CDMotion’s contributors haven’t come up with a wish list this year. Maybe that’s because we’re most wishing for time to work on all the projects we’ve got planned! (No material goods needed – unless it’s a Time Freezing Machine or Brain Accelerator!) But there are a couple of really fantastic visual gift guides out there. […]

We’re seeing all sorts of musical sequencer creations with grids, from software to hardware like the Monome and Yamaha Tenori-On. But, of course, the whole beauty of a grid is that you could map to it whatever you like. Maybe you want your sequencer to work differently than someone else’s sequencer. CellDS, from the creator […]

Electronic music is filled with grids and repeating loops. But get off that grid, and you can quickly wind up, well, floating in space. The challenge of marrying music that’s pre-sequenced with music that can generate itself, between self-evolving music and music that you can control live, is the challenge a lot of people are […]

Not dead yet: Coney Island lives, and so does NYC’s electronic music scene. Photo: Evelyn Ochoa aka paperocks aka evalinda. Minitek is a massive “electronic music + innovation festival” coming to New York this weekend. If you’re anywhere in the area, I definitely recommend finding a way to get out here. And if you’re far […]

Yes, speaking of the visual power of flipbooks, Ivan points out that Kraak and Smaak have just made a big splash with an ingenious new music video making surrealist plays with space. It uses copious, cleverly-placed flipbooks throughout. Now you have two challenges: one, to go out and make and film flipbooks, and two, to […]

One box, many sounds, all toy-like and strange. Such is the vision of the Glam Machine. Norman Fairbanks, the man who brought us the all-Tenori-On album, has been teasing this creation, housed in a lovely wooden box with a giant VU meter on it, for a few days. Now we finally get to find out […]

When did you make your first electronic composition? Andrew Cordani points us to a find on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog — a CD compiling high school students (and a seventh grader, in the first example) composing electronic music between 1968 and 1984. Brian Turner at WFMU notes that right now the way to get […]

With talk of instruments like the Tenori-On, and looking to the future of tangible interfaces for music, it’s worth exploring past designs, as well. Take Don Buchla’s Music Easel — concocting sounds with this rare 70s instrument was a matter of plugging, touching, and patching. Digital sounds and music sequencers do plenty this can’t, but […]