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In the last year I unfortunately couldn't build much, neither guitars, pedals or noise boxes - I relocated in Austria where I couldn't get a new atelier and had to adjust to a new country, then I've been quite sick, so all my projects kept virtual... Things are happening still, and a luthier in Sweden is interested in my design work and proposed to conceive a prototype together and have it built - these sketches are the last versions of this guitar project - that should be both ergonomic and cool. More about this later. 

Music of the week: regularly I have to listen to Cocteau Twins's 1982 debut album Garlands - it's a kind of perfection, minimal and grandiose, hypnotic and emotional, with the killing bass lines of Will Heggie and walls of noisy guitars - I love also the later Cocteau Twins but this album is their  masterpiece.

And if you're a Facebook user, don't forget to follow gUitarREN's page - it doesn't bring me anything but it's boosting my ego and allows more dialogs.

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Music of the week: I've just discovered Sigur Rós, isn't it silly? 

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Music of the week: I really enjoyed watching on YouTube a 2 hours concert of Tokyo Jihen (東京事変), the late band of Ringo Shiina - a quite incredible mix of rock, suave J-pop and hyper technical jazz rock....

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Music of the week: a couple of days ago I received the CD 'Catacombs' by the Observatory from Singapore and I enjoy their  strange mix of dark wave, noise and progressive rock. And I just listened on the radio the new album of Tricky and it seems that he's back in shape!

The Owl programmable effect pedal

Last year I posted about Devi Ever's Console project - a cartridge-based analog effect platform funded by Kickstater (unfortunately it's not been released yet, it seems that it was more difficult to develop than planned). 

Here is another open-source / open hardware digital effect pedal, targeted at musicians as well as at developers: the Owl - and it's also looking for crowd funding... More or less you can program - or upload - any effect you can think of (preferably something that was never done before) in there!

It seems very interesting to me, though I know nothing about coding, but I'd bet that a completely new era is starting with these projects where musicians and technicians can closely collaborate to develop new sounds!