With over a decade in experimental techno (working with the likes of Jamie Lidell and Cristian Vogel), and years more in production, Bill Youngman has earned his veteran ribbons. But this isn’t about the past. This is about what happens when you switch on the machines and make music that can only be heard live […]

The Bug, indeed. If you could insert Kevin Martin like a data glitch into the music scene and watch the wonderfully-corrupted results, you wouldn’t be too far off. (See the datamoshed music video below for a visual representation.) Under the name The Bug, or as GOD, Techno Animal, Ice, Curse of the Golden Vampire, Pressure, […]

At 350 pounds (159 kg), the original Mellotron is not an easy instrument to acquire … or lift. But its 8-second tapes helped define a classic sound – Strawberry Fields, forever. Sample house UVI have been doing a lot of nice work lately – including some real rarities like the prepared piano at Paris research […]

There’s talking, there’s showing, and there’s doing. And there’s listening, too – but we’ll get to that in a moment. When female:pressure put some numbers behind the relative absence of women in festivals, the long-running discussion about the role of females in the scene was accelerated. Suddenly, the entire music press seemed to be talking […]

Coded Environments from Jekka on Vimeo. Big EDM stage shows aside, in the realm of more intimate electronic performance, there seems tremendous untapped potential in combining wearable technology with performance. There, the immersion speaks to the player – essential, as in computer music much of what the performance artist does and imagines is invisible. Jekka, […]

In the midst of a pop-up week of events held with Köln’s Kompakt Records, Ableton has offered a surprise peek into what’s coming soon to Live. 9.1 is a free update for all users, adding some widely-requested features. There’s no release date yet – we’re awaiting a more formal announcement with details soon – but […]

Yes, you have our attention. LF-Ogling this one could raise an eyebrow or two. We’ve been waiting for Bitwig betas to start to look like something that’s ready to use, and for Bitwig Studio to start to set itself apart from a certain, popular live performance / clip-launching DAW that’s made a few blocks away […]

Against the sweeping tide of a term as meaningless as “EDM” – perhaps describing a commercial phenomenon more than a genre – or the historically-ambiguous “techno” or “electro,” there is “bass music.” There’s no “treble music,” but there is “bass music,” and even a “bass music culture” to go along with it. If the term […]

“The future has arrived; it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson. Well, that’s certainly true of digital recording. Dedicated producers aside, the masses of musicians in the world are often still at a loss when they want to record their music on the iPads and laptops and machines that surround them. And for […]

When we last saw the Bass Station II, Novation’s affordable analog monosynth celebrating the company’s 21st birthday, Novation still had a prototype. Some stuff on that instrument simply didn’t work – or didn’t sound the way we might expect. But there was still reason to anticipate learning more. Novation had something at the $500 street […]