Modular synthesizers aren’t just instruments. They can be a way of life, with practitioners getting deeper into the circuits, erecting walls of patch bays and cords, and transforming them anew each time they plug another module into the rack.
Thomas Ankersmit plays a Serge, which was originally devised in the early 1970s by CalArts professor Serge Tcherepnin. It’s the way to go if you want to make music out of imagination and electricity.
But for Ankersmit, a Dutchman who lives in Berlin, the gear is never an end in itself. When he first came on the scene a quarter century ago as a young associate of Phill Niblock and Kevin Drumm, he toted a saxophone, which he used to blast long notes at the walls. The sound of…
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Just weeks before unveiling their highly anticipated third studio album, 
In 1974, Phaedra redefined the landscape of electronic music. What began as an experimental session at Richard Branson’s Manor Studios in Oxfordshire became a seismic event in modern sound.
Last year, Tobias Jesso Jr. made an album with his former gardener. Now, 
…newly remastered and features six bonus tracks that were previously unreleased or hard to find.
How do you become considered a classic in any music genre or sub-genre? Is it how long you’ve been on the scene, how many fans or just cult fans you have, how many records you have come up with, have you been recognised by other artists, something else or all of the above?
Some artists turn up on the music scene as rough diamonds, so to say, with talent showing, but with some edges that need to be finely honed through time to make their music sound great and probability of that happening always somewhere in the middle.
Nashville producer 
“I became interested in the idea that recording is a bottomless medium,” explains multi-instrumentalist 
“Feels like all I ever do is try / And try again,” 
For a band that has always cultivated a unique and idiosyncratic sound, 
Not everything is Twin Peaks, but Rockie does kinda feel like the album Donna Hayward would make if she could pursue her musical ambitions: She’d be influenced by Julee Cruise, for sure, and probably Chromatics, and Sky Ferreira, and what could be more Badalamentian than the cloudburst of synth that opens “On Our Knees”? Maybe you feel like you’ve seen this show before, but it’s actually the spooky and charming debut from New York songwriter Cate Osborne, aka Rockie Rode, an unassuming indie-pop record with the aura of a vintage cult classic.
We always want life to make sense, yet despite our best efforts, it does not. This is the starting point for Asymmetry, which distills a lifetime of thoughts and emotions into 88 keys.