Wutopia Lab treats architecture as a medium for constructing parallel realities inside the everyday, spaces where imagination is embedded into ordinary urban life.
Pilar Zeta builds environments like dreams that feel like stepping into a thought mid-formation. Her sculptural works take shape in the form of portals and objects that invite direct engagement, as visitors are invited to walk through them and notice subtle shifts in perception.
Lachlan Turczan's practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light.
Pitchfork is honored to host one of our favorite bands- Mandy, Indiana-to kick off our inaugural reader Q&A series. Starting right now, you can post your questions for guitarist and producer Scott Fair, and synth player Simon Catling to talk about their outstanding record, Fair's solo project set dressing, or whatever else you want to ask them about the joys and difficulties of music, Manchester, and making art.
Her slowly shifting synthesizer compositions and quiet, meditative pieces for acoustic instruments continue to inspire a deep immersion in their audiences, and her recordings and writings have influenced multiple generations of musicians worldwide.
The Eski.Sub draws inspiration from the visual language of Brutalist architecture and the cultural atmosphere of UK grime music scene. The project examines the relationship between design, urban context, and emotional listening experiences, positioning the loudspeaker as both an audio device and a spatial object.
Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.
The unit can run on three AA batteries (a set is included) or on the included USB-A to DC adapter (you'll need your own wall charger). The included instruction manual helps you make sense of what the heck all the knobs, levers, buttons, and lights mean.
Junho Park's graduation concept borrows all the right cues from TE's playbook, that modular control layout, the single bold color, the mix of knobs and buttons that practically beg to be touched, but redirects them toward a gap in the market. Where Teenage Engineering designs for people who already understand synthesis and sampling, the T.M-4 targets people who have ideas but no vocabulary to express them.
The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines.
Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system."
Radioposter has built what it calls Paper-fi: physical books with synchronized audio soundtracks that follow readers in real time as they turn each page. No chips embedded in the paper, no QR codes to scan. The system uses patented computer vision and other modes through a smartphone or smart glasses to track your place in the book and play the corresponding audio.
The Phase8 uses a new form of "acoustic synthesis" that combines acoustic sound generation with electronic control. Takahashi says the synthesizer is "beyond analog vs. digital" and "beyond electronics" altogether. It features chromatically tuned steel resonators, which creates an acoustic sound similar to that of a kalimba. These signals can be manipulated via onboard effects and sequenced like a traditional synthesizer. Here's a video of the synth in action.
The work behind "Waiting for You" by Monotronic spanned two years and several geographic mindsets. Its songs were built in the contained spaces of an East Village apartment and the open humidity of Tulum, initially seeming like disparate projects with no clear direction. Only in retrospect did their shared disposition come into focus. This is an album about the slow work of self-knowledge, which here looks less like an epiphany and more like the gradual acceptance of a particular signal,
Paradessence draws its title from a portmanteau of "paradoxical" and "essence," coined by author Alex Shakar. Per Visible Cloaks, the word embodies the oppositional-but-coexisting concepts they're trying to explore with the new album. "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments, we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux," Doran shared in a press statement.
We tend to think AI music tools are just gimmicks for social media creators, or that they're limited to basic beats. But it's hard to dismiss them when companies like Google, Meta and Stability AI are pouring resources into generative audio models that can produce full compositions in seconds.