NONOTAK's ZERO POINT TWO V.2 uses a sparse arrangement of horizontal light lines. There is no image in the conventional sense and no screen carrying a rectangular composition. Lig…

For Nosaj Thing's “Eclipse/Blue,” Daito Manabe did not treat projected graphics as a backdrop added after choreography. Working with choreographer MIKIKO and two dancers, he built…

BYOB began from a practical observation. Rafaël Rozendaal was living in Berlin and noticed that many artists around him owned projectors. Instead of waiting for a museum to supply…

In Cairo in 1944, Halim El-Dabh borrowed a wire recorder and took it to a Z?r ceremony, where women used chanting and percussion as part of a ritual practice. He did not treat the…

Ikue Mori's move from a drum kit to drum machines in the mid-1980s was not a search for tighter time. She took machines designed to supply dependable backing rhythms into improvis…

Basic Channel did not simply add Jamaican dub effects to Berlin techno. Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus treated the mix itself as the composition. On records such as Phylyps T…

Chris Watson’s Trent Falls follows the Humber Estuary from Goole Docks toward the North Sea, but it is not a continuous recording of one trip. Watson gathered material over nearly…

In from here to ear v.26, around one hundred zebra finches moved through a room containing roughly twenty amplified electric guitars. When a bird landed on a string, bridge or con…

Zimoun supplied equal power to 329 small DC motors inside a former toluene tank in Dottikon, Switzerland. Each motor moved a compressed cotton ball against the tank’s thin steel s…

Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia was not initially distributed like an ordinary album. Customers received it when they bought a plant from the Mother Earth shop on Melrose A…

Robert Hood’s 1994 records Minimal Nation and Internal Empire helped define a form of techno built through reduction. Their force comes from tightly controlled drums, short repeat…

The ten pieces on Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness are all titled “Continuum.” Across the 2024 album, an electronic arpeggio acts less like a hook than a shared piece of ground. Saxoph…

When Hailu Mergia made Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument in the mid-1980s, he was no longer leading the Walias Band through the long nightclub sets that had made him well kn…

Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody begins with one recorded drop of water. Made in 1955, the piece was also a practical study of his Special Purpose Tape Recorder, a machine that allowed se…

Laurie Anderson's Tape Bow Violin replaces the bow's horsehair with prerecorded magnetic tape. A playback head mounted on the instrument reads the tape as the bow passes across it…

In his 2007 interview with The Wire, Burial confirmed that he made Untrue in Sound Forge, editing waveforms without a conventional sequencer. He described recognising drum pattern…

Raymond Scott's Electronium was not simply an early synthesizer. It was conceived as a system that could generate and perform musical material automatically, using electronic circ…

The 51 tracks on Synthetic Water Music do not try to agree on what water sounds like. Across two hours, the compilation moves between reflective surfaces, submerged tones, imagine…

For The Sirens, Geologist and visual artist Kyle Simon did not use the night sky as a theme added after the music was made. At Simon's Farrington Observatory in Joshua Tree, light…

Jlin has described composition as something close to a mathematical proof: the answers seem to be present, but the question still has to be discovered. It is an unusual way to exp…

Éliane Radigue worked with one ARP 2500 for roughly three decades. She called it Jules. The instrument's matrix switching system let her see signal paths without the dense patch-c…

Suzanne Ciani did not treat quadraphonic sound as a larger stereo image. In her account of working with Don Buchla's instruments, the four speakers were equal, and the position of…

Sound Without Sound is a generative p5.js study built around rhythm without audio. The visual composition uses internal pulses, repeating patterns, syncopation and silence to create the impression of ...

In Daphne Oram's Oramics system, electronic sound began as marks on transparent film. Waveforms and control shapes were drawn across 35mm strips, then read by photoelectric cells…

Download Wave Slicer — Sample Editor by Frank De Rop on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more apps like Wave Slicer — Sample…

False Film is a generative p5.js study inspired by the physical behaviour of damaged film. Scratches, dust, frame shifts and light leaks appear and disappear over time, not as a fixed vintage filter b...

Beatriz Ferreyra entered the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris in 1963 after hearing musique concrète for the first time. She later worked with Pierre Schaeffer on the Solfè…

Solari, arriving on 25 September 2026, is the first release under the Courant Zéro name by Montréal sound and video artist Maxime Corbeil-Perron. His background in electroacoustic…

Brussels producer Le Motel made much of Pozo de Agua outdoors or while travelling, especially on trains. The album, due on 15 September 2026 through Constellation Tatsu, treats en…

Molly Soda has been uploading herself to the internet since before “content creator” became a normal job description. Her archive contains webcam performances, makeup videos, sing…

Roni Size made some of the music that helped move drum and bass from underground clubs toward a much wider audience, but the studio behind New Forms was surprisingly restricted. O…

Bajune Tobeta’s Anechoic, released on 14 August 2026, takes its title from one of the strangest acoustic spaces humans build. An anechoic chamber is designed to absorb reflections…

Stephen O’Malley’s Avaeken, released on 21 August 2026, did not begin as a conventional album. The music originated as a site-specific sound work created in relation to Banks Viol…

Yuyan Wang’s new Boring Billion is a 2026 single-channel video made from the kind of image material digital culture produces almost without noticing. Wang has long worked with ima…

Ayoung Kim’s Al-Mather Plot 1991 begins with an actual building in Riyadh. The Al-Mather Housing Complex was constructed by the Korean company Hanyang during a period when large n…

Boris Blank of Yello has spent decades recording sounds that were never designed to become musical instruments. His enormous personal sample archive has included voices, percussio…

Rupert Parkes, better known as Photek, once described jungle in a way that still seems unusually precise. For him it was not primarily a set of instruments. It was a method of pro…

During the making of Construction Time Again, Depeche Mode discovered sampling and immediately started looking beyond conventional instruments. For “Pipeline,” Martin Gore, Gareth…

New Order's “Blue Monday” now sounds like a piece of electronic music whose machines must have known exactly what they were doing. They did not. The group had a sequencer and a dr…

Darya Andijan's new 2026 film Do You Know That I'm With You begins with a figure who has almost disappeared from cultural memory. Travelling through Central Asia, Andijan searches…

Isaac Julien rarely asks us to watch a film on one screen. His installations distribute moving images across several screens so that editing begins to happen spatially as well as…

Jakob Kudsk Steensen begins many of his digital worlds far away from the computer. His fieldwork has taken him to environments including a collapsed Swiss ice cave, experimental f…

Jasper Marsalis has made a contemporary landscape exhibition without travelling to photograph the landscapes himself. In Still Life, currently at Chisenhale Gallery in London unti…

In 1831 an underwater volcanic eruption created a temporary island between Sicily and Tunisia. Britain, France, Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies quickly became interested…

Jürgen Addiers opened I Have No Idea What I Am Doing at M HKA in Antwerp on 28 August 2026. The exhibition combines painting, installation, neon and video, but its title may be th…

Panu Johansson’s Wherever Street Piece begins with anonymous 16mm footage he rescued from being thrown away in the early 2000s. Nobody appears to know exactly who filmed it. The m…

Carolyn Lazard’s current exhibition Long Take, at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center until 13 December 2026, begins with dance but quickly moves beyond the idea that a video simply rec…

Cao Fei’s work has repeatedly used moving image, virtual worlds and digital culture to examine the speed of social change in China. Her major current exhibition Testimonies to the…