In Braque's paintings, collages, and prints, the polymath set out to distill bucolic landscapes and rural village scenes as broken up and then re-assembled geometric compositions; decidedly abstract yet still slightly recognizable representations. Through this revolutionary approach, he examined how objects could be depicted from multiple perspectives-multiple sources of light-as if superimposed portrayals of the same setting rendered at different times of day.
The Eski.Sub draws inspiration from the visual language of Brutalist architecture and the cultural atmosphere of UK grime music scene. The project examines the relationship between design, urban context, and emotional listening experiences, positioning the loudspeaker as both an audio device and a spatial object.
The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines.
The unit can run on three AA batteries (a set is included) or on the included USB-A to DC adapter (you'll need your own wall charger). The included instruction manual helps you make sense of what the heck all the knobs, levers, buttons, and lights mean.
This release is about connection. Not in a strategic sense, but in terms of feeling part of a scene rather than orbiting around it. There's a lot of really strong music coming out of Australia right now, especially in the underground, and this felt like the right moment to place something there.
Pitch Shifter-910 is based on the iconic Eventide H910 Harmonizer from 1974, an early digital pitchshifter and delay with a very unique character. Arturia does an admirable job preserving its glitchy quirks. Pitch Shifter-910 is not a transparent effect that lets you create natural-sounding harmonies with yourself. Instead, it relishes in its weirdness, delivering chipmunk vocals at the higher ranges. There is also a more modern mode that cleans up some artifacts while preserving what makes the 910 so special.
The Phase8 uses a new form of "acoustic synthesis" that combines acoustic sound generation with electronic control. Takahashi says the synthesizer is "beyond analog vs. digital" and "beyond electronics" altogether. It features chromatically tuned steel resonators, which creates an acoustic sound similar to that of a kalimba. These signals can be manipulated via onboard effects and sequenced like a traditional synthesizer. Here's a video of the synth in action.
Junho Park's graduation concept borrows all the right cues from TE's playbook, that modular control layout, the single bold color, the mix of knobs and buttons that practically beg to be touched, but redirects them toward a gap in the market. Where Teenage Engineering designs for people who already understand synthesis and sampling, the T.M-4 targets people who have ideas but no vocabulary to express them.
First of all, it offers four times the processing power of previous MPCs, which is enough to load up to 32 virtual instruments at the same time. This is assisted by a full 16GB of RAM, which is a whole lot in this era of AI tomfoolery. The XL can handle 16 audio tracks simultaneously. In my experience with previous units, this is more than enough for a full song.
Casio showed up to NAMM (CES for music gear nerds) this year with a prototype sampler called the SX-C1 that looks every bit the lovechild of a Game Boy and an SP-404. The top has a directional pad and four buttons just like you'd find on a game controller, flanking a 1.3-inch OLED screen. But at the bottom, there are 16 rubberized pads for triggering samples with crunchy pixelated number labels on them.
For this time around, however, the concept player here stays within the audio listening gear domain; nonetheless, has clear signs of a TE-inspired design. The retro Bluetooth player is a music accessory that's reminiscent of the classic cassette tape player design, but on the inside, it's a modern music player that plays music wired or wireless. The aesthetics are purely for arousing the nostalgic feel of listening to music on a cassette player, while the audio is digitally played via a DAC for high-resolution output.
The work behind "Waiting for You" by Monotronic spanned two years and several geographic mindsets. Its songs were built in the contained spaces of an East Village apartment and the open humidity of Tulum, initially seeming like disparate projects with no clear direction. Only in retrospect did their shared disposition come into focus. This is an album about the slow work of self-knowledge, which here looks less like an epiphany and more like the gradual acceptance of a particular signal,
Listening to music has mostly collapsed into phones and streaming apps, buried between notifications and multitasking. Some people still crave a single-purpose device that treats listening as the main event, not background noise. The MP-1 is an independent concept study that asks what a modern Walkman could look like if it borrowed Teenage Engineering's design language, without being affiliated with the company or trying to become an official product at all.
OKO DJ's music is best measured not in decibels but in candle watts. Sunlight, one suspects, would reduce it to ashes. Her debut album, As Above, So Below, is a seance of a record, a journey into the darkest corners of the night. The Athens-based musician, aka Marine Tordjemann, is host of an NTS Radio show called Twisted Dream Diary, and As Above, So Below, is similarly steeped in dream logic and surrealistic visions. In its collision of bleak sounds and cosmic mysticism, it often feels like a gothic take on new-age spirituality. It might be the post-post-punk equivalent of a European art-house film shot in grainy black and white, framing monologues muttered in French and Greek in dramatically austere trappings. It's a mood piece par excellence.