Humming and hypnotic, moving from dripping-wet ambient surface textures to pulsing thumps like an alien rave in the next room of your spaceship, the sounds of these three artists and their taste in tracks can pleasantly absorb an evening. We have not one but three four separate mixes, enough experimental electronic sonic diversity that you […]

So much is possible when we just open up the materials of musical invention to a range of people – and those materials can be cloth, circuits, acoustic, electronic, light, sound. I was reminded of that yet again last week, thanks to an amazing group of artists, developers, facilitators, and organizers. I’m still recovering – […]

Cubepix Demo Test – by Xavi’s Lab from Glassworks Barcelona on Vimeo. The next step in projection mapping: kinetic projection mapping. Moving beyond the sometimes-clinical use of projection mapping to use three-dimensional objects as a surface, the addition of the kinetic makes the surface itself part of the motion. Cubepix is a direct, lovely implementation […]

The Prophet 12 from Dave Smith Instruments is a landmark synth: packed with polyphony and sound features, it’s the latest demonstration that “new” and “synth keyboard” can go together. So, for our first-look tour through the new Prophet, we get a special treat – writer, electronic musician, and mathematician Gina Collecchia got a hands-on look […]

From the avalanche of discarded, used electronics, artists are beginning to make new works. DeFunct/ReFunct, as covered here in some detail recently, appeared last week at Berlin’s Transmediale. But for a uniquely-elegant transformation of the old into the new, Chris Shen shares his TV screen made of some 625 remote controls, as installed in an […]

No disco-colored pads. No pressure-sensitive controls. No flashy layouts for specific software. It’s not an iPad app. No, it’s just the Faderfox controller we love: incredibly compact, engineered and built like a tank in Germany from metal and high-quality pots, with gimmick-free controls. And perhaps more than any previous version of the Faderfox series, the […]

Audiobus may have just gotten its killer app. See if this scenario is familiar to you: you’ve got some instrument or effect on the iPad or iPhone, and you’re making some cool sounds. But you want to actually get to recording more than one track of that instrument, perhaps even as far as arranging it […]

Music with beats can get some people down in the mouth, as the demands of the commercial dance floor wedge music into narrow genres and expectations, awash in nostalgia. And that’s just the time CDM turns to our regular columnist Matt Earp, not only to help us find the artists dancing to their own drummer, […]

Who says guitar technology isn’t advancing? Joe Gore is a guitarist who’s unafraid of the bleeding edge, so he was a natural to report back to us from the hallowed halls of new musical instruments, NAMM. He takes a look at what’s new and what’s evolving through a guitarist’s eyes. And this stuff is interesting, […]

Everything old is new again. And everything new is everywhere – at least if we’re talking iPads and so on. At Anaheim’s massive gathering of music gear, there were some definite themes. Photographing for CDM, James Grahame and Marsha Vdovin give us a look at the tools on the floor. James has stumbled upon various […]