How do you visualize the invisible? How do expose a process with multiple parameters in a way that’s straightforward and musically intuitive? Can messing about with granular sound feel like touching that sound – something untouchable? Music’s ephemeral, unseeable quality, and the ways we approach sound in computer music in similarly abstract ways, are part […]

Delicate and dense, melodies and sounds from church contexts, found sounds of bells and voices, are set against crisp, sharply-solid, forward-driving electronic beats. And then, there are the visuals: an archaic architecture of mystical symbols and three-dimensional, evolving forms interpret the music in visual form. Swedish-born artist and technologist Eric Wahlforss, in other words, has […]

Inside this compact white box lurks a lot of sonic power and technical prowess. Perhaps that explains why the newest version of the open source Shruthi-1 now sports a crazy-badass wolf dog cartoon with glowing eyes. Since its launch, the Shruthi-1 has gradually evolved new features, with a fairly sophisticated combination of hardware and extensive […]

Mouse on Mars’ Parastrophics for Monkeytown has been an early highlight of the year, a record packed with musical ideas in densely-configured arrays of sound. The duo is now taking that music on the road, in ambitious, improvisatory live performances. Perhaps all of this can be summed up in one word: energy. Their studio and […]

Hit your own upgrade button with Ableton Live: costs nothing, keeps on giving. Photo (CC-BY) Andrea Mitrani. Get a whole new Live, for free. Smart users can make it happen. Sure, just a mere mention of Ableton can bring out angry hordes of Live users waiting for whatever they imagine they want out of Live […]

Figure, the iOS app that’s powered by Reason instruments and effects, is now available on the App Store for US$.99 cents. The sound is Reason on your phone – literally, with the Thor polysynth and Kong drum machine, plus the Master Bus Compressor and side-chaining from Reason in effects. But the user experience is quite […]

Technology may be about the next Big New Thing, but as with music making in general, making music with tech is for many of us a lifetime vocation. So, it’s welcome news to find that time-tested tools, maturing over decades rather than months, are enjoying greater use than ever before. We saw Pure Data (Pd) […]

If, in my opinion, you want to see how to run a label in 2012, look no further than Project Mooncircle (PMC). It’s based out of Berlin and was originally an offshoot of HipHopVinyl Records – a store I wandered into one summer day in 2004 and left, several hours later, minus a quarter of […]

We’ve heard the new Fhloston Paradigm; here’s an up-close look at the studio setup on which it was made. Making music can be about collecting the best, not just the newest, finding what’s inspiring to build your own tradition. Perhaps that’s why so many artists increasingly turn to vintage analog gear not just because they […]

Finding new sounds in our pulsing electronics means refining our working techniques isn’t just a technical matter. It’s a musical one. King Britt, who has been granted many successful musical incarnations over the years, set off on just such a quest under his new identity Fhloston Paradigm. In a much-watched debut EP for brilliant UK […]