Awesome Electronic Music

As we’ve seen and heard before, Electronicos Fantasticos! love to make music using barcodes. They recently rigged up a couple of skateboards with barcode readers and circuitry under their decks, covered floors and ramps with black-and-white patterns, then took a little ride.

Ksawery Komputery made this captivating music video for Max Cooper’s remix of the Joep Beving track Hanging D. The colorful shapes that move across your screen were inspired by an imaginary future where visitors travel back through time via “data excavation.” The parallax scrolling effect really creates the illusion of depth.

Franzoli Electronics fires up their tesla coils once more with a high-voltage performance of Coolio and L.V.’s Gangsta’s Paradise. The track sounds awesome as it buzzes through the man-made lightning, reminding us not to mess with West Coast rappers unless you’re in a Faraday cage.

Hear The Beatles as you’ve never heard them before. Ghostcar’s experimental digital EP features five classic Beatles tracks reinterpreted as modern electronica. The unconventional sounds might offend die-hard Beatles fans, but so did The White Album.

This robust input device for music production and live performance packs not one but four fully configurable and independent sequencers, with LFOs, loopers, arpeggiators, and more. Each supports up to 128 steps, with auto-harmonization capabilities. It connects via MIDI, CV, or Bluetooth.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Device Orchestra, they’re a band made up out of electronic gadgets and appliances. Here, they perform a wonderfully buzzy cover of Imagine Dragons’ Believer, with the toothbrush on leads, accompanied by a toaster, a PS2 controller, a typewriter, a steam iron, and two credit card machines.

IK Multimedia’s virtual instrument can replicate the rich and emotive sounds of tape-based samplers like the Mellotron. SampleTron 2 comes with over 400 virtual tape tracks, including choir, strings, brass, organ, piano, bass, synths, and vocoders. You can also load your own samples and run them through the tape sound engine.

We’ve previously seen how the musicians from Electronicos Fantasticos use laser barcode readers in their performance. In this clip from Maker Faire Tokyo 2020, one of their members shows how to make record scratching sounds using the same technique.

Google Arts & Culture’s online exhibition offers a fascinating look at the history of electronic music. The museum features content from cultural partners around the world and looks at the people, technology, and creativity that paved the way for modern music. You can also play with AR Synth, a virtual electronic music studio.

The Vector is one of the niftiest electronic music makers we’ve seen. Its 16-voice hybrid synthesis module can create some badass sounds. Its touchscreen lets you manipulate complex sounds visually, as shown in this in-depth video from Red Means Recording. It’s currently sold out but its makers are working on more.

If you’ve ever attended an EDM concert, you know that most of the performing is done on laptops, synthesizers, and other instruments with buttons and knobs. Norwegian comedy show Kollektivet pokes fun at the experience when a duo of DJs gets a new piece of equipment and doesn’t know what any of its buttons do.

Do you have a place in your heart for the sounds of the 1980s? Sonicware’s portable synthesizer makes FM sounds like many electronic instruments of the era, but can merge multiple sounds into one. It has a built-in 4-track sequencer, effects, filters, and more than 300 preset sounds. Their 8bit Warps synth looks nifty too.

Zone out with this soothing music video from filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin, who once again fills our rods and cones with brilliant imagery. He shot the full-spectrum infrared footage with a drone over Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland. The chill track was performed by Re: Buddha, Japanese Zen monks who create electronic music.

Microsoft Windows has a long history of throwing annoying and cryptic error messages at us. Video artist 4096 decided to memorialize some of the operating system’s various foibles over the years with a fun-filled electronic music remix inspired by this Japanese video. MacOS even gets into the game at 1:24.

Eight Minutes Upside Down has created a fantastic series of videos which explore the many tracks that sampled sounds from other musicians. In this episode, you’ll hear how electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk influenced artists from Beck to Sir Mix-a-Lot to The Chemical Brothers to Miley Cyrus.

Roland’s latest electronic rhythm maker, the TR-6S packs a six-track sequencer into a portable, battery-powered box. What really makes it special is its ability to play sounds from famous drum machines like the 808, 909, 707, 606, along with preset and custom samples, as well as FM-generated tones.

BRONSON is a collaboration between the members of ODESZA and Golden Features, and the music video for Keep Moving perfectly suits the track’s industrial beats, thanks to StyleWar’s deft juggling of stock corporate videos and insane visual effects.

This unique MIDI controller makes it easier to play by teaching music theory. Simply select one of its 840 pre-loaded scales, and it maps only the applicable notes to its right pads, and chords on its left pads, so you can’t play a bad note. It has 96 velocity sensitive pads with polyphonic aftertouch and RGB backlighting, plus 24 hotkeys.

Pouff creates moving images using fractal math, and makes their own music to go with. Their YouTube channel is loaded with colorful and hypnotic visuals, like this clip of intricate, organic looking structures, accented by brilliant backlighting.

Toto’s 1982 hit Africa has seemingly been covered a million times. But we can say with certainty that this is the first time we’ve heard it played by a pair of high-voltage Tesla coils. We could almost feel the hairs on the back of our neck standing up from the electricity. Performance by Franzoli Electronics.

Japanese electro-punk group Electronicos Fantasticos is known for making music with unusual instruments. In this clip, musician Ei Wada shows off an electronic guitar known as the “CRTelecaster” that uses feedback created from the screen of an old CRT television set to produce sounds. More CRT goodness here.

We’re not sure why, but hard rock and heavy metal music sounds surprisingly good when played on the Stylophone. Musician maromaro1337 once again demonstrates his skill on the basic analog keyboard with a great rendition of Black Sabbath’s rock classic Paranoid.

This pocketable, palm-size gadget is a real-time performance controller for MIDI- or OSC-compatible music software. It has two backlit, velocity sensitive pad grids, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and a joystick for adding expression to your digital music. Pairs with iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows via Bluetooth LE or USB Type-C.