Upon checking out the app store this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ “Bloom” for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Simple and beautifully executed, the application allows you to create your own ambient music via a simple and intuitive touch interface. You can also run the app in “listen” mode and watch it generate the soundscape for you. Perfect for falling asleep to.

This app succeeds in three ways – simplicity, immediacy and beauty. You don’t have to know anything about music to achieve instantly great results. Your gran could understand the interface intuitively, and because it’s Brian Eno the music is beautiful and the aesthetic minimal. Ten out of ten.

DJ Chroma posted this article by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker about live bands using laptops on stage, which made me think.

When I’m not colouring in or sticking bits of the internet together with gaffer tape, I also like DJing. I remember the day I finally got my own Technics 1200s and a bad-ass Ecler scratch mixer. I practised very hard at first, then gradually a bit less hard. Then one day I realised that I had no new records because I had become so busy doing grown–up daytime stuff that I had no time to go to tiny crowded record shops and stand in line to use one of three available turntables to skip through the noisy bits of a bunch of 12s I often knew nothing about.

So I started using a laptop. I gave up scratching, juggling and the like (which I was only OK at after years of practice) and concentrated on playing music that people actually liked to dance to. I found that most of the labels I like sell downloads directly from their sites, and this meant that the night before I had to go out and play I could spend a couple of hours panic buying tunes from the comfort of my sofa.

Now I’m DJing more than ever (which was never very much to be fair) and people are actually dancing. My mixes aren’t always perfect, but no-one seems to care except me. And it’s all thanks to the laptop. My 1200s still look cool in my flat and occasionally I fire them up, but mostly they’re just really expensive conversation pieces. Come to think of it that 12" laptop is still pretty bulky. Can I justify spending £400 on a Tonium Pacemaker?

French artist Gregory Chatonsky made this piece of audio art which generates sound via some sensors placed on a broken hard disk. The amount of vibration is picked up and changed into sound via a program running on a PC. Hit the play button below to listen – it sounds kind of beautiful but eerie and reminds me of the ambient music of German glitch pioneers Oval.



Original article at Make: Blog

How cool is this? I'll tell you how cool... FECKING cool!

1. Add your own sounds to the usb stick.
2. Place the stick inside the tape style gift pack.
3. Write your own message and playlist.
4. Give it to someone you love.

There are six different styles of tape to collect and you can order one online from Suck UK.

After finally getting their entire music collection on one device, many digital music fans have discovered that there is simply too much choice. A smaller but still significant few will also have encountered the dreaded "shuffle loop", where, unsatisfied with the random tune your iPod has provided, you keep skipping tracks indefinitely until either you or your iPod dies of old age.

If you suffer from either (or indeed both) of these terrible afflictions, you may be interested in the Slacker Personal Radio – a device which has just become available in the U.S.



I'm a huge advocate of intelligent internet radio services like Pandora and Last.fm. These applications learn your music tastes over time in order to provide an effort-free stream of music containing both a mix of your favourite existing tunes and exciting new material. Last.FM is how I discover 75% of the new music I listen to. In fact my less technology–obsessed friends are convinced I'm on some kind of commission for encouraging new sign-ups, such is the fervour with which I evangelise about it's brilliance.

By the clever trick of caching the music on the device and updating it's contents each time you connect to wi-fi, the Slacker provides Last.fm style functionality on the move (it even has "love" and "ban" buttons). Early reviews are good, but I'm a little concerned that a whole new device is required for this kind of functionality. Perhaps if the iPod Touch or iPhone had a little more memory they could run this kind of software without the need for a whole new player. For this reason I'm putting the Slacker in the "stop–gap" category. Convergant devices aren't going to go away, but in the short-term it looks like good fun.