Jaranan techno: Raja Kirik is the mad sound of resistance from Indonesia

This sonic mayhem assaulting your speakers is battle music – ancient folkloric resistance, exploding out of the Yogyakarta home base of YES NO WAVE MUSIC.

What culture, ritual will be like in the age of AI, as imagined by a Hacklab

Machine learning is presented variously as nightmare and panacea, gold rush and dystopia. But a group of artists hacking away at CTM Festival earlier this year did something else with it: they humanized it.

Peter Kirn - July 26, 2018

Minds, machines, and centralization: AI and music

Far from the liberated playground the Internet once promised, online connectivity now threatens to give us mainly pre-programmed culture. As we continue reflections on AI from CTM Festival in Berlin, here’s an essay from this year’s program.

Peter Kirn - June 15, 2018

A look at AI’s strange and dystopian future for art, music, and society

Peter Kirn - June 11, 2018

Hugo rattled Berghain’s enormous system, talked to us about sound

Peter Kirn - March 9, 2018

MusicMakers Hacklab Berlin to take on artificial minds as theme

Peter Kirn - December 1, 2017

How sound takes Lvis Mejía from Mexico to a collective unconscious

Peter Kirn - July 18, 2017

With Japan’s latest Vocaloid characters, another song from the future

Peter Kirn - July 14, 2017

This cybernetic synth contains a brain grown from the inventor’s cells

Peter Kirn - May 8, 2017