everything else

I’m tempted to enroll in the EDI program at Berklee, take Daedelus’s courses, then fake my own death to get out from under the student loan debt…

Omri Cohen’s thorough look at methods for creating melodic phasing in VCV Rack.

Hell Is Round The Corner explores the contradictions of a music industry that was determined to profit from his outsider status in the wake of Maxinquaye’s release in 1995. It also displays his determination to maintain his autonomy in the face of shallow celebrity culture. But as well as being a finely-crafted document of several decades in the limelight, the book reveals how Tricky, now in his 50s, is a keen social observer, having spent his life mixing with gangsters, boxers and gunmen, as well as celebrities, models and intellectuals. 

Adam Quarshie for The Quietus

Currently reading.

This is a pretty exhaustive and up-to-date basic comparison of fancy sequencers for Eurorack. There are many sequencer-related modules for Eurorack, and this comparison is rather picky, focusing on heavier-duty, melodic-oriented designs with fairly complete gate sequencing ability. It includes pretty much everything at the “high end” and excludes pretty much all simpler “utility sequencers”.

This 6-part series delves into every aspect of designing a modular system for taking out and performing with, from overall architecture and philosophy to the nitty gritty of the case, sequencers and timing, modules, layout and approaches to performance.

Easy to follow explanation of the synthesis techniques used in Make Noise’s semi-modular 0-Coast synth.

“If I had to boil down my take on all of this, it’s about wanting to have people’s boundaries expanded somehow. They would come in with a certain idea about things and leave with that widened. That’s the aim of music and performance for me, to open people’s heads up, to give them an experience outside their normal routine or life, to make them think there’s something else out there. To reconsider the boundaries they set on the world they live in. Maybe these boundaries and ideas are not so fixed and solid? They’re really very loose, I believe. That’s the whole idea of music, to transmit that idea, to make them bend their idea of the world.”

A techno luminary outlines his approach to live performance.