So much energy is spent reflecting on the merits of different tools, or re-hashing tired debates like the comparison between analog and digital, often with the assumption that you can hear the tool in the finished work. But the real value of an expressive, creative tool is that it can produce wildly different results in different hands; it’s the measure of its versatility. And the measure of music is the music itself.

That makes it doubly satisfying listening to the results of the Efficient Music Competition CDM hosted with the Renoise production software and Linux-powered Indamixx netbooks and software suites. While tracker applications have been conventionally associated with certain styles, there’s music here from every possible genre. There are contributing artists at a wide variety of different stages in the development of their craft and creative output – just as all of us are growing and changing. There’s even a spoken word piece with a cow in a can (one of my offbeat favorites). I’m sure you’ll hate some of the music and love some of the rest; some will think the voting results were spot-on and others will be surprised and find the results upside down. Such is taste.

You can download all the entrants in the original Renoise file format, which you can play on any Mac, Windows, or Linux machine even with the free demo version. They’re ranked by popular-opinion vote.

http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/results.php

On the main competition page, most of tracks have SoundCloud players, which means you can also connect with artists you like at that community:

http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/

Remember that all of these tracks are Creative Commons-licensed, meaning they’re ripe sources of samples and sounds you can use freely in your work. If you need them for commercial purposes, you can contact the artists.

Taste aside, though, it’s fantastic to hear the range of activity going on. And keep in mind that the challenge of the competition, as sponsored by the software Renoise and Linux netbook vendor Indamixx, was to do more with less. As lovely as it is to have ever-growing computational resources, this is proof you don’t need them all the time. Even an affordable Atom-powered netbook is capable of real production, which says great things about the ongoing mobilization and democratization of computer music technology.

We have more than just a one-dimensional set of results. The contest judges offer lots to hear, including commentary on the tracks. And I’m pleased to share my own CDM pick and honorable mentions.

CDM Picks

Now, for my own personal Editor’s Choice selections. Keep in mind, these are governed exclusively by my own taste; your mileage may vary.

My pick: After a lot of listening, I’m naming the official Top CDM Selection dvoraktunes’ Tangeble, by Dave Smith-Hayes.

The track didn’t make it into the top popular selections, which is another reason to highlight it here. Sure, it sounds chippy, but it isn’t fondness for chip music and raw, digital sound that prompts me to give it honors. I thought some of the sounds here were the freshest in the bunch. It makes nods to breakcore but manages to parody it in an intelligent, inventive way. (“Chipbreak” is an apt name, as it’s something that, well, happens to chips.)

Catch it on its drop.io page:

http://drop.io/dvoraktunes8190

Here’s what its creator had to say about the track and the software:

It’s one of the first few tracks I ever made in Renoise, I decided it had the best breaks and best instrumentation. It’s a chipbreak track that uses two drum loops (the amen and a Ryan Gruss break) and two simple waveform tracks. Along with filtering, delay and chorus effects. Everything is native to Renoise, no use of VSTs or third party plugins. It should be more than adequate for a netbook.

Generating Drum Kits in the instrument mode is definitely something some one should look into if they’re slicing beats like an old school tracker (fast-tracker II? It’s before my time, that’s for sure). It’s definitely helped me plug in breaks super fast. And learn your effect columns! They can help you achieve some of the coolest sounds that I find are really hard to emulate outside of Renoise.

Honorable mention:

The work of Cornelius Noll (aka 84 Caprice) is easily one of the highlights of the event. It’s worth a visit to the Audio Cookbook site for the track and a lot of background on how it was produced.

http://audiocookbook.org/audio_news/84-caprice-featuring-prof-karma-the-uh-oh-beat/

[indamixx]_84_Caprice_feat._Prof_-_Karma_the_uh_oh_beat.mp3

It did (rightfully) make it near the top of the competition, but it’s worth mentioning that Atte André Jensen’s Længere væk (“further away”) made exquisite use of vocals on Renoise – even if vocal production is not normally associated with trackers or netbooks.

(Working on grabbing the MP3 file, but until then, it’s in the contest results.)

I love Transient’s self-described “abstract hip-hop” on Green Butter:

green butter by transient

ASCII Death Star is a thumping, tasty track:

http://drop.io/asciideathstar

Sometimes, what’s nice about these sort of contests is listening to a track and hearing a musical voice that isn’t your own, that isn’t expected. The cut “Mole” seems just wildly quirky to me, like soundtrack material, and I got to play it while auditioning tracks as I drove along the I-5 in LA:

Mole by aksn

There were many, many worthy tracks, and polish was clearly rewarded in the top five, but at least I’m able to note a few that might otherwise have been missed.

Finally, I’ll shout out a couple of tracks for being especially topical:

chunter deserves recognition for inventing a name for this ("compact electronic desktop music") and then using an open-source, Linux vocoder to sing it:

Compact Electronic Desktop Music by chunter

And, of course, I have to give a special nod to the tune submitted as a CDM theme song. Give "You Know CDM" a listen:

You Know CDM by Subtracted

Podcast and Track Commentary

Ronald Stewart of Indamixx put together a full, hour-long podcast with his top tracks and commentary on his take on each of them:

http://www.trinityaudiogroup.com/EntireBraodcast.mp3

He also had some nice things to see on the Renoise forum:

I just want say I can agree with the comments about ‘competition’ being too restrictive. This was so much more than a competition. This was special. Thank you to all the Renoise producers!

Peter Kirn and I were talking at Dubspot Sunday night and we both agree that this competition BLEW AWAY any opinions of what Renoise sounds like, sounds, specific genre etc. That mold is officially shattered and I think we are all moving on to bigger and better with computer based music production. The fact that someone can produce this caliber of music on a netbook will redefine mindsets that we have yet to realize the benefit for years to come! Let’s cook this for 2-5 years and see how the dust settles (IMO it will be in all of our favor). Lastly, the incredible amount of global contributions to Indamixx (via Linux community) and all of the songs submitted has placed this contest in a new realm that I have never seen in a contest in the USA. This is the ultimate global collaboration that can never be taken away from all of us!

Rock on brothers!!!
I can’t wait for that Renoise Party

Indeed.

Thanks to everyone for contributing, and feel free to share your comments – including constructive criticism – below. (Key word: constructive!)

It’s music production. It’s … lasers. If you’re in the LA area, you’ll want to be there. If not, let us know in comments what you most want to see covered / interviewed / videoed for CDM.

DubSpot’s Live 8 Sessions Tour heads to Los Angeles this weekend, for a set of workshops, performances, and demos on Hollywood Boulevard. I’ll be out with the crew, and hosting with DubSpot a special interactive performance lounge Sunday night.

Sunday night will feature generative audiovisual art made on iPhones, and laser-powered, open-source gestural controllers and a laser installation that responds to motion and sound, plus Christopher Willits, Kid Beyond, Irwin, myself, and a lot more.

The weekend workshops: The artist lineup includes legends from a number of genres, including Scientist, Kid Beyond, Daedelus, Justin Boreta (Glitch Mob), Thavius Beck, and Christopher Willits. Other names you may not know have their own resume in sound design and performance (Irwin), producing and education (Steve Nalepa), mastering technique (Daniel Wyatt), and business (Barry Cole). Sunday, monome virtuoso Daedelus and I will talk about controllers, performance, and sampling technique, I hope going well beyond Live to design and playing technique in general. Passes are $110 for one day, or $195 for the weekend. Watch for a similar series in Austin, Texas this month, and other cities TBD, or for everyone else, stay tuned to CDM and DubSpot.

Ableton is a co-presenter, and Live a jumping-off point, but the topics really wind up being about more than any one tool. You’ll find deeper questions about composing, sound design, mastering, business, performance, controllers, and design in these discussions. I hope to work with some of my artist friends and DubSpot to bring more of those conversations to the CDM readers worldwide.

Want a free pass? One free pass awarded by the end of the day Thursday to the first person in comments to … write a really quotable comment about why you need a free pass. (Sorry, it’s the best I can come up with; I have to sleep and leave for the airport shortly.)

Los Angeles Tour [DubSpot]

Sunday night – $5 benefit Interactive Performance Night + CDM 5th Anniversary PARTY CDM turns five this month, and we’ll be kicking off a series of parties in LA, Boston, and New York. For $5 (all proceeds go to the sustainable charity NextAid), catch a night of audiovisual performance and bleeding-edge musical and visual inventions:

• Featured live performances by Kid Beyond, Christopher Willits (Ghostly International), and Irwin
  , with surprises through the night
• Open laser instruments: Open-source, gestural laser music controllers you can build, presented by Meason Wiley (www.cyclespersecond.net)
• 3D mobile music: iPhone-based performance live, synchronized three-dimensional audiovisuals by generative artist Aaron McLeran (Electronic Arts – Spore)

9:00 pm
SUNDAY, November 8
Los Angeles, CA
$5 / free for tour attendees
King King Hollywood | Directions
Facebook page

Full disclosure: The author is currently providing consulting services to DubSpot, and DubSpot’s Live Tour is a CDM advertiser, though there has been no compensation for this story or for my appearance in LA. (In the interest of disclosure, I’m happy to be spending my weekend being involved with the event!) – Peter Kirn

Mint.com, the online financial management tool, has put its numbers together with market researchers NPD Group to analyze music spending. The results: when it comes to consuming recorded music, digital music continues to rise. At the same time, so does Apple’s grip on the music consumption market, a combination that includes proprietary control of a music store, a music player, and the leading mobile device.

The NPD data should look familiar. Digital music is growing, and clearly it’s at the root of the record industry’s loss of revenue as consumers shift from physical to digital media. Also, Apple’s iTunes remains the lion’s share of the market – enough so that they effectively control distribution, pricing, and consumption patterns, the very definition of monopoly by most measures. (That’s even before you get to Apple’s effective monopoly over the computer player and mobile device, though my suspicion is that an all-out attack on the portable device could start to chisel away at all three.)

Even in the NPD data, though, there’s an interesting indicator: note that the “Other” category is roughly the same size as Apple’s main competitors. That suggests that there’s a plurality minority. And oddly enough, it’s right in the middle of this mysterious “Other” category that a lot of unknown music artists make their dollars, selling direct to listeners or going through niche sites. Artists I’ve talked to in the electronic genre have almost universally said they make nothing on Apple, while they do very well on a site like electronic-specific Beatport. And unlike physical media, it’s not a big deal for someone who loves electronic music to drop their favorite tunes manually from the Beatport store into iTunes and an iPhone.

Dig into the Mint.com numbers, and you see just how different stores can be. Per-transaction spending differs by an enormous margin. Brick-and-mortar retailers sell a lot more per transaction. True, this could include accessories like headphones at stores like Sam Goody, but it’s also interesting to note the gap between stores like eMusic, Rhapsody, and CD Baby, and the smaller per-transaction buy at iTunes.

While Apple buyers aren’t spending as much per visit, they’re visiting more often, and Apple’s move to variable has made a big difference. Buyers have gone from purchasing an average of 2-2.5 transactions to well over 3, coinciding with the introduction of variable pricing.

If you’re not a fan of monopolies, there’s just not much to be done to spin this data. As digital consumption has grown by an order of magnitude, nothing has happened – thus far – to change Apple’s dominant share of the market. And as you can see in pricing statistics, within the Apple ecosystem, Apple has been enormously effective in controlling the pricing of the product and spending habits of the consumers.

On the other hand, looking at the inverse situation, a lot of the most interesting activity is happening outside either the former brick-and-mortar or new digital iTunes economies. We don’t have data on a lot of these niche stores (Dancetracks, Beatport, Bleep, and so on), which grow in number and variety. We don’t have data on direct-to-consumer sales by artists. And we don’t have much data on legal free music consumption, music released as Creative Commons or pay-what-you-will. Just criticizing Apple for their popularity could miss out on what’s happening in these alternative channels.

Many of these channels have no obligation to share their statistics, but to any who are interested, I’d love to talk to you. (And I think CD Baby winds up being the most interesting stat here.)

This is also an excellent illustration of what online analytics can do with financial data. It certainly won’t ease anyone who prefers that this data remain private, but fans of analytics might also see potential for collective learning experiences from shared data. Data like this had long been privileged only to banks and credit cards; a service like Mint allows users to share such data with one another.

So, how are you spending on music?

And would you find it useful – or disturbing – to have that kind of data shared anonymously with other consumers?

If 16 bits spoil the mood of your All Hallow’s Eve, and you need some chips with your treats, the good peoples of the chip music community are hear to make sure the celebration of the visiting dead are properly accompanied by a free musical soundtrack. The download is free to grab, and fully Creative Commons-licensed for noncommercial, ShareAlike use.

The lineup:
The Guillotine Factory – Assembly Line
NESMETAL – The Throes of Wickedness
Heosphoros – A Traditional Childrens Waltz
Chema64 – Mictlantecuhtli
Norrin_Radd – Reciprocal Dimensions
Mr. Doom – Poison’d Candy
Nestrogen – Infernal Misanthropy
Dr. Zilog – Sanguinary Sect of Worship
arottenbit – Chemiotrails
FTF – Phobos & Deimos
Baphomania – Roaming Spectral Shores
Peter Swimm – illithid
H-Pizzle – Ghosts of a Fallen Empire

Enjoy!

All Hallows Eve in 8bit Hell Compilation

And you can add this to our exclusive, blippy, delicious Liz Revision Mix:
Exclusive Liz Revision Mix

The veil between the living and dead is growing thin, and I… uh, have some free music for you. Sorry, it turns out I don’t have a clever lead for this story, and my segue makes no sense. So let’s get to it!

Friend of the Site Liz McLean Knight aka Liz Revision aka Quantazelle of subVariant has put together a special, exclusive mix for CDM of 117-119 bpm musical goodness, excavated from the “_blippy” folder of sketches on her USB drive. Matt Moldover, who has been working on his CD-as-electronic-instrument album, lent his laptop. (Watch him assembling CDs in the video after the break.)

It’s all in celebration of a Halloweeen party Saturday night in Chicago, headlined by Josh Davis (BitShifter). Party ringleader Liz joins Josh on behalf of subVariant to represent the IDM-glitch-minimal-tech-house side of things, and Mr. Automatic (Front 312) and Onefiftyone (Chicago Workshop) will be joining in. If you’re in Chicago, this looks like the place to spend your Saturday. If, like me, you’re not, well, we have some music and videos for you to bring the party home.

Chicagoans:
Going.com Chicago event link + discount
Presale tickets on FractalSpin

And yes, while Josh is working on Game Boys in 8-bit, our CDM mix is fully 16-bit, baby! I’m telling you, 16-bit is totally the future.

Download MP3

Now, for a bit of Josh tearing it up in glorious 8 bits:

Bit Shifter – March of the Nucleotides from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

Bit Shifter // Blip Festival 2006: The Videos from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

Bitshifter did an interview recently with Chaos Control, for more on his performance techniques and inspiration.

And here’s a video of what Moldover was up to as Liz perfected her mix on his laptop — assembling special-edition versions of his CD, which, thanks to custom electronics in the jewel case, can double as noisemakers instead of just packaging. (See our previous story.)

Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.

It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have “no stature” and “have sound all over them,” and Elton’ John’s classic call to “tear down the Internet.” (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a brand-new verb.) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a recent Resident Advisor interview, among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, you’re right.)

No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… Ricardo Villalobos. (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)

I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.

Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.

The drum machine you might have bought then could be the Alesis HR-16, or perhaps a Roland TR-707. They’re fantastic, unique-sounding instruments. But “the best quality possible” is not generally a phrase associated with instruments of this era. We love them because they aren’t 192kHz, 64-bit multisamples recorded from 30 microphones and shipped on a 100 GB hard drive, because “quality” isn’t actually everything. And if you bought a new mixer in 1989, I assume you picked up something like Mackie’s just-released LM-1602, rather than an SSL. Of course, you really could go do that now. In fact, Ableton Live recently added 64-bit processing in the signal chain; the software that does more aliasing to account for lower bitrates is actually Pro Tools.

He goes on:

The thing is, you have the limitation of the program, the limitation of the digital mixing which is happening inside the computer, you have the limitation of the sound sources of the synthesizers—the virtual synthesizers. Even the sound engine is playing a very big role in the whole sound of the product. If you have a good turntable and good speakers, you can hear it is made in Ableton. Logic, for example, is very neutral in sound but Ableton…you can hear it in two seconds.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Live does have an overused sound – but that comes from people using effects presets as-is, people not knowing how to mix, people time stretching and warping without adjusting settings or taking care to think about the impact on its sound.

The idea that you have to use a turntable to hear these things, or generally to hear quality issues in a track produced entirely digitally is… well, an interesting theory. (It’d be like testing the fidelity of your inkjet printer by first taking a Polaroid of the output.)

They have all of these virtual instruments that are calculated by a computer, and you have a certain space where you have to put everything. And when you want to leave this space, you have to live with compromises, the compromises of digital mixes and recordings.

Now, perhaps I’m wrong, but I thought that if for some reason you thought you needed to mix on an analog board and record to, say, analog reel-to-reel, you were no less able to do that with the analog outs of your MacBook Pro than with your 606.

And what exactly was in those vintage drum machines, if not a computer making  calculations? Eleven secret herbs and spices? Elves with slide rules?

But this is the beauty of interviews – you can say whatever you want. And it definitely beats boring.

There is also one statement with which I wholeheartedly agree:

People are finding it easy to publish something without any controls. And this is the problem with the internet in general. There is so much information, and no one knows if it’s true or not. It’s just there. It’s an information monster.

It’s almost as though the Internet is a place in which people can make any wild claim they wish, without anyone questioning its basis in reality or fact.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1128

Commencing in about 12 hours, Visionsonic 2009 showcases Audiovisual artists from around the world. The Thursday show is “for Young Audiences”, but I’ll definitely be watching The Odyssey of Rick the Cube.

L’Odyssée de Rick le cube (extraits du spectacle) from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo.

The festival program has 20 artists performing over Friday and Saturday, which you can view on the Visionsonic TV page, or load the WMV stream in your media player of choice (VLC works beautifully).

There are plenty of reasons to go to live performances, to be in the same physical location as the artists, and to experience them without any technology or production getting in the way. Of course, if the performance is happening on the other side of the planet, then streaming may be the only feasible way to get there. CDM has dabbled in internationally-streamed performance before with NetLag, which attempted to put together a “festival” featuring artists performing from various locations. This was great fun, but beset with various problems, as technical and especially bandwidth limitations are keeping us from the “everything streaming live in HD” world the mainstream media seems to think we inhabit. These limitations are falling away quickly though, so it just remains for us to figure out the most compelling ways to capture live performance for streaming.

For watching the stream? Well I’ve got a big stereo, a projector, a copy of VLC, and a weekend’s entertainment all planned out for me.

It’s nearly Election Day again here in New York. But it’s also Musical Election Day worldwide for the Efficient Music Competition with CDM, portable Linux-powered studio Indamixx, and modern tracker Renoise. In an age when technology tends to mean more, these artists are making music with less, carefully optimizing Renoise-powered tracks to operate well on lesser CPUs. Now’s your chance to hear the fruits of their labors, and register your vote. (And because these are Creative Commons-licensed, they’re free to share and share alike, too.)

Here’s what to do:

1. Head to the Renoise-hosted official competition site.

2. Sign in to your Renoise forum account, or register for a free account if you have not already. (This is just a forum account; the Renoise folks won’t be spamming you. Having the account gives you the ability to discuss the songs and pick up some Renoise tips, too.)

3. Give the tracks a listen. You can download them all at once in XRNS format and play them in Renoise – a free demo will do the trick. Alternatively, click the “plus” icon to expand the song for more details; most include an MP3 preview you can listen to on-demand (a good way to browse the tracks, especially on a machine that doesn’t have Renoise installed).

4. Drag and drop to vote. Drag the song from the list down to the voting box at the bottom, then reorder them in order of which you like best. You can vote for multiple songs, but whichever is listed higher in your list will be “weighted” better, so pick your favorites, then choose your favorite favorites.

5. Save your votes! You can adjust your list, add additional entries, and change your mind – just be sure to save each time.

6. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8 is the deadline for voting. Whatever you have listed as your votes then is final.

The forum will be the official venue to discuss these tracks. Of course, I’m also curious to hear on comments – what do you think of these entries overall? Those of you who worked on tracks, what was the experience like having to optimize for limited system resources?

Awesome as Renoise is, I also wanted a place for lovers of all trackers to come together, so I’ve created a new group on Noisepages:

I <3 Trackers [noisepages.com]

Sign up, join in, and we can talk about tracker technique and tools in general. (For instance, I’d love to get a workflow going working on a tiny tracker on the go, then bringing that work into a netbook or laptop running Renoise.)

Amo Navas Bravetti – Raw (live video) from Gustavo Bravetti on Vimeo.

Sure, novel controllers are fun to watch, like our friend Gustavo Bravetti, driving a Brazilian crowd wild by waving his Wii remote live. But what if you can’t see the performance gimmick, if you’re just listening to the track?

The pitch behind the track “Raw,” celebrating the fifth anniversary of Fresco Records, is just that. It’s a studio-produced track, but the artists wanted to maintain some of the improvised feel of the live music. The track pairs the hit DJ/producer duo of David Amo and Juli Navas with Gustavo Bravetti of Uruguay – the Ableton and alternative controller wizard who regularly feeds tutorials to CDM.

Of course, this trio aren’t the only folks thinking this way. The first sequencers gave us the power to arrange everything in advance, meaning people immediately began to seek ways to restore live feel, turning off the metronome and doing everything in one take. But it’s nice to see these high-profile artists – and our friend Gustavo – taking it on specifically with something as off-the-wall as a Wii remote.

multi-touch the storm – interactive sound visuals – subcycle labs from christian bannister on Vimeo.

What if you could mash, mangle, mush, and morph sounds with your fingers on a screen, watching the waveforms dance in response in three dimensions? That “what if” is expressed beautifully in a project by musician-developer Christian Bannister of Portland, Oregon, who works as Subcycle Labs.

The result is like being able to touch sound directly.

Three-dimensional forms morph and vibrate using visuals programmed in Processing, making architectural-organic shapes and spaces that really begin to “look” like sound. These forms can represent synthesis and effects parameters (Christian has done some work with the Massive synth from Native Instruments), or can allow navigation through loops using touch. Gestures remap offsets and duration for audio, scrub and slice, and apply granular resynthesis.

Controls use multiple touch points on a screen (apparently via Community Core Vision and reacTIVision), with sound from Logic, Reaktor, and Max/MSP, and auxiliary control with a joystick array and KORG KAOSS Pad.

Here’s what happens with a Massive bass line:

low frequency entity – subcycle labs from christian bannister on Vimeo.

It’s spectacular, gorgeous work, and I can’t wait to see more. It’s well worth reading through the whole description on the blog for more details, technical, musical, and artistic:

http://www.subcycle.org/