electronica Archive
07 Jun 2021
Oklawaha Synth Community: Bringing the Weird
Open-mic music nights are fairly common at the bars and breweries in Western North Carolina. But responding to the challenges brought on by the pandemic, some enterprising musicians took the […]
10 Jan 2021
Hundred-word Reviews: January 2021 #1
Welcome to 2021. Let’s hope it’s better for the world’s citizens than 2020 was. Some things, at least, never change. And one of those is my commitment to covering music […]
01 Dec 2020
30 Days Out, December 2020: Doom Flamingo, Unspoken Tradition, John Doyle, Mike Cooley
Live music is decidedly back, with restrictions. All of these shows – happening in the next 30 days in Asheville – feature limited seating and other restrictions, but they represent […]
26 Nov 2020
Rad Lab: Doug McKechnie and the Moog Model III (Part Three)
Continued from Part Two … You’ve said – only half joking, I’d guess — that the main goal of the San Francisco Radical Lab was attracting women. Well, it wasn’t […]
25 Nov 2020
Rad Lab: Doug McKechnie and the Moog Model III (Part Two)
Continued from Part One … The Moog Model III didn’t come with a manual. How much was it hit-or-miss to develop the sounds that you wanted? Well, I pretty much […]
24 Nov 2020
Rad Lab: Doug McKechnie and the Moog Model III (Part One)
In the late 1960s, Doug McKechnie and his roommate launched the San Francisco Radical Lab, an experimental endeavor launched (in part, as you’ll read) to explore the capabilities of the […]
23 Nov 2020
Doug McKechnie’s ‘San Francisco Moog: 1968-1972’
In the late ’60s, the Moog modular synthesizer was still very much an experimental tool. While there had been some ambitious attempts to use the Moog as the centerpiece of […]
24 Oct 2020
Album Review: Halou – Albatross (Deluxe Edition)
For a time in the 1990s, trip hop was a musical sensation. In some ways an outgrowth of the brief lounge/exotica craze, trip hop (also known as chillwave) owed at […]
14 Sep 2020
For Orgatroid, The ‘Future’ is Now
Electronic music is sometimes unfairly characterized as cold, sterile and lacking in emotion. But the music of Orgatroid – an Asheville duo of Jason Daniello and Jeffrey Richards – is […]
21 Aug 2020
Dan Lacksman: The Electronic System Man
This feature appeared previously in Synth and Software. — bk This pioneering synthesist has worked with Bowie, Dolby, Deep Forest, and Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider on what could be his final […]