Hey people. There is new stuff from Korg flying into the shops. Check out the LittleBits.
Korg defines its new market-strategy once again: getting out nice-price gadgets, that dips into new areas of creating sound (think of Kaoss Pad Mini 2, Volca series, DS-10, Monotribe…). This strategy reminds me a bit on the things, that Nintendo does 15 – 25 years ago. Market-innovation from Japan?
Read the whole thing at Create Digital Music.
Another obscure videogame-finding. Mag Max is an arcade game from Japan, made in 1985 by Nichibutsu. It’s basically a shooter-game. The graphic-style is interesting: it has some soft of pseudo 3d and an “over- and underworld”. Also some weapons are some sort of strange.
This is a nice little feature film about Hal Lasko, a 97-year old man, who discovered digital painting tools as artwork expression helpers. The pictures he makes are somehow optimistic, playful and pixel art in the end.
An excellent article about glitch-art and the development of this artistic genre is available at We make money not art. Nice pictures included, so go there!
I just found this totally obscure C64 game, called “Dragons Den”. It seems, that this game was available back in the days on cartridge, meaning “plug-and-play”-fun. Also interesting, that the ride-level at full speed seems to be a very early predecessor of a “one-button-game”. If you want, the grandfather of Canabalt.
Today I discovered this neat experimental soundtool from India, called DIN is Noise, developed by S. Jagannathan. This tool is a little hard to describe at the first glance…
In DIN is Noise you have some sort of “soundboard”, where you can put individual sounds on it and modulate the sounds while the are playing – including movement of the tones in the range of pitch and velocity.
This tool seems to be quite inspired by Indian microtonal music, because you can mess around with micro scales and complex sound transforms and seamless note pitching – things you will not meet that often at “ususal” music software.
Here is some video-tutorial – as you can see, that user interface has also its very own charming style…
