Cairo-born producer ABADIR is back with a four-track gut-punch of Arab rhythm, a foot-stomping, belly-activating powerhouse of an EP. True to its label, The Primitivist is neither fetishized nor repurposed: it’s Rami speaking in a native musical language that’s fully rooted and simultaneously all his own. The Primitivist by ABADIR We don’t get a lot […]

Do you love drones? I mean, like you’re craving nothing more than aggressive drones coming right into your ears from violin and self-made reed instruments for 27 minutes, 28 seconds straight? The legendary Werner Durand and John Krausbauer have you covered on label-for-the-heads Moving Furniture Records out of Amsterdam.  And then we take a side trip to time crystals, images, and sounds to discover from La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi.

As part of CDM’s year-end coverage, I’m rounding up some of the best music and sound design in games. There’s nowhere better to start than Despelote, a beautifully designed and directed game that will move you by putting you in the shoes of a kid in 2001 Quito, Ecuador. It’s a master study in weaving sound and music in a way that both triggers sense memories and transports you inside a life experience.

Sale-itis has made the full year a maddening deluge of discounts. (You know who you are, inbox plagues!) But here are some legitimately excellent deals on music software available now.

How far MadMapper has come. The tool, built as a collaboration between Swiss GarageCube and French studio 1024 architecture, helped define projection mapping for a generation of visualists. It has matured into a broadly versatile media tool, and v6 brings timelines, montage tracks, clips, audio features, and more to manage your project work, all wrapped into a new UI. Here’s the quick rundown.

Summer vacation? You can tell a USA-born project because it doesn’t take one. Vidvox has a nice update to their VJ/live visual app VDMX that captures inter-app audio. And for absolutely any Mac user, there’s an awesome music visualizer that’s totally free — bringing you back to the fun you had with visualizers back in the day. Milkdrop is back on the Mac!

“Chaos and resiliance” – the words become cruel cliché when applied on repeat to Beirut’s music scene. But the three latest releases from the Ruptured label tell a sonic story that’s not from some periphery, but the center of our world. They do so in collage — like film fragments (one from a filmmaker). That include’s today’s debut of Ripe from Postcards and in the recent sound narratives of Nour Sokhon, Stefan Christoff, and Camille Cabbabe.

To aid in your professional merriment, here’s a complete round-up of Severance stuff, from behind-the-scenes discussion of the show’s sound design and score to an eight-hour mix of “music to refine to.”|

London’s Music Hackspace has kicked off a series of free TouchDesigner meetups – and anyone can join from anywhere online. Today’s episode is on at 5 pm London time (check that world clock!), featuring kinetic installations.

Nothing about this year was normal; next year promises the same. But that’s what music is for – to reframe moments in time.