Awesome Electronic

You know you’re really getting old when bands like this “come back.” French dance duo Justice teamed up with Tame Impala to mark their return with a hell of an earworm. Neverender is about being haunted by regret and troubled times, appropriately paired with the duo’s iconic tempo and sound and Kevin Parker’s loopy lyrics.

After collaborating on Wide Open, The Chemical Brothers and Beck have reteamed for Skipping Like a Stone. To accompany the ethereal dance track, they enlisted directorial team Pensacola and master stone-skipper Kurt Steiner for a video that starts out soothing then amps up the energy as a skipped stone takes an incredible journey.

Music technologist and producer Jay Harrison built this machine he calls an Electromechanical Lithophone. It uses a series of servos and hammers to strike metal plates and play music. Sit back and enjoy as it performs Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al, along with ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky.

AKAI Pro’s standalone digital wind instrument can be played like a flute, oboe, or saxophone. It has 200 built-in acoustic and synthesized sounds, and can be listened to via its built-in speaker, a 1/4″ audio output, or headphones. It also works as a USB-MIDI controller.

(Loud) The track Megalovania from Undertale is one of the most frantic and challenging to play pieces of music in the history of video games. It sounds especially great when performed on high voltage tesla coils, as demonstrated by Franzoli Electronics.

Icelandic musician Daði Freyr and his band Gagnamagnið made a silly music video filled with pixel art sweaters, strange-looking keytars, awkward dance moves, confetti, and most importantly, a funky and soulful electro-pop track which we’re adding to our heavy rotation list right now.

Device Orchestra plays a cover version of the classic theme song from Knight Rider on a variety of clicking and vibrating gadgets, including a typewriter, a pair of credit card terminals, and an electric toothbrush in a black leather jacket. Though we wish he got an R/C Trans Am to play KITT.

Sonicware’s little electronic music maker cranks out some seriously fat sounds. It packs four synth engines, including 8-bit frequency modulation, as well as a step sequencer, effects, and looping, all for less than 200 bucks. It has 27 keys, MIDI in/out, stereo in/out, headphone out, and can run on batteries too.

One of the most satisfying sounds on earth is that noise a cold can of beer makes when you pop it open. Musician Koji Kobura agrees, and decided to sample a bunch of sounds he could make with a beer can, ultimately turning them into a short EDM track.

Expressive E’s keyboard gives musicians an incredible amount of expressiveness, with each key capturing subtle movements that influence pitch, loudness, and many other attributes. It works in concert with a robust sound engine by Haken Audio to produce amazingly warm and enveloping sounds. It also works as a MIDI controller.

Are you a singer? Zoom’s foot pedal gadget offers up a ton of useful performance features, including a variety of vocal effects, from tweaking octaves, to adding harmonies, to pitch correction, to reverb, chorus, and a formant pedal for adjusting vocal texture, It’s also got a built-in looper for up to 3:30 of recording.

The consistently silly and entertaining Device Orchestra is back to perform another track, taking on Darude’s 2000 dance hit Sandstorm, played on an electric typewriter, some credit card terminals, and a pair of electric toothbrushes. The googly eyes mean they now earn union scale for their performances.

In POLY|C’s vibrant music video for Lusine’s smooth electronic track Not Alone, a young engineer works on an neural interface which transports her to a mysterious virtual world. But the lines between the real and imagined worlds blur the deeper she journeys. From the EP Retrace and featuring vocals by Jenn Champion.

Check out the hook while my robotic DJ revolves it. It’s been a while since we heard from bd594 and his band of misfit computer parts. This time, they’re joined by a DECtalk speech synthesizer to provide a Stephen Hawking-esque take on Vanilla Ice’s vocals.

12 credit card terminals and a small sewing machine, members of the ever-changing lineup of the Device Orchestra, perform a rendition of Pharrell Williams’ hit track Happy, bringing a smile to our faces, and not wasting too much receipt paper in the process.

Paweł Zadrożniak’s Floppotron performs yet another all-too-perfect tune for its clanky electromechanical instrumentation, the 1983 New Order classic Blue Monday. Those little click breaks on the hard drive servos are just what the doctor ordered.