Our co-editor Ryan Clarke has researched a list of articles, interviews and documentaries about techno and its history. We have compiled it into this library that will be updated as we find more relevant work.

LFO 2.0 is the result of trying to build the best general purpose swiss knife LFO for myself. It needs Ableton Live 9.x with Max4Live installed. It offers three basic ways of modulating a target: Directly via Live's engine, (Engine) which disables manual control of the target parameter and is perfect for fast modulations. Or via a method similar to manually turning a knob on the user interface (GUI), which can create automation data when recording. And, as a third mode it can put out the modulation as audio signal (Audio) which is useful for creating control voltages for analog synthesizers.

Free download of samples made from a collection of broken instruments. The Broken Instruments Sample Pack is a free download of Found Sound Nation's favorite sounds from the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra Project.

Riley was particularly interested in the way playing the same patterned phrases against each other can create a disjointed rhythm and unusual harmony (a technique he would apply to some of his more familiar, more formal minimalist compositions like 1964’s ‘In C’). So when the owner of a Philadelphia disco—clearly still addled from watching Riley perform an all-night concert of alto-sax feedback—commissioned him to compose a “theme” for his nightclub, Riley took the opportunity to apply that process to something a little more club-friendly that he could totally fuck with.

The emergence of house music is due to Black women in spite of the racism and sexism that they faced.

This list was included on the sleeve on Panda Bear’s album ‘Person Pitch.’

Over the course of three decades and with 80 million records sold, Enya has morphed into more than musician: She's her own adjective. What makes her music — and the mysterious woman behind it — appealing to so many? Anne Helen Petersen visits the reclusive singer in Ireland.

Somebody added the slide guitar wolf whistle after every line in Steve Miller Band's "The Joker" and the result is hilarious!

Hear Steve Miller's 1973 classic enlivened considerably by the addition of dozens more wolf whistles

That’s right: 49 slide guitar wolf whistles in one track

I got on Reddit.

There are 49 wolf whistles in a new parody version on YouTube that's encouraging donations to the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.

If all I said was “suck my dick,” you can’t arrest me for that. Before the video even started, I asked him for like five minutes what the reason for handcuffing me was. So I was like: “You can’t hear me? Then I’m going to sing it to you.” The words just came. And I already know, if this went to your supervisor, [sings] you about to lose your job. I know my rights and I know the law.

Generate lyrics like they're from Drake or Rihanna – all magic done by a Markov Chain

On October 10, 1980, Margaret Thatcher delivered a speech to the Conservative Party, something of a Top Ten hit for her followers. She spoke about repaying the “debt which had been run up by our predecessors,” the way predecessors do, what with their curiously unverifiable but limitlessly stupid antecedent behavior. After beating up the previous administrations a bit more, Thatcher celebrated investment “opportunities overseas,” which she said would “help to secure our living standards long after North Sea oil has run out.” It’s amusing to think Thatcher had any intention of bowing to the limits of nature or, worse, accepting a version of “the natural” that wasn’t based on the unnatural condition of state-supported monopoly. Because, hey, we’re all just selves, aren’t we? Look what you can do with a self! […] For a kid trying to understand music in 1981, the future was obvious. All bands were interracial and every album had two parts, the singing version and the dub version. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the enemies of the people and Jah was a post office box in Bethnal Green.

Where DID you come from, Cotton Eye Joe? --- The first known published version appeared in Alabama writer Louise Clarke Pyrnelle’s 1882 novel Diddie, Dumps, and Tot, or Plantation Child-Life, a nostalgic look at the antebellum South. Drawing heavily on her own childhood experiences on her father’s plantation, the novel gives credence to what most experts now hold as fact: "Cotton-Eyed Joe" originated with black slaves well before the Civil War. Pyrnelle’s version describes the titular character as an ugly man ("His eyes wuz crossed, an' his nose wuz flat / An' his teef wuz out, but wat uv dat?") who swoops into town and steals the narrator’s sweetheart. "Ef it hadn't ben fur Cotton-eyed Joe," the jilted narrator sings, "I'd er ben married long ergo." That basic plot line—boy loses girl to mysterious charmer—drives most iterations of "Cotton-Eyed Joe," including the one Texas-born "song catcher" Dorothy Scarborough included in her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs. As Scarborough writes, she learned parts of the tune from "an old man in Louisiana," who picked it up from slaves on a plantation. Three years earlier, in 1922, the noted black cultural historian and longtime Fisk University chemistry professor Thomas W. Talley shared a slightly different rendition in his book Negro Folk Rhymes. The son of former Mississippi slaves, Talley came across a version wherein "Cotton-Eyed Joe" isn’t just a person, but also a dance: "I'd a been dead some seben years ago / If I hadn't a danced dat Cotton Eyed Joe." The song ends by saying Joe has "been sol' down to Guinea Gall," which again implies he was a slave.

The singer-composer offers a call to action and discusses why her defining environmental song is more urgent than ever. --- You ask, “What can we do?” You can talk to everyone you know about this on a constant basis and try to create consensus about it. You can create groups of people and think tanks to try to counter the billionaire-subsidized think tanks that are forming our current trajectory as a species. If there’s anything you can do, it’s to get profoundly involved. Like, quit your fucking job and do something useful. Hold yourself accountable. It’s painful, I can say that from experience. You’re going to have to sit with your own hypocrisy. And then you have to get real comfortable with people telling you that you’re a killjoy.

A song from the rapper's landmark album good kid, m.A.A.d city, produced by DJ Dahi, is built around an atmospheric sample. For one writer, it's a portal back to a night out in L.A. in 2015.

Independent music: • Listeners rent music for pennies on streaming platforms • Artists rent listeners for ad dollars on ad platforms • Isolated artists make tunes in their bedrooms for isolated listeners in their bedrooms • “Hustle” myth makes a virtue of being selfish and finessing others • Trickle up attribution (lone genius myth) and compensation models (star makes all the $) • Irreverent of institutions and the archive in favor of individual freedom and ahistoricity • 20th century kitsch individualism • Fracking / short termist Interdependent music: • Listeners pay artists directly on Bandcamp/Patreon/Mixcloud/Currents.fm • Artists own and nurture their contacts and supporters • Artists and audience contribute to global scene ecosystem where the sum is greater than the total of its parts • Humble ethos makes a virtue of being considerate and supporting others • Artists attribute and pay their collaborators • DJs pay the producers whose music they use • Respect the archive and understand strong institutions actually make it possible for individuals to thrive • 21st century democratic socialism • Permaculture / long termist

In our new recurring series, we look at the good, the bad, and the straight-up bizarre songs spreading across TikTok via dances and memes. --- TikTok’s trend-setting prowess has given famous people an even greater incentive to dip their toes into the mortal world. A little song and dance comes with the possibility of a handsome reward, at least for the musicians: hits that soundtrack TikTok memes clobber their way to the top of Spotify’s Viral 50 with the rapaciousness of King Kong scaling the Empire State Building. It usually works like this: some impossibly cool teenager with above-average rhythm choreographs a dance; said dance must be rudimentary enough for anyone to learn—give or take a few hours and several YouTube tutorials—but dynamic enough for you to look impressive if you put in the work. Like a fast-casual burrito, TikTok dances are customized from the same basic ingredients, but adding something new and spicy to the mix can work wonders. Particularly fresh choreo—or at least moves backed by the right influencer—can single-handedly rocket a song to the top of the viral charts.

With rappers recording at a nonstop clip, and sampling more difficult than ever, hip-hop producers are increasingly outsourcing their melodies to a global network of loopmakers. --- These loops are snippets of original music that Prasad composes at his computer, melodic ideas that might serve as the instrumental hook of a song—but without the rest of the song attached. They range in length and complexity: some incorporate one or two different sounds, while others are multi-layered miniature compositions. Every two weeks, he packages around 40 of his best loops to send to established producers he connected with on Instagram. If everything goes perfectly, a producer will use one of his loops in a beat—they might change the tempo, adjust the pitch, chop it up and rearrange it, or just drop it in as-is—and an artist will record a song over it. In recent years, these melody loops, and the musicians who create them, have become a fundamental part of the way rap music is made. For up-and-comers like Prasad, supplying well-connected producers with packs of pre-made melodies has become the most effective method to get a foot in the industry’s door. And for producers working with prolific rappers, outsourcing the time-consuming work of writing a melody to a pool of dedicated loopmakers is the most efficient way to keep making hits. […] The popularity of loops, on some level, is a reaction to the increasingly complex legal and financial barriers placed on sampling pre-existing recordings in new songs, a cornerstone of early hip-hop production. In the past three decades, from pivotal court cases around samples in De La Soul and Biz Markie records in the early ’90s to more recent copyright battles over “Uptown Funk” and “Lucid Dreams,” incorporating references to other songs in your music has become a risky and expensive proposition. […] Within this collaborative spirit, there’s also an inherent power imbalance. When unknown loopmakers—often geographically removed from rap’s centers of industry in Atlanta, New York, and L.A.—send material to big-name producers with connections to artists and labels, the latter have far more leverage than the former for negotiation, a dynamic that can leave loopmakers vulnerable to exploitation. […] Though loops have already become a music industry standard, there’s still a stigma attached to them, according to Jetsonmade. “People have a lack of respect for the loopmakers,” he says. “Some producers don’t want people to know they’re using loops.” For more traditional producers, there’s a prevailing sense that using loops is a sort of cheat code. The separation between clicking through a folder of loops and making a beat from scratch can seem like the difference between ordering from Seamless and cooking a meal. It also suggests a depressing reality for many of the most in-demand rap producers, who may simply lack the time or bandwidth to work from a blank slate on all of their beats.

A look into the hoaxes and dubious genesis tales of cult musicians. --- However, would the music of Jungle really, truly have taken off in the way it did if it was presented honestly by the creators from the off? Would two white guys from a failed indie band who went to a £20,000 a year private school, knocking out generic laptop music, have been the buzz band of the year? […] The underlying question around all of this remains, of course: why? Pretending to be a retired Serbian factory worker is of course not the same as racial or cultural appropriation but they are linked and the answer is somewhat axiomatic in the fact that articles like this are being written. More pieces have been written about this kind of music because of both its backstory and its likely fakery than ever would have been written if some Scottish band started knocking out some retro 1970s German music. The real answer to this approach arguably comes when McFadyen is asked about the ongoing success of his project, as volumes continue to sell. “It’s been very satisfying to see the music spread naturally through word of mouth. Thankfully, as the advertising budget has been, and remains, zero.”

With her first album in eight years, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple is breaking free of the chains that have bound her for decades. --- Q: If there is a cohesive statement you’re trying to make with this album, what is it? A: “Fetch the bolt cutters” is probably the theme of it. I know in The New Yorker piece it says something like, “It’s about not being afraid to speak,” but it’s more than that. It’s about breaking out of whatever prison you’ve allowed yourself to live in, whether you built that prison for yourself or whether it was built around you and you just accepted it. For me, it could be many things — including breaking out of this image that the world told me I was and that I actually believed. That’s the sad part.

Why we are turning to darkly funny music during the coronavirus. --- Throughout history, music has been an integral part of how people cope with epidemics. Sometimes, we put them in familiar musical contexts to make them less scary (less “novel,” you could say). While the rest of the world called the 1918 outbreak “the Spanish Flu,” at home in Spain it was often described as “the Naples Soldier” after a song from a popular opera; one of the librettists claimed it was because the tune was just “as catchy” as the disease. […] The themes underpinning many of their songs—passion, intensity, body heat—reminds me that art gets much of its meaning from confronting the ephemerality of existence. We want things deeply and quickly because life is, indeed, short. And musicians know that; they usually only get a few minutes per song. Who better to guide us in how to squeeze as much out of life as possible?

Quarantunes is for... - sustaining the creation of (live) music throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. - providing a platform for artists + fans to connect, despite the cancellation of tours and shows in venues. - creating opportunities for artists to recoup lost earnings from cancelled dates through donations from fans via livestream. - encouraging new experiments in sound and music, using digital technologies and social media interfaces.

With her first album in eight years, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple reached into the past to confront her rapist, middle-school bullies, and herself.

This is popular music in March 2020. Complete with profiles for each artist.

National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But — somehow, for some reason — Weird Al keeps rocking. --- Onstage, Weird Al sat on a wooden stool and started to snap like a lounge singer. With an orchestra swelling behind him— the tour was called “Strings attached”— he kicked into a soulful medley of 1980s parodies. If that does not sound great to you, if it in fact sounds like a very particular flavor of sonic hell, I’m here to tell you something, Weird Al was absolutely belting. He was singing the bejesus out of this ridiculous music. I leaned back in my chair, reassessing core assumptions I’d made about life. Was this somehow part of the joke? That Weird Al was an amazing singer? His voice was athletic and precise. It was rippling through intricate trills and runs. By the time he reached the medley’s climax, “Like a Surgeon,” his 1985 parody of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Yankovic was stretching for high notes and holding them over his head for the crowd to admire, like an Olympic weightlifter, who had just snatched 500 pounds. […] But it turns out that Weird Al approaches the composition of his music with something like the holy passion of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Looking through the “White & Nerdy” file felt like watching a supercomputer crunch through possible chess moves. Every single variable had to be considered, in every single line. The song begins with a simple sentence — “They see me mowing my front lawn” — and even here Yankovic agonized over “lawn” versus “yard” and “my” versus “the.” He sifted through phrases in gradations so small, they were almost invisible. […] Weird Al likes to say that every one of his albums is a comeback album. That’s because a parody career is not like a normal career. It has no internal momentum. Everyone always expects you to go away. […] Weird Al’s bond with his fans is atomic. He will stop and speak with them anywhere — at airports, outside the tour bus — for so long that it becomes a logistical problem. The fans approach him like a guru, and Weird Al responds with sweet, open, validating energy. […] The connection is so deep that it is more like a merging, and after a while it struck me that Weird Al has spent basically his whole life making his music for exactly these people, which is to say for his childhood self. For many decades, he has been trying to delight Alfred Yankovic, the bright, painfully shy kid who grew up alone in his tiny bedroom. For the benefit of that lonely boy, he reshaped the whole world of pop culture. His ridiculous music sent out a pulse, a signal, and these were the people it drew: the odd, the left out. A crowd of friends for that lonely kid.

She will not be silenced. That’s patently clear from the start of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. In gnarled breaths on its opening song—feet on the ground and mind as her might—Apple articulates exactly what she wants: “Blast the music! Bang it! Bite it! Bruise it!” It’s not pretty. It’s free

The country-folk singer, whose matter-of-fact style attracted a reverent cult following, died this week of complications from COVID-19 at age 73.