Vintage radio equipment, ca 1957, (CC-BY) the Seattle Municipal Archives. Oliver Chesler and his Wire to the Ear blog have long been among my favorite reading on the Web. It turns out he and I have both been pondering the idea of doing an audio podcast to talk about trends in music and technology. After […]

Making music, making blips and bleeps, turning knobs, plugging in keyboards, and having the freedom to modify your gear – these are good things. And that’s why I’m so excited that today is the day the MeeBlip launches. It’s been several years in development, but now it’s finally here. It’s a hardware box that makes […]

Love patching. Hate running out of patch cords. For all the quantity and inventiveness of iOS music-making software, only a few titles have become contenders as must-have apps. KORG’s iElectribe often tops those lists. What makes the iMS-20 especially interesting news is that it may have a bit of an edge even on hardware. Touch […]

tricil – The Emancipation from Clear Notice on Vimeo. stretta – Calculus from Clear Notice on Vimeo. Forget the iPad app or cross-media visual interpretation for a moment. “Enter Calico,” the compilation debut of new electronic label Clear Notice Recordings, begins with some damned fine music listening. In a world after shallow labels like “IDM,” […]

Tron Legacy – Miguex & EshOne – Light Cycles [Unofficial] from Accent Creative on Vimeo. Our friends at Accent Creative indulge themselves in some Tron love, cutting up the new Lightcycle sequence and composing their own, original music score. (Take that, Daft Punk!) It’s like the audiovisual equivalent of those fabulous blue slushies you get […]

Brian Eno’s Small Craft on a Milk Sea comes ashore in the US today on Warp Records, produced with collaborators Jon Hopkins (whom I recently interviewed and covered live) and Leo Abrahams (a wonderful and dexterous composer and musician himself). You can hear the full album on Grooveshark. Update: The Grooveshark available was apparently premature, […]

Moog Music have been busy. Yes, they’re making an iPhone app, but for hardware lovers, there’s also the Slim Phatty, a rack-sized rendition of the Little Phatty announced last week. US$849 list, fourth quarter of this year; Synthtopia reports an $800 street. What does the Slim Phatty get you? Like the Little Phatty, it’s basically […]

The Canadian Broadcasting Centre, viewed from above. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Benson Kua. To me, a license is a tool: it’s a means to an end. But that means that the tool ought to be doing the job you chose for it. After news broke that the Canadian public broadcaster CBC was moving away from Creative Commons, […]

I’m late in posting this, but it’s too good to pass up – our friend Troels Folmann sends us his latest sound design experiment, this time with bees. Better audio: Bees by Tonehammer Specs: 200-230 wing flaps per second (hence the tone) Top speed: 15 mph. Compound eyes with thousands of tiny lenses plus simple […]

Circus of Lost Souls *Sneak Peek from Momo the Monster on Vimeo. Animation as performance — our friend Momo gives us a little teaser of what has kept him hard at work. If you’re interested in visual work that bridges different tools, there’s some tantalizing stuff here. Have a look, and let him know how […]