruments – voice, guitar, live drums, ukelele, or whatever it is you play. But it becomes more mysterious in the hybrid performance media that emerge from “playing” the arrangement directly, manipulating the larger bits of a track in the form of stems and […]

Dan Shiffman @ Kickstarter HQ on Genetic Algorithms on April 2nd from Kickstarter on Vimeo. Creative code may, to most people, be as far from the natural world as possible. But in a purely aesthetic way, finding the connection between natural environment and code expression is the mission of Dan Shiffman’s recent tome. And in […]

Saying your device isn’t as responsive to sound as you’d want is a bit like saying you’re feeling sick to your stomach. The symptom is easy to describe, and everyone would agree it’s not a desirable state. But the fix can be rather complex. And when it comes to engineers who care about music and […]

What once was in the hands of a few early adopter Lemur owners and technologists is now available to the masses: most musicians own some kind of touch device, capable of spawning faders and X/Y controls and buttons and layouts for just about anything they can imagine. And the app that is perhaps best known […]

BIOSTAGOG from Platige Image on Vimeo. When futurists dream of fluid architecture, more digital image than brick and mortar, this is one element of what they mean. From Warsaw, Poland comes a project combining algorithmic design, 3D-printed surfaces, and interactive motion turned into projection-mapped image. Yep, that ticks all the buzzword boxes. But the upshot […]

If your ears and spirit need an ambient reboot, you could do worse than this gorgeous, abstract wash of sound pieced together from two wonderful Spanish artists. From bzzzbip, aka multimedia artist Antònia Folguera, and about:blank!, a photographer/filmmaker/artist, comes this project in sonic exchange. Antònia writes: About:Blank! and I exchanged songs via email and dropbox […]

I hadn’t actually seen this quote from Daft Punk. I don’t want to beat this issue like a low-polygon future Derezzed horse, but I realized I missed a very important quote from Billboard. Bangalter: We really felt that the computers are not really music instruments, and we were not able to express ourselves using a […]

Who’s afraid of laptop musicians? Music stories are more exciting when there are eight-foot-high walls of flames and hype to match. But what when it’s all just a special effect? And when does mystique trump the actual music in music journalism? The new Daft Punk record is perfectly likable. It is at times arguably polished […]

It’s all Deceptikon, in the remix – gear and tracks. First, 1978, meet 2013. The re-released Korg MS-20 mini here teams up with the lovely iPhone sequencer app Arpeggionome, courtesy the wonders of MIDI. (See our recent feature on the app.) As Arpeggionome’s clever developer Alexandernaut describes it: My friend Deceptikon (http://deceptikon.net) tries Arpeggionome for […]

Properly configured, a Linux system can breathe life into old hardware or finely-tune performance on new gear. The problem has often been not the OS, but having a comfortable tool for production when you load it. And so that means Linux fans – or would-be fans – will likely be pleased to see the image […]