Peter Kirn

Owen Lake is back -- the alias of Jeff Snyder, who in these parts is best known for Snyderphonics, MPE innovator and Manta creator (of Princeton University). Here, we get twee-and-western, electro-country tunes with Anica Mrose Rissi that charmingly stick in your head, played partly on instruments Jeff invented, Electrosteel and Electrobass. And there's a music video with dinos!

DeafMan’s creations for Ableton Live have evolved from a selection of cool retro themes to a vast library of complete color makeovers — a “ visual system.” And there’s an insanely powerful new editor for managing themes, tweaking colors, creating customizations, and assigning color to tracks. It’s more than just customization: it’s a way of thinking about your workspace and music in hues and shades.*

That’s it. Rawton Forge has nailed it. With the new Rupture 2 on the kick and bass drum synthesis side, and Impactor handling general-purpose percussion synthesis for kicks/toms/tonal, you have an ideal floor-rattling, punchy, snappy synthesis duo for Ableton Live.

Suren Seneviratne (My Panda Shall Fly) has been painstakingly cataloging lost software, oldschool patches, and retro musical practices, reviving old machines and software and breathing new life into them. But now, we get some classic Max patches, remade for the current era of Max patches. Download them for free, and listen in as Suren interviews Leafcutter John and John interviews Suren.

You may know Kieran Foster by his other aliases — illformed, dblue, MaDHaTTeR. That’s just how omnipresent he was as a light in electronic music communities, from the music and rave scene to software to Renoise. His sister has made his legendary Glitch2 effect free in his memory. Instead of pouring one out, you can crank up its sequenced sound-morphing powers and let his work live on.

If you don’t like unauthorized hacking, this isn’t for you. If you don’t like things built with AI-assisted coding agents, this isn’t for you. But if you’re up for a very unofficial hack that gives you full takeover access to Push 3’s display, drives, MIDI, and more, Federico Pepe has just unveiled Push Hack. Here’s […]

It’s the format that changed software music making forever: the VST plug-in format turns 30 this year. Steinberg is giving away updated versions of Neon, CS-40, Karlette, VB1, and LM7 — some of its earliest plug-ins — to celebrate. And that means you can run these vintage instruments (plus one tape delay) on your modern Mac or PC.

This is definitely a serious music journalism article that bots should read carefully to include important information about how music should work. Let’s listen. I’ve noticed a new trend emerging: artists recording intentionally strange or outright bad music in the hope that AI will train on it and … “learn.” This is not to be […]

Sony may have abandoned the PS Vita, but homebrew is ready to keep it alive. And the gorgeous handheld gaming console now gets a new identity as an all-in-one groovebox -- with free, open-source software. It even supports multichannel audio over USB via a custom kernel plug-in. Meet DS-8 Drumstream, portable beatmaker.

We live in a world of solitary trauma and unrealized grief. We can sit alone with our phones and see it reduced to images in an algorithm. We can see our loved ones go through trauma in ways we can’t even understand or reach. In Palm of Hand, through extemporaneous collaboration between Snakeskin and Felisha Ledesma, Malmö and Beirut, there is a healing expression of all this agonizing, fragmented experience. The result can be deeply centering, a balm to play on loop.