Innehållsförteckning för June 2024 från Future Music

Spending the 2010s at the heart of the Parisian electronic music scene, French producer and DJ Kartell channelled influences from soul, disco and R&B into slick and sultry beats that sparkled with the mirror-ball glitter of ’90s French touch. In 2021, Kartell escaped the big city to relocate to his birthplace of Tours, building a new basement studio and setting to work on producing his most personal project yet. That project is Everything Is Here, a 15-track statement that expands his already diverse sound in new directions, taking cues from everything from ’70s soft rock to alternative hip-hop. With more of a live and instrumental feel than his earlier work, the project invites a varied cast of collaborators, including Tkay Maidza, Barney Bones and Kurtis Wells to furnish Kartell’s polished,…

The array of plugins, synths, controllers and sequencers on the market these days offer near limitless potential. When creativity strikes, there’s no end to the roads it can lead you down. Sadly though, alongside this comes a lot of admin, necessary preparation and potential issues, all of which can get in the way of your creativity. Unlike, say, composing a song on an acoustic guitar, where – aside from tuning and possibly changing a string – your instrument is almost always to-hand and ready to go, composing an electronic track or recording music in a DAW comes with a long list of potential pitfalls. Whether you’re largely in-the-box or running a varied selection of hardware and outboard, the truth is that your studio has as much potential to get in…

Hailing from Boulder, Colorado, ethereal songwriter Tom Krell has experienced all sides of the commercial pop terrain. After posting a string of anonymous digital EPs in 2009, critics picked up on his stunning falsetto vocal and melodic, evocative ambience of his debut album, Love Remains. Signing to Domino imprint Weird World Records, Krell’s career took an immediate upward trajectory, with dreamy electro-acoustic pop albums Total Loss (2012) and What Is This Heart? (2014) achieving significant commercial success, dragging Krell into label boardrooms where it ultimately became almost impossible to fully control his artistic direction. By 2018, How to Dress Well had toured in almost every corner of the globe, albeit rarely staying anywhere for more than 24 hours, and by the time he’d released his fifth album, The Anteroom, Krell…

The word legend tends to get bandied about way too easily sometimes but there are among us certain artists for whom the description fits perfectly. Jeff Mills is one such artist. From his pioneering work as part of electronic collective Underground Resistance in ’80s Detroit and his early ’90s establishment of his own Axis imprint, Mills has ploughed a unique and ever-evolving course through techno. Always innovative and keen to push any and every envelope, Mills most recent incarnation is the three-piece electro-jazz-afrofunk ensemble Tomorrow Comes the Harvest who blew hearts and minds at the aforementioned CRSSD Festival in San Diego, California. One could wax lyrical ad infinitum about the contribution Mills has made to electronic dance music over his career; the DJ skills, the soundtrack work, the TR-909 workouts…

KEY FEATURES AMP CLASS: D HF POWER: 40W LF POWER: 40W TOTAL POWER: 80W HF DRIVER: 1” Textile Dome LF DRIVER: 6.5” Optimized Paper FREQUENCY RESPONSE (-10 DB): 39 Hz - 25 kHz FREQUENCY RANGE (±3 DB): 47 Hz - 21 kHz MAX SPL: 115 dB ENCLOSURE: Front Ported LF HEIGHT: 14.125” (35.9 cm) WIDTH: 8.75” (22.2 cm) DEPTH: 10.25” (26 cm) WEIGHT: 16 lbs (7 kg) The first gen LP-6 was easy on the ears yet light on the pocket, making it hard to imagine how Kali’s engineers could improve on it without a substantial uplift in price. Well, they did it, the LP-6 2nd Wave boasts some notable upgrades, for below $199/£199 per unit. For those not familiar with the original, the LP-6 is a powered, nearfield monitor…

CONTACT WHO: SSL WEB: solidstatelogic.com KEY FEATURES: 30 rotaries offer dedicated control over SSL 4K B, Channel Strip 2 and Bus Compressor 2 plugins (included). Now controls any 3rd party plugin via free 360 Link DIMENSIONS: (W x H x D): 300 x 61 x 266 mm; WEIGHT: 2.1kg SSL’s UC1 controller was released around three years ago, and is a direct knob-per-function interface for controlling the SSL Channel Strip 2, 4K B and Bus Compressor 2 plugins. The central part of the UC1 controls every dial on the SSL Bus Compressor plugin, while the left and right sides control the EQ plus compressor, limiter and gate parts of the Channel Strip plugins. It’s a neat device and does a cracking job of directly controlling those plugins in your DAW,…

Tracktion adds clip launching and Wavetable Synth to Waveform Pro 13 update “Say hello to a new, inspiring workflow” > Over recent updates, Tracktion Waveform Pro has become the DAW you didn’t know you should be using, but its latest version could seal the deal, with familiar clip launching and a new wavetable synth promising to increase its user base. Waveform is a Mac, PC, and Linux DAW with one of the best free versions around, but the latest update looks like being its most significant, with Ableton-style clip launching being the new ‘must-have’ feature which an increasing number of DAWs boast. Ableton might have started the clip-launch party, but other big names like Logic Pro and Bitwig Studio have crashed it. The Waveform Pro 13 version, then, could be…

Mr. Scruff Ninja Tuna Ninja Tune, 2008 By this, his third album, Mr. Scruff was on a roll. After coming out swinging with his first few LPs and signing to Ninja Tune, he’d cemented his reputation as a beat-maker extraordinaire. His calling card? His silly sausage sense of humour, and seriously eclectic taste in music. Both of which are found in spades across Ninja Tuna. From the trademark fishiness of the title, and self-penned cartoon cover, to the broadest beats and glorious grooves he tucks inside. Musically, the album takes cues from his all-night DJ shows, where devoted dancefloors regularly lost themselves to impeccably mixed jazz, breaks, funk, disco, hip-hop and house. He covers all those bases (with added bass) and more, across the album’s tracks. “It’s like a DJ…

CONTACT WHO: Noise Labs WEB: noiselab.io KEY FEATURES Multi-mode waveshaping, Capable of folding square waves, CV controllable, Ring modulation The relatively new Eurorack company, Noise Lab, has already established itself as a developer of excellent quality modules. The original Wrinkler is a fantastic module but, not one to rest, Noise Lab has released an updated mk2 version, which offers a lot of extra tone-shaping tools. The 12hp module is only 26mm deep and draws 41Ma +12V and 42Ma -12V, so it’s suitable for almost any case out there. Everything is solid and confidence-inspiring and pots and switches have a pleasing level of resistance and engagement. Wrinkler mk2 is a wavefolder, much like those from the Buchla West Coast camp, but with a few extra treats for the sound designer. It…

CONTACT WHO: Universal Audio WEB: uaudio.com KEY FEATURES Sound City room emulation with placeable vintage microphone locker, reverb chamber, EQ and dynamics processing If you have even a passing interest in the recording of rock, there’s a very strong chance you’ve heard of Sound City Studios; Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Fleetwood Mac, Rage Against The Machine, Metallica are just a few of the artists who have holed up at Sound City. But, perhaps most famously, it was the studio used to record Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Dave Grohl himself immortalised Sound City in his documentary of the same name. Now, those wizards at Universal Audio have captured the qualities of Sound City’s Studio A and made them available as a plugin for us to immerse our tracks in rock history.…

INCLUDES VIDEO British techno legend Luke Slater is a man of many aliases. He’s probably best known for his work as Planetary Assault Systems, a moniker under which he’s been releasing tough, drum-machine-focused techno since the mid-’90s. While that strain of techno is undoubtedly a cornerstone of Slater’s sound, Planetary Assault Systems is only part of the story of who he is as a producer. Slater’s prolific body of work touches on ambient electronics, acid, house, psychedelic dance music and crossover electro-pop, working as aliases including The 7th Plain, Clementine and LSD, as well as under his own name. More recently, he’s been releasing music as L.B. Dub Corp, a project loosely rooted in the sounds of classic house, but one which allows Slater to experiment with elements of jazz,…

There are many reasons to embark on the DIY module journey. It could be a simple case of saving some money, or maybe you want to understand the components that go into your favourite modules. Maybe you have an idea to develop modules of your own but don’t know where to start. Over the next few pages we’ll be discussing the basics of this weird science, showing you some key techniques and highlighting some of the tools and components that are needed to get started. Grab a cuppa and a magnifying glass and let’s get started… It’s all in the mixer >Designing a module is outside the scope of this article but it’s worth exploring how circuits work in the context of a synth. We’ll focus on a simple mixer…

For over 20 years, Guillermo Scott Herren has been releasing derivations of hip-hop under a swathe of pseudonyms such as Prefuse 73, Savath and Savalas and Delarosa & Asora. With the pandemic giving him the time and space to think outside of the box, the Miami-born producer emerged with The Failing Institute album series – a new way of working, collating vocal samples and textures using minimal effects. The latest Prefuse 73 album, New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol. 1, continues Scott Herren’s search for new avenues of expression. After being troubled by America’s 24-hour news cycle of crime, he began digging into vigilante movies from the ’70s and ’80s. In deep admiration of their soundtrack scores, he abandoned his famous reliance on the Akai MPC and enlisted live musicians…

CONTACT WHO: Forever 89 WEB: forever89.studio KEY FEATURES Drum machine plugin using ‘sample modelling’ engine. Formats: PC/Mac, AU/VST3 It’s been a particularly exciting few years for drum plugins. In a space previously dominated by a mix of vintage hardware emulations, Battery-style samplers and faux-acoustic drum kits, an influx of recent plugins put a genuinely fresh spin on drum creation, from Audiomodern’s Playbeat 3, with its smart randomisation tools, to Modalics’ rhythmically creative Beat Scholar. Enter Visco, a virtual drum machine from Forever 89, a new Berlin developer founded by ex-Ableton and Teenage Engineering employees (the name refers to the era of creativity that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.) At core, Visco is based around a fairly standard drum machine setup – it has eight tracks, which use samples…

CONTACT WHO: Modbap WEB: modbap.com KEY FEATURES 4 effects plus sidechain compressor, Arcade-style physical triggers and CV inputs, Clock input, Colour button for extra effects It may be relatively new to the scene, but Modbap Modular is already making waves. Its initial range of modules includes Per4mer, a DJ-inspired multi-effects device, with live play a focus. To accommodate the performance aspect, the design of the module is dominated by four arcade-style buttons, each of which can be used in momentary or latched mode. These can be activated in any combo of one to four effects at any given time. It’s oddly satisfying bashing those buttons and it adds a playful nature to a modular system that can otherwise lack playability. But if you prefer to patch than bash, Per4mer has…