It’s not every day we get a new, full-featured physical modeling synth. So welcome to Objekt, a new Reason Rack Extension – and possibly the most notable instrumental addition to Reason in years.

Chair Audio quietly launched a new plug-in, and it’s both free and wonderful. EXC!TE CYMBAL is, no exaggeration, realistic enough that you’ll do a double-take knowing this is a physical model and not in any way sampled.

Artist Rochefsky has been busy cooking up a ton of Mutable Instruments Plaits recipes – which seems just the thing to share on a Sunday. Plus even if you don’t have the module (or like me are on a train at the moment) you can give this a go for free in VCV Rack in software (with the Macro Oscillator 2 module).

One little board is the brains of just about any synth, modular starting point, noisemaker, or instrument you can dream up. Meet the Datanoise PicoADK – Raspberry Pico plus high-quality I/O and the Vult DSP language. Now with a complete video tour of how to get started.

Free meets free: in a labor-of-love community project, soft synth Surge XT is now available as an exquisitely designed set of modules for VCV Rack. It combines two of the best open-source projects for software synthesis lovers, bringing new ways of patching to both. And that means all this power is on macOS, Windows, and Linux, all three.

For music to blossom, artists needs more than isolation. And Berlin and Los Angeles have increasingly been a corridor for inspiration and cross-fertilization. From Kyoka to Khadija, Rainbow Arabia to Daniel Troberg, Los Angeles x Berlin gives a window into that exchange.

The new Max thing Cycling ’74 has been teasing is here, and it’s pronounced “rainbow.” Maybe the easiest way to see why this is a big deal: on the product page, you can mess with an interactive patch in your Web browser natively.

Ancestral Archaeology is more than the title of Nina Pixel’s new double-album. It’s an urgent practice at a moment of crisis for Slovakia and the world, taking a critical and scientific approach to folklore’s legacy, rather than a fetishistic one.

Module makers Lenny and Clarissa are making a name for their After Later Audio line. Up for fall: all the best bits of a complex oscillator made more modular, and a growing line of reboots of now-discontinued Mutable Instruments modules.

Designed by Aphex Twin, Samplebrain takes a new approach to samples – chopping up audio into a “brain” of little bits, networked by similarity. You can play it in real-time, free for all platforms, including Apple M1/M2.