Neverland Ranch was closed by authorities in 2006 after Michael Jackson, who was lying low in Bahrain after being cleared of molestation charges, failed to pay employees. A few years later it went into foreclosure. In the process, the pop star’s private Disneyland degenerated into a ghost town of an
Notch is just awesome. The creator of Minecraft has paid an outlandish sum of $46,300 at auction for an extremely rare, unreleased pressing of an album by electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin. The album first had emerged on an online auction site. The Internet freaked out because it was never-before-
The Rubik’s cube is a 3D puzzle that clandestinely teaches us about algorithms and math and lessons in futility. The 808 is an iconic drum machine by Roland popularized by The Beastie Boys. Not much in common, right? But when the color-matching toy is paired with classic electronic percussion equip
Brian Eno has a new album, which is not surprising since the father of ambient music stays pretty busy. But what is surprising and rather amazing is the killer companion app for the album, which is a collaboration with Karl Hyde of Underworld called Someday World. The augmented reality toy (for iPho
The imagery for George and Jonathan’s interactive music videos for their album III is simple yet savvy: bright polychromatic lines streak across a grid towards infinity. It’s pretty much like the light-cycle scene in Tron, which is suiting enough for electronic music, but with one catch: all the com
Imogen Heap is a kinda folky, kinda electronic, almost shoegaze-y pop artist who has developed a pair of futuristic musical gloves. Watching her play with her Mi.Mu gloves reminds me of someone playing a theremin, sans the theremin, of course. In a way they remind me of Imitone, Evan Balster’s music
A musician has built from Lego an old-school analogue synthesizer that plays smooth and hypnotic Chicago acid house, totally one-upping both that Lego city I built when I was 7 and my unimpressive foray into DJing. Simply called Play House, the Goldberg-esque mechanical sculpture was assembled from
Mac DeMarco writes jangly, bluesy indie rock songs. As far as I know he has no songs about burning insects with cigarettes, though I could be mistaken. He does however have a game about it. His label has just released Squish’Em, which you can play here. Armed with a half-smoked cigarette from your c
Not being particularly German nor particularly old, I admittedly have little firsthand knowledge of the subculture surrounding krautrock, the musical movement that gave us electronic bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, although I did once hear a bootlegged CAN show. But Fract OSC sure looks l
Granted, there’s a lot to love about the pig masks. But Scarface-types in animal masks aside, the smooth, distinct vibe is realized in the music video/not-quite-a-game Honey by musical artist James Dean and video artist Vince Mckelvie. There are the rows of palm trees receding in the horizon; the th
Vlambeer’s manic new shooter Luftrausers is taking some heat not for its relentless gunning but for its provocative art direction. A blogger has claimed that the game’s edgy imagery bears resemblance to the Nazi aesthetic, a view he shares with one Game Informer reviewer who called it an “edgy, styl
The electronic artist Cex’s new record is a soundtrack for a PlayStation 2 game that doesn’t exist, and the music seems similarly outside of physical space. Shamaneater is sample-heavy, low-key electronica filed under the sub-genre of vaporware—hyperreal, beat-bumping tunes as imagined by purveyors
Imitone is at the home stretch of a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, but it’s worth taking a look because it’s a very cool project that allows you to compose digital music simply by humming into a microphone, and because I ran into its creator Evan Balster at GDC and I told him I’d post about
The song is called “Radiation Therapy” by a noisecore artist going by the name of Wolfshirt. (Googling produced no additional information other than this superlative entry on Urban Dictionary: Wolf shirts generally possess an almost magnetic effect on women; who as if under a spell, cannot quench th
As part of Moogfest, we’re arranging an afternoon of talks featuring people who worked on Nidhogg, Dance Central, Gone Home, and more. It’s gonna be awesome.
There are so many ways a videogame adaptation of the movie My Girl could go wrong, and My Girl: The Movie: The Video Game capitalizes on every single one of them, starting with the unwieldy name. Yes, this is one of those jokey platformers like The Great Gatsby whose punchline in its entirety is tha
The Jeopardy! prodigy Arthur Chu, who bent the rules but did not break them, has had his win streak snapped at 11 games. A particularly lousy night answering trivia landed him in 3rd place in the final round, with little to no chance for shenanigans. Judging from the list of questions Chu got wrong,
