As winter’s chill sets in, any self-respecting lover of digital visual distortions will no doubt be curling under the protective warmth of a glitch blanket. New York-based artist Phillip David Stearns, himself a kind of guru of glitch, has produced detailed, organic patterns spun out of camera hacks. Via machine knitting and weaving, complex, non-repeating […]

Look closer, as that’s not a Moog – it’s a clever, two-Elektron rig. Love that retro-styled case. Photo courtesy RPE Duo. Melding trumpet with live electronics and synths, RPE Duo is doing some hybrid jazz, further out. The pairing of (Doctors) Matt Postle (trumpet/synths) and Radek Rudnicki (electronics) is straight out of England – the […]

It’s a good time to be following this duo: Mouse on Mars seem to have entered a period of explosive creativity. And so it’s doubly a pleasure to be working with them now. As I hear younger artists complaining that they feel confined in musical expression, here are artists unafraid to explore strange, wonderful sonic […]

Synthesizers can sometimes seem stuck in a groove, an endless, repeating parade of identical virtual analog synths. If you want something different, the Hadron Particle Synthesizer could fit the bill. It’s a synth. It’s a sampler. It’s an effect. It’s a synth that can morph from synth to sampler to effect. Based on granular synthesis, […]

A thousand points of light! Okay, really, just a whole bunch of “Fixtures,” which allow DMX/ArtNET integration of lighting goodness with your MadMapper mapping rig. Image courtesy GarageCUBE. The future of mapping as technique is doing more than just mapping as a technique. And so, having seen how ArKaos targeted LED lighting, here’s the popular […]

On computers and most hardware, waveforms have been a “look, but don’t touch” affair. Now, that view is coupled with multi-touch capabilities. Samplr is, as the name implies, an app that focuses on working with sound. With rhythmic slicing modes and multi-touch manipulation of samples, it’s a lovely-looking way to surf sounds from your fingertips. […]

It must be the season of the DAW. After a bit of a quiet spell, we have DP8 (and moving in on Windows turf), SONAR X2 (announced at about the same time), and Live 9 all coming into relief. And now, it’s Steinberg’s Cubase 7. The surprise: these audio tools that seem to do everything […]

So, you’re really hot stuff now that you’ve got a vintage Roland TR-808, huh? Ready to have your pride taken down a few notches? If you haven’t seen it, have a look at this. The MR-808 is a “real-world” replica of the Roland sounds. And when people throw around buzzwords like “post-digital” to try to […]

Stay with us here. So, yesterday, I reported a French boutique manufacturer of custom visual hardware unexpectedly closed shop and ceased all operations, and will shortly discontinue support of its products. Okay, you can now insert into the sentence above “Vixid, maker of hardware mixers,” or “Codanova, maker of hardware controllers.” That’s two boutique French […]

Vixid, boutique makers of the VJX hardware mixer line, have announced unexpectedly that they are closing all operations. This comes as a surprise to those of us who talked to them earlier this year about plans to release new hardware – a story seen here as recently as September. From their site: Dear users, dear […]