Designed by Roger Linn and released by the Japanese company Akai in 1989, the MIDI Production Center or MPC has proven to be the backbone of hip-hop production. Its 16-pad interface allows for 64 continuous sample tracks, and has provided producers with some of the intense sound-granulating control that you’ve heard in the genre’s last 20 years.

The MPC has been around for pretty much all of Providence, R.I.’s Abraham Orellana’s life. So it makes almost cosmic sense that Orellana—who does business under the puzzlingly given name of AraabMuzik—has a masterful way of pounding the pads. He came to most peoples’ attention as the man who produced this summer’s “Salute,” the reunion track for Harlem’s Dipset crew (after the jump). Personally I think the kid’s talent far outclasses Dipset’s extreme-swagger stance, but whatever.

Here he is in raw form in the studio with his buddy the MPC-5000…a visual treatment of his virtuosity to follow…
 

 
After the jump: the Death by Electric Shock video crew and visuals freak System D-128 collaborate to spotlight AraabMuzik’s technique…

 
Better yet, keep your Italo disco. Here’s some actual Krautrock. Yes, It’s the Sauerkraut synthesizer, the work of one Gordon Monahan.

Gordon Monahan’s Sauerkraut Synthesizer is an experimental synth, built around fruits, vegetables, and a jar of sauerkraut as voltage controllers for a software synthesizer, built with ppooll-max/msp and an Arduino interface.
The video captures a live performance on the Sauerkraut Synthesizer at the Subtle Technologies Festival, on board a cruise ship in Toronto Harbour, June 5, 2010.
The Sauerkraut Synthesizer is based on a technical prototype using lemons (The Lemon Synthesizer), developed as a collaboration between Gordon Monahan, Akemi Takeya, and Noid, in Vienna, March, 2009.

 
Witness the majesty of the Lemon Synthesizer after the jump…

 
French special effects genius Geoffrey Niquet collaborated with Gaspar Noe on the creation of the mindblowingly wonderful Enter The Void. Here’s a clip that shows the multi-layered visuals that were composed for the film. It’s like looking through a glass onion. For those of you have seen the movie, this will be a reminder of its loveliness. For those of you who haven’t experienced the Void, this will tantalize and perhaps compel you to see it.

Music by Sigur Ros.
 

 
Here’s a gorgeous and beautifully edited fan-made video for NASA by YouTube user damewse. Damewse says he made this video because “NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously.”

There ya have it.

 
(via TDW)

 
Dangerous Minds is happy to announce that we’re now a featured blog on Pulse, the popular news reader app for i-devices! Pulse lets users compile customized news feeds with a great graphic interface. We extremely pleased to see our content alongside that of web heavyweights like Huffington Post, GOOD, Gizmodo, Salon, Fast Company, Techcrunch and others. Pulse’s easy to use interface will make DM available to readers on the go and we’re excited at how our content is displayed, too. Pulse is the most feature-laden new reader app out there, and it’s FREE!

Meet Pulse. A beautiful application that makes reading news fun and engaging. Pulse takes your favorite websites and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Tap on an article, and you will see a clean and elegant view of the story. Sharing the story via Facebook, Twitter, Email or Instapaper is as easy as two taps. So good, the app was featured in the App Store Hall of Fame!

Over 2000 users have given Pulse a 4.5 star rating at the iTunes store. Get Pulse here for FREE! Available for iPad, iPhone and Android. See Pulse in action in the clip below:
 

 
Listen to “Computer World” played on a Casio VL-80 calculator here.

View larger version of the notations here.

 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk and Poecker)

 
All hail female geek culture from polyester past! Women and giant-ass computers… what more could you ask for? From Lawrence Harley “Larry” Luckham:

In the late ‘60’s I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women except for the programmers who were all men. For some reason only one of them was around for the pictures that day.

 
See more photos after the jump…
 

 
As someone who shot a lot of Super 8 film back in the day, I must say, I was quite impressed by the new 8mm Vintage Camera app for the iPhone and iPod touch.

It used to be that the “vintage” effects packages for treating digital video were lacking whatever that ineffable quality is that can make something digital look like an authentically retro celluloid format. Just adding a bit of screen jitter here and there with some “scratches” didn’t cut it. I was never able to get the effect I was looking for, but, wow, this app is done right.

The app comes with 25 different retro looks, five different kinds of “film,” five “lenses,” retro filmstock color palettes, light leaks, random flickering and jitters. And best of all, the effects are seen “live” in the viewfinder. With the “old skool” celluloid version you never knew what was going to come back (admittedly part of the fun) but now that variable has been removed.

From Nexvio, it’s priced at just $1.99. The only bummer is that it doesn’t output HD video. How much longer will it be before an effects package like this becomes standard issue with video cameras?
 

 
Via Retro to Go

 
A must-read article from The New York Times about brilliant, 70-year-old physicist Geoffrey West, who has found a way to crack the code of what happens when population density occurs. West, has, in essence, turned the concept of a “city” into an elegant mathematical formula:

After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. “What we found are the constants that describe every city,” he says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

A Physicist Solves the City (New York Times)

 
Berlin has always been a bastion of innovative cultural work, and one excellent example of this is the Digital Tattoo Productions outfit.

Comprised of the husband/wife team of video artist and animator Edna Orozco and sound artist Dean “Tricky D” Bagar, Digital Tattoo have executed video-mapping-and-sound projects on historical sites in both their home countries of Colombia and Croatia.

They also recently worked on the body-centered dance theatre piece Quia, performed in Bogota and excerpted below. Check it out and keep an eye and ear out for these folks…
 

Digital Tattoo- QUIA from digital tattoo on Vimeo.