Lorenzo Colombo in live session, framed by speaker stacks, equipment from Torso and Soma on the table and metal percussive plates suspended behind him and on tables, as he strikes one plate with a hammer.

Dream with this: solenoids, percussion, and circuits in live Torso session

Here’s a perfect way to treat your ears at the start of the week. Sound artist and percussionist Lorenzo Colombo recorded this ethereal, cosmic live set at Torso Electronics in Copenhagen. The dadamachines automat toolkit and its mechanical possibilities get woven together with Torso’s T1 and S4 hardware, and the results are pure magic.

Worlds of sound from hacked hard drives, piano-triggered modular

NYC-based Purplish Records releases music on cassette in batches, and this double release is a serious gem. Ipek Eginli creates a magical cloud world of prepared piano interconnected with modular synths, as Jad Atoui transforms discarded hard drives into mechanical compositional machines.

Peter Kirn - February 7, 2025

Soundtoys SuperPlate promises a full library of electromechanical plate reverbs in a plug-in

Now we’ve seen a first glimpse of what’s next from Soundtoys: massively expanding their reverb modeling to cover some nine massive electromechanical plate reverb units. SuperPlate is the long-hinted-at follow-up to the company’s terrific Little Plate.

Peter Kirn - April 18, 2023

In Instruments series, encounters between inventors and musicians, watchable online

Peter Kirn - October 8, 2021

Playtronica’s Orbita explores sequences on physical, kinetic turntable, launching soon

Peter Kirn - August 30, 2021