German label raster-noton has been quietly building an empire of astute dance floor and headphone wizards; amassing producers with a progressive bent to their love of heavy techno music. Producers who are not content to hit for par or sail the known course of safety and calm waters. Producers who want to challenge the load-bearing capacity of your speakers, and your hips. So, if raster-noton is a burgeoning techno armada, growing in parallel to the early rise of Ninja Tune, then Kyoka is the Neotropic to Kangding Ray’s Amon Tobin in the raster-noton canon. But I would hesitate at making any further direct comparisons to Riz Maslin’s Ninja alter ego.

On Is (IsSuperpowered), Berlin-based and Japan-born Kyoka offers a brilliant bouquet of flavors and influences. There is the kosmische cut-up flow of Jan Jelinek wed to the heavy dance floor deconstructions of Andy Stott, but a bit more…

Editor’s Note: February may be over, but our forum is still on! Today I bring you installment #5 of Sounding Out!‘s blog forum on gender and voice. Last week Art Blake talked about how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage. Before that, Regina Bradley put the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with race and gender. The week before I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, “loud.” That post was preceded by Christine Ehrick‘s selections from her forthcoming book, on the gendered soundscape. We have one more left! Robin James will round out our forum with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy.

This week Canadian artist and writer AO Roberts takes us into the arena of speech synthesis…