Revolution

Kraftwerk And The Electronic Revolution is a documentary that looks at Germany’s ubermensch of electronic music, Kraftwerk.

Short review, via Craig Thom:

This documentary attempts to cover the rise of German electronic and experimental music from the 1960s, centered on Kraftwerk. There are perhaps two documentaries here: one an overview of the career of Kraftwerk, and the other the development of native German music. I found the latter more interesting, but I enjoyed it all.

If your interest is just in Kraftwerk, you may not get enough out of this to justify the time. If you are mostly unfamiliar with German music from the ’60s, picking it up, as I did, with Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and Neu! in the ’70s, then you may find the first hour as interesting as I did.

You can preview Kraftwerk And The Electronic Revolution below.

via vanelektrik

Vermona analog drum synthesizer

via Passie808:

This is a demo with the Vermona DRM 1 MK 3 analog drum module.

ripe909 does his Trance Trash thing live, with help from the Octopus, SE BassLine x0xb0x, Machinedrum, Revolution, JP-8080, oh and, yes, some Virus. 

Does this guy have the gear, or what?

Let me know what you think of Trance Trash in the comments.

Future Retro’s Jered Flickinger has quietly updated his Revolution analog synth, giving it a cool new look, longer battery life and a new OS:

The new R2 unit, designated by the gun metal grey chassis, has an updated PC board design using a new RAM chip which extends the internal back up battery life from approximately 1.5 years on previous white faced units to now more than 10 years life span. In addition the R2 units include OS version 2.0 making it more compatible for use with our XS semi-modular synthesizer.

It’s $750. Flickinger plans to have an OS update available for original Revolution synthesizers owners. Read more…

Future Retro’s Jered Flickinger is celebrating 10 successful years in business with a gear porn retrospective of rare FR prototypes.

Here’s an image of the Abstrak sequencer, a prototype of a new type of analog sequencer built using discrete logic components. The rhythm switches could define if notes were off, on, or sustained, while the knobs set the pitch for each step. This model also had a true analog swing function.

Flickinger also offers a bit of biographical background on himself and how he turned Salina, Kansas into a hub of hardcore acid-style synth action…. Read more…