There's a new M83 album due this October, an as-of-yet untitled double album. A source of inspiration was dreams and how they influence your lives. The heady concept album ... it'll be interesting to see how this plays out as an M83 release.

The label head discusses the advantages of touring with 2020 Soundsystem, as opposed to DJing, in a video interview alongside his bandmates from Space in Ibiza.

Dance music without bass would be like a car without wheels. But not all basslines are created equal. We wanted to give it up for basslines that twist and morph and move, that grab you by the lapels and won't let you go. We're talking about elastic, acidic, mercurial, even elephantine bass; we're talking about seasick wobble, all-encompassing throb, and the nimblest figures ever to jitterbug their way into your heart. From deep house to dubstep, and from drum 'n' bass to progressive, these B-lines will inspire a beeline to the dancefloor every time.

Read more on Beatportal

Hedi Slimane, maybe the most 'rock' photographer of his generation, introduces us into the recording studio of Phoenix. It was last May in New York that the photographer took pictures of the recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix's successor.

Check out all the pictures of this recording session here, and other bands' pictures here.

Twenty new artists have been added to the lineup for FILTER Magazine's second annual Culture Collide Festival in Los Angeles, CA October 6-9, 2011.

Gang Gang Dance, Datarock, The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, MEN, Ximena Sarinana, De Staat, Chico Mann, The Tender Box, Suave As Hell, Death Letters, Electra, Descartes A Kant, Da Punto Beat, Guineafowl, Black Box Revelation, Los Hollywood, Bodi Bill, Hundreds, Hedgehog and For A Minor Reflection have all been added to our constantly growiing line-up.

These bands will be joining already announced artists like CSS, Liam Finn, Lindstrøm, Buck 65 and many other bands from the 23 participating countries.

A limited number of festival wristbands, which gives access to all Culture Collide showcases, are now available for $20. On top of the multiple live-performances, film screenings, happy hours with free food and drinks, and intimate acoustic sessions will fill the four day extravaganza.

Click here to get you wristbands now.  

This year, Culture Collide will be held in multiple venues accross LA's East Side including The Echo, Echoplex, Taix, 826LA, Swinghouse Studios, The Church, Reform Academy and Stories Books & Cafe. Of course the festival will conclude with the FREE Toyota Antics Block Party in Echo Park on Sunday, October 9.

To get all the Culture Collide info you desire, click here.

Get your festival tickets here.

Check out this somewhat disturbing clip for "Wildfire," featuring vocals from Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano.

"I don't think the DJ is ever at the top of his craft," Craig Richard tells Defected in an interview that covers fabric's early days, painting and poetry.

The Detroit veteran mixes up Adam X, Marcel Dettmann and Addison Groove in a set for Electronic Explorations.

Summer Of Luvstep: Luvstep Serenade (Mixed by DJ Nappy) by djnappy

Summer Of Luvstep – LuvDub Symphony Mixed by DJ UMB (June 2011) by djumb

The homie DJ UMB from Generation Bass linked up with DJ Nappy to record two mixes of luvstep for you.
In UMB’s words:

Luv, Luv he said!

Luv is here…Luv is lost…luv is gained…hearts are broken, hearts get mended & hearts melt….u feelin’ the butterflies in your stomach yet?

LuvDuB Symphony is really an emotional journey exploring your passions, your romance, your joy of being in luv, your love lost and also your heartbreak.

You might feel as high as a kite, as if on cloud 9, you might get a warm glow inside you, you might wear a smile on your face and your heart might skip a beat.

You might experience some insecurity, despair, pain, get nostalgic over the memories you had with your loved one and also you might feel as though you’re world has ended too.

It’s all a part of being in luv!

Happy sun shiny songs but also sad, sad songs, all meshed together by me, DJ UMB, to make you feel the uplifting, superhuman strength of being in Luv but also the devastation & low ebb of breaking up and being heartbroken.

The mix, well yes it’s pretty lengthy but that just how love-making and getting over a heartbreak ought to be. Imho a Luvstep mix shouldn’t be rushed and some tracks should be allowed to be played in their entirety for the sake of creating a mood/ambience.

Everybody is doing short mixes but I love to do the opposite of whatever everybody else is doing and so I’ve opted for long & epic mix on this ocassion. It stretches to just over 2 hours & 20 mins and contains over 50 tracks including some personal & sentimental faves that have been meshed in that are not dubstep. Tracks like Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You”, Neil Young’s “Expecting To Fly” and various versions of Lovesong. Indeed, the main inspiration for this mixtape comes from The Cure’s “Lovesong”, which is one of my all time favourite tracks.

Anyway, enough waffle. I hope you enjoy it and it becomes a soundtrack to some part of your happy or sad life.

I need to give BIG thank you’s to all the artists, DJ Nappy, Dirty South Joe & Flufftronix, all my dudes at Generation Bass and all of you who take time to listen to my mixes.

A special thank you to members of the Luvstep Dub Symphony Facebook group who posted some of the tracks in that group, which I have used in my mix, Anna, Lara, Ivo, Badshah and some others. Also to Monica & Kiran for recording the Lovesong dialogue and sending it to me.

The English producer tells TEA about his time working at the renowned Wire club in Leeds, and how one-and-a-half years there taught him discipline.

Can editing sounds be as easy as editing pixels in a tool like Photoshop? That’s the question asked yet again by an audio editor, in the announcement of a new tool called Spectral Layers, seen in a new teaser.

Visualizing sound is not a simple problem, but you can do worse than the spectral view. Mapping frequency over time rather than just amplitude, the graphic spectrum illuminates components of a sound as we hear it, showing sonic energy of different frequencies in brightness and color. And audio editors have routinely made use of these views, whether as displays in various audio editors (some editable, some non-editable views), or in graphical tools like the ground-breaking MetaSynth. In fact, even Adobe themselves have weighed in on the “Photoshop for sound” notion with their own Soundbooth app, which, naturally, copies the toolset verbatim from the company’s flagship Photoshop image editor. See also: Photosounder, which perhaps comes closest to this tool, and SPEAR, which is available free on Mac and Windows and has some fascinating resynthesis features. (Spectral sound design probably deserves its own post, later on!)

Spectral Layers nonetheless looks to potentially break new ground by focusing entirely on the idea. Whereas many audio editing tools that use spectral views have had modest editing facilities, here, it’s the entire program — and with some nice twists. On-the-fly selection previewing means that you’re constantly listening to your audio, not just looking at it. Advanced selection brushes make honing in on certain parts of your sound more precise, including by essential harmonic editing tools. (We hear harmonic relationships intuitively, so editing wave spectra at the literal frequency, rather than in the logarithmic proportions with which we hear, doesn’t work nearly as well.)

Spectral Layers also works with visualizing spectra in more compelling ways than just the typical, two-dimensional frequency vs. time view. Three-dimensional visualizations make seeing details in the sound easier.

Then you get into the actual editing. The developers are promising some powerful features, from extraction to independent pitch and time transformations, all moving this well beyond eye candy to the realm of deep sound editing. (The UI shows other features as well.)

There’s a new UI tutorial, but some of the features in brief:

• Cross-platform Mac and Windows compatibility
• Non-destructive layers for editing, plus compositing audio either by adding or subtracting a selection from a sound. (The latter sounds fascinating for sound design.)
• A multi-pane UI, similar to tools from Apple and Adobe and familiar to people with a graphic software background.
• 32-bit float spectrum.
• Surround project support.
• Pattern matching algorithms for still more-sophisticated selection and editing.
• An “open project format” (presumably something XML-based or the like).
• SDK for file formats, devices, tools, and filters.

In other words, the whole thing sounds mind-blowing and gives us everything we’d want … on paper. Presently described as “alpha stage 2,” the tool is still in development. But we’ll be watching.

DIVIDE FRAME, the developer, is a Paris-based house led by engineer Robin Lobel. Unrelated to the music side of this site, they also have a GPU-based video decoder, but no trial of the audio software – yet. Stay tuned.

Spectral Layers

Updated: while this is just a teaser, lead developer Robin responds with some more details for CDM:

There are 4 categories of tools: info (to get extensive info on the spectrum), extract (brush, frequency, harmonics, multichannel, noise (wip), time (wip), and others incoming), modify (so far only erase/amplify, but much more coming to transform the sound, like blur and other graphical modifications), draw (any tool to directly draw sound, as frequencies, harmonics, noise, etc).

Available Q4 2011, no price range yet (expect it to be the high, but there will probably be a light, affordable version too)

3D visualisation can display both amplitude or phase velocity using the GPU (OpenGL), it is seamlessly integrated with the 2D view (right clic+drag to make it 3D as you want, double right clic reset to 2D)

I do independent R&D in audio/video for several years now, have worked in some French [post production] companies as R&D developer and [graphics artist], wanted to start my own business (first with GPU Decoder as a small project, then came Spectral Layers). Spectral Layers came from the need to get clean voice tracks when shooting movies (as I do short movies too), then I thought of extending the concept to a general purpose, Photoshop-like tool. iZotope RX and Adobe Audition were not enough for my needs — I found the spectral editing pretty limited — so I decided to do my own.

Thanks, Fahad, for the tip!

In this ten-minute video, Soundwall speak to the outfit on the eve of their live debut in London.

The New Yorker chats about his recently released album, The Warriors and his hometown in this interview with Ibiza Voice.

It’s not often when we experience some club beats mashed with polish highland folklore. Thanks to a young artists called Gooral this situation may change. Gooral merging his electro crossover style with folkloric music from beskid region of south poland created some serious highland beats for global dancefloors. Check out the promo clip for his debut release called “Ethno Electro” and let’s hope for some more material to appear online soon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gooral’s website.

Performances from The Chemical Brothers, D/R/U/G/S and Wu-Tang feature in a series of videos covering the 2011 edition.