Truly imaginative electronic music can let you screen science fiction in your mind’s eye. Dive into Cluster Lizard’s LP, close your eyes, and let their sounds be a score to legendary Ukrainian author, philosopher, and dissident Oles’ Berdnyk.

Secret sauce? Hardly. It’s more like a hot sauce competition with everyone sharing recipes. Naivi’a NAP Framework, if you missed it, is an open-source, high-octane toolset for digital artists that’s ready to plug into your data, any protocol (OSC, MIDI, Artnet, serial, Web), and push graphics to the edge. And it keeps getting better.

It’s not so easy to get an authentic-sounding recreation of the classic 1960s Moog modular. So that makes Cherry Audio’s unofficial version welcome to all of us modular fans – and it’s just US$79.

Tap tempo? Advanced granular controls? Deep delay? 4-band parametric EQ? All the deep features crammed into the beautifully compact Blackbox sampler features have now moved from beta to stable, and 1.9 to 2.0. Here’s a look.

If you love software, if you love the imaginative and compositional choices it affords, at last hardware is embodying that same freedom. Few devices do that more elegantly than the MOD Dwarf. MOD’s place in the sound galaxy You know the story as far as need. You like having all those choices of different effects […]

In just 48 hours, we’ve been treated both to whistleblower testimony that questions Facebook’s impact on society – and a massive technical outage that shows our dependence on it (and its fragility). Maybe it’s time for the world of music to stop treating Facebook as inevitable and entirely benign.

There’s a gently pastel-colored hand-drawn interface, a backstory involving extraplanetary mining. It’s a reverb, a degrader and multi-effect, but also a drone maker. But whatever it is, Rymdigare transports everything you do to a warm, happy place. It’s like drizzling stuff with warm chocolate.

While everyone else modulates the 70s, 80s, and even 90s, step back to the 1950s – with a complete array of test oscillators, vintage sound equipment, mixers, patching, and tape. It’s Berna3, and it’s possibly the most retro electronic music software … ever.

I’ve been playing with the LXR-02, the new digital drum synth from Erica Synths and Sonic Potions. Verdict: it’s versatile, loud, and brutally violent when it wants to be. Here are some sounds, plus more tips for LXR-02 players, and the latest on the just-out 1.2 firmware update.

Ableton Live 11.1 is now available as a public beta free to anyone with a Live 11 license. New in this build – new tools for handling lag and adjusting MIDI and pitch/frequency shifting, plus much-awaited native M1 Apple Silicon support.