As electronic musicians craft songs in digital collage, the distinction between “producer” and “writer” has never really made much sense. Samples, synthetic sounds, and the technology used to bring them together are all an extension of compositional imagination. I’m reminded of this when I regularly explain what I do. (This is really fun in crowded, […]

Now with the release of The Marriage of True Minds, the duo’s album based on parapsychological telepathy experiments, it’s worth visiting again with Matmos. The Baltimore-based duo offer dueling interviews. One, with XLR8R, ventures into their basement full of sonic wonders, full of handmade instruments and electronics and oddities, like wooden creations built around contact […]

MS-20 mini, on the left, next to the original, on the right. Photos: Peter Kirn and Benjamin Weiss for CDM and DE:BUG. It’s the news collectors of vintage synths on eBay probably didn’t want to hear. For $599, Korg has made a new MS-20 that the company says has “perfectly reproduced its circuitry” for an […]

Even as technology rolls forward, sometimes the old is more cherished than the new. Perhaps this should come as no surprise in music. Musical relationships span many years – the records you love, the hours you spend practicing and producing. And so it is that we’ve heard a common refrain from electronic musicians: with many […]

Is anyone in Iceland not a musician/producer? Given the island nation has an absurdly-tiny population, there must be some explanation that so much music pours out. Well, we’re going back there again. This weekend’s selection is the lovely music of Magnoose, aka Magnus Skarp of Reykjavik. This little-known producer is putting out some really fine-quality […]

Dripping with vividly-acidic synthetic analog textures that wash in and out of shot footage, the new music video for Maryland, USA artist Maxmillon Dunbar is a dreamy reverie of light and image. It’s a bath in color, swept up in the warm glow of the single “Loving the Drift.” Brooklyn-based, DC-born artist Aurora Halal is […]

Dripping with vividly-acidic synthetic analog textures that wash in and out of shot footage, the new music video for Maryland, USA artist Maxmillon Dunbar is a dreamy reverie of light and image. It’s a bath in color, swept up in the warm glow of the single “Loving the Drift.” Brooklyn-based, DC-born artist Aurora Halal is […]

When music moved from live venues to radios and recordings, artists had to find a way to respond. Now, labels struggle to be heard in the era of Spotify and streaming, always-on, always-overabundant media. We could talk grander themes, but the possibilities of this conflict are most vivid in a microcosm. Call it post-digital or […]

Humming and hypnotic, moving from dripping-wet ambient surface textures to pulsing thumps like an alien rave in the next room of your spaceship, the sounds of these three artists and their taste in tracks can pleasantly absorb an evening. We have not one but three four separate mixes, enough experimental electronic sonic diversity that you […]

Music with beats can get some people down in the mouth, as the demands of the commercial dance floor wedge music into narrow genres and expectations, awash in nostalgia. And that’s just the time CDM turns to our regular columnist Matt Earp, not only to help us find the artists dancing to their own drummer, […]