Music tech Software Tech
Tim Exile built an experimental modular system, all about playability
“Music production feels pointless now,” says Tim — but years after walking away from DAWs, he’s embraced instrument building. New Modular System is a patchable environment, constructed in Reaktor, that’s truly Exile-ish in philosophy. It’s not about a bunch of wire connections. You drop in colored modules and get straight to tweaking, generating, and playing — with wild, massively diverse results.
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Incline, “toposonic corpus explorer,” transforms granular synthesis
Imagine granular synthesis, taken in entirely different dimensions. That’s Incline — Cristian Vogel’s cross-bred mixture of microsound and machine learning segmentation. It explodes sounds into a highly configurable topography, then applies precise envelopes, with unique rhythmic and textural results. Here’s how to explore those strange new worlds.
Peter Kirn - March 30, 2026
Music Music tech Software Tech
Jazz Szu-Ying Chen and Surgeon remind us why craft and art matter
Surgeon’s Shell~Wave easily tops my favorite techno records from 2025, a nice return to form for Tresor Records. But as we’re awash in generated artwork, let’s devote our own brain cycles instead to listening to Surgeon talk to Taiwanese artist Jazz Szu-Ying Chen about the craft of making this album cover by hand.
