It wasn’t until the age of 22 that New York artist Matthew Craven enrolled in art school. Being untrained for years allowed him to create an artistic world of his own — and when Craven thinks back to his childhood, the message is clear. Like...
An imposing wall of rotary dials, turreted by oscilloscopes, draped in spaghettied cables, emitting a series of creaks, groans, and unearthly bubbles, is one of the most iconic images of electronic music. These monolithic machines -- known as modular synthesizers -- have had an enormous...
It’s tempting to think of SXSW Eco as the weird hippie brother of the massive music-film-interactive-free-vodka-was-that-Bill-Murray-and-RZA? festival. In reality, SXSW Eco is South By Southwest’s chic sister, just back from Les Ateliers and looking for ways to change the world while classing the joint up...
In a world where our gadgets and devices open us up to an endless stream of novel sounds from around the globe and throughout history, it makes sense that there is sometimes more love and attachment for the machines than the people that made the...
"I suppose with the video for 'World War Pt. 2', we were going for cheap thrills on one level, but maintaining cognizance of what a funny looking little dude could communicate under these conditions in a human and emotionally salient way. Maybe I’m trying to...
Jax Deluca and Kyle Marler of Flatsitter discovered one another years ago on an Amtrak train, in what one might call an act of divine timing, or a perfect illustration of the "right place, right time" adage. What emerged from this meeting is a male-female...
“Language is the quintessential blueprint that can bridge between the senses. The more I attempt to describe music in visual terms, and the visual in musical terms, the more I’m training toward synesthesia. It’s not an ability that I naturally have, but I’ve developed it...
Out of all the inventions to have contributed to the increasingly relevant history of electronic music, the TR-808 from Roland likely has the strongest legacy. From Brian Eno to Marvin Gaye to Kanye West, the unique sounds of the TR-808 have dominated the electronic-sonic vocabulary...
Platform, the second full-length from San Francisco musician, producer, and conceptual artist Holly Herndon, tackles the many confusing, conflicted layers of modern living, in the form of a poppy, accessible dancefloor sound sculpture. ...