Some tracks have a magic ability to smash the gas pedal. “Wait” by Zöe Mc Pherson gets a deeply satisfying treatment by aya that’s just too good not to share here right now. It just churns. And it drops atop a don’t-miss EP of remixes of Zöe’s Pitch Blender – so here’s your reminder to catch that.

As so many friends and colleagues face ongoing warfare and violence, I hope we resist reducing them to victims – that we both keep active and keep their humanity in view. On this Bandcamp Friday, Gaza is again calling. From a mix last week for Refuge Worldwide, here’s an hour of Palestinian experimental producers and Palestinian labels and adjacent music and where to go support it.

In ethereal stretched harmonic recollections of Debussy, across cooly confident grooves echoing from dance floors, composer Marie Wilhelmine Anders has again constructed a rich musical reverie. I spoke to her about her process for Frozen Music, down to the bar, and how Scottish poetry fed this lush sonic landscape.

KORG remains on a quest to get some microKORG mojo going. But both new models – a new microKORG and a 37-key KingKORG Neo – are trying. One looks like it’s closer to the appeal of the original than the other. Here’s a preview.

If you need sonic architecture to hold emotions beyond words, look no further to this poignant sampler by the underrated Facade Electronics, the label by FAX out of Mexicali, Mexico. It’s brought together by feeling as much as something superficial like genre. I had the same sense of connections to producers I care about in contributing a mix this fall.

Late last week, we learned of the passing of a legend of electronic music production, Mexico’s Álvaro Ruiz Mayagoitia. His wide-ranging talent across various aliases (Balboa, Ruisort) should have gotten far wider recognition outside of Mexico. It turned with ease from glitchy experimental minimalism to hip-hop electronica to soundtracks, his imagination simply refused to be confined to a single form of expression.

LANDR’s machine learning-powered mastering service is now more than a simple web tool. The quality of the results has matured over years of development, and you can opt for a plug-in version with a complete set of tweakable controls. So, is the current offering worth considering, even if you know what you’re doing with mastering tools?

Mitxela has continued a project to make the “smallest and worst” synthesizers possible – and he’s one-upped himself this time. This MIDI synth is barely larger than the size of its USB-C connector.

The evolution of music is intertwined with the design and capabilities of instruments. After several decades of more constrained tuning and expression, new playability is becoming a norm with technologies like MPE and live per-note tuning. Music hardware maker Roman Flippov of Japan-headquartered Black Corporation joins us to connect early instruments from Buchla and Yamaha with these capabilities with modern creations.

If you weren’t already in love with the free synthesis powerhouse that is Surge XT, here’s a big 1.3.0 release with a candy store of new features, from Open Sound Control to command line interface to visualizations in the tuning editor.