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.

In fragmented, alien futuristic materials, FRKTL – aka Sarah Badr – has produced another spectacular release. This project fuses her evocative sound design with increasing virtuosity in digital visuals, as generated surfaces melt into synesthesia. Sarah to me was already pushing the envelope of sound design in organic, flowing compositions, and now all the little […]

Add free, open-source visual programming on the GPU to the free-for-noncommercial-use vvvv – and get materials, lighting, effects, particles, and generative geometry. Here’s the twist: you do all of that without code or scripts, and it’s all on the GPU, live.

Apple is filling in a key piece in the Spatial Audio puzzle – tracking the position of your head through the company’s headphones for more realistic immersion. Spatial Audio is already popular just weeks after launch on Apple Music, backed by a full-court press from Apple themselves on their own platforms and in the media. […]

The music nerd cultural happening – modular pilgrimage is back, and with it… way too much gear to wrap your head around. Here are the not-to-miss picks and of course the exhaustive CDM monster guide.

Afrorack continues to make richly textured polyrhythmic music and share secrets for cheaply producing powerful modular instruments with open tools. Here are some tantalizing updates from Uganda.