When Austrian entrepreneur Heinz Lichtenegger established audio-tech brand Pro-Ject in 1991, the compact disc was on the rise. Unfettered by this, what ultimately proved to be short-lived development, he was instrumental in the revival of vinyl; a music format that, unlike the CD, is still thriving. For those true music aficionados and experts – DJs among them – no mode of music transmission has better quality than a 78” or 45”.

With its simple belt-driven modality but also accessible price-point, the inaugural Pro-Ject 1 turntable resonated with a broader consumer base, bringing the vinyl record back into the home as much as the club. With the brand’s launch of the Debut product in 1999 – available in a diverse array of striking colorways – the typology became even more of a lifestyle signifier.

As tastes shifted in the past three decades, so did the finished offering but the integrated technology only improved. Pro-Ject has maintained a reputation of providing the best sound and durability within the mid-range market category.

Building on and commemorating this trajectory of success is the just-released Debut Reference 10, the brand’s first turntable to feature a hybrid carbon/aluminum tonearm. Harkening back to other emblematic models, the design is defined by its sleek matte black surface anchored by acrylic accents. Its bearing block form is made of diamond-cut aluminum.

There are both monolithic and iridescent aesthetic cues; a trip back to more the sophisticated tendencies of the early 1990s. The frosted acrylic semi-transparent main platter evokes the aesthetic quality of ice. Not just aesthetically – even viscerally – appealing, these bold – weighty yet light – components ensure better stability and clearer performance.

The Pre-adjusted Pick it PRO Balanced cartridge makes all the difference when it comes to more-immersive experiences. It isn’t just about listening to the music but also engaging the turntable from a tactile standpoint: positioning a record on the almost suspended plate and placing the tonearm in just the right place.

Other features include a Mini-XLR balanced phono output, electronic speed switch, and gold-plated RCA connectors. The height of the sizable but not overbearing feet can be adjusted.

Produced in Austria, the Debut Reference 10 is both hyper-engineered and meticulously handcrafted. Though seemingly buoyant, the turntable doesn’t include any flimsy elements or unnecessary flourishes.

Heinz Lichtenegger in 1995

Heinz Lichtenegger in archival photo

To learn more about the Pro-Ject Debut Reference 10 turntable, please visit project-audio.com.

Photography courtesy of Pro-Ject.

Form Us With Love’s Nomad Collection remedies cable chaos in today’s increasingly fluid work environments. An ever-imaginative Swedish industrial design studio, Form Us With Love developed the modular Nomad system in partnership with technical design company Forming Function to better accommodate the hybrid conditions of contemporary workspaces – where charging devices and task lighting are no longer tied to a single desk or location.

The office has radically changed over the past few years. Drawing back employees who became accustomed to working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic, these spaces have had to become far more well thought-out, with both stylistic and functional nods to the comforts of domesticity and the unexpected novelty of hospitality – a rapidly expanding and evolving sector. With hot desking the new standard, few people have fixed workstations anymore.

It’s not all that different from the growing number of independent professionals working for themselves, setting up shop in coffee shops and a host of newly imagined third and fourth spaces.

Technology, too, has drastically changed in response to these systemic shifts, becoming more infinitesimal, flexible, and yet durable. Whether our work devices have actually become more efficient is another matter.

Analyzing both factors – that of changing spatial constraints and the ever-refined nature of our everyday tools – the Nomad system emerges as a distilled response to contemporary work culture. The power cord and plug-in task lamp concept might seem simple, but it is a well-achieved solution that addresses these developments without skimping on aesthetic refinement.

The two practices sought to tackle two problems at once: needing to charge devices that have been intentionally engineered with planned obsolescence – batteries with lifespans that degrade faster than they once did – while also providing the right amount of illumination to avoid eye strain.

With varying numbers of plugs and multiple sizes of kitted-in lamps, the scalable ecosystem is lightweight and easy to move around. Its sleek, pared-back appearance and minimal proportions make the design relatively inconspicuous, though much of that is influenced by the chosen finish and colorway.

Now with a taller lamp silhouette variant and freshly developed tones – ranging from calming greens and serene blues to bold reds, slightly shiny silvers, and matte blacks – there’s even more plasticity, not just in materiality but in how aesthetics can support functionality. Though precision-formed, the complementary components are hand-cast at a long-established Swedish foundry using 100% recycled aluminum. Nothing was left to chance.

Varying configurations of Nomad can be conveniently set up anywhere from a co-working space to an airport lounge or the overcrowded “work counters” now found at the gate, where everyone hastily vies for the few available plugs and already out-of-date USB-A charging ports.

To learn more about the Nomad Collection by Form Us With Love and Forming Function, please visit formuswithlove.se.

Photography courtesy of Form Us With Love.

Ich weiß nicht, was ihr so „zwischen den Jahren treibt“ – hier ist Gelassenheit angesagt. Morgen mal eben nach Erfurt auf ein Konzert, dort kurz bleiben und dann hoffen, dass die überängstliche Hündin ob der Böllerei zu Silvester nicht wieder kurz vor Herzstillstand ist (Hab schon geguckt, was so ein Flughafenhotel, an denen nicht geböllert werden darf und die krass gut schallisolierte Fenster haben, kostet. Leider sehr teuer.) Egal, anderes Thema…

Im Sommer war ich dabei, als Pay auf einer Hochzeit ein „Acoustic-Set“ gespielt hat, was wir DJs der elektronischen Musik ja ganze gerne so nennen, wenn wir mal richtige Musik auflegen. Hihi. Jedenfalls hatte mir das im Sommer und dem Anlass angemessen so gut gefallen, dass ich dachte, das könnte der ja gerne öfter mal machen. Und dann haut der vor ein paar Tagen so ein Ding raus. Neben dem Kalender für mich schönste Mix im Dezember. Note to myself: Vielleicht doch noch mal über eine Karriere als MC nachdenken. Ich wette, wenn er bei Soundcloud in seine Insights sieht, hat keiner dieses Mixtape so oft gehört wie ich, denn hier läuft seit Tagen einfach nichts anderes. Wirklich nichts anderes. Passend zu den Anlässen der letzten Tage und in der Summe einfach wunderschön. Life is a beach.

This set is a tribute to calm rituals: the soft clink of glass, the low hum of the room, the comfort of being alone without feeling lonely. Each transition feels like casting a line into darkness, waiting—not for a catch, but for clarity.

A mixtape made for those moments when the world finally slows down, when a single glass of red wine warms your hands and thoughts drift freely.

These tracks breathe. They shimmer like moonlight on still water, carrying a sense of patience, reflection, and gentle longing. It’s music for sitting back, for staring out of a window, for letting memories surface without forcing them away.

Bleiben wir doch noch ein wenig besinnlich, weil es ja auch irgendwie ganz heimlich angenehm ist. Ólafur Arnalds hat am kürzesten Tag des Jahren ein paar Freunde eingeladen, um mit denen zu musizieren – und das ist ganz schön dolle schön geworden.

To celebrate the winter solstice I gathered a few friends and family members at home in Reykjavík. Sunrise Session III features Sandrayati, RAKEL and Salóme Katrín on vocals and 4 incredible string players, performing a few choice songs we felt fit the occasion.

On this shortest day of the year, this is our tribute to brighter days ahead. I truly hope you enjoy it. We loved making it.

Wishing you all wonderful holidays!

(Direktlink)

Whenever I tell people I’m getting back into tapes, their faces immediately light up.

There’s a genuine excitement in peoples’ expressions these days when I mention physical media. Lately I’ve been talking about the cheap walkman I bought on a recent trip to Tokyo, and the various little shops where I hunted for music on cassettes. Unlike in Europe and the US, physical media never went out of vogue in Japan, and many people still have a strong preference for shopping in-person. This made Tokyo the ideal place to rediscover my love of portable analog music.

I searched through racks of tapes stacked on top of an old piano in a back-alley store on the edge of Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood known for thrifted fashion and oddball record shops. On recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, I checked out a specialist shop on a sleepy street in Nakameguro, where cassettes easily outnumbered vinyl records 10-to-1. Almost always, I steered myself toward local artists whose names I didn’t recognize. Sometimes, I bought tapes based on the cover art or description alone. Most second-hand music stores in Tokyo keep everything sealed in plastic, so you either have to bother the shopkeep, or just trust your gut and take a chance.

This kind of music discovery delights people when I describe it to them. Sometimes they start telling me about rediscovering their old CD collection, or wanting to track down an old iPod Classic to experience their music library away from the surveillance and excess of big tech platforms. Maybe it’s just because I live in a particular social bubble in a particular countercultural pocket of New York City. But recently, the conversations I’ve had on this topic have got me feeling like the culture of music is shifting.

People are leaving Spotify, and those who aren’t seem embarrassed about using it. Major artists pulled their music off the platform this year in protest of the company’s ICE recruitment ads and connections to military drones, and posting your Wrapped stats has gone from a ubiquitous year-end pastime to a cultural faux pas. Many folks are sick of streaming in general. They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and an internet infested with AI slop. Artists are tired of tech platforms that pay them virtually nothing, owned by degenerate billionaires that see all human creativity as interchangeable aesthetic wallpaper, valued only for its ability to make numbers go up. Everywhere I go, people are exhausted by the never-ending scroll, desperately wanting to reconnect with something real.

My own path to re-embracing physical media unfolded in stages. Last year, I canceled my Apple Music subscription and started exclusively listening to music I bought from artists on Bandcamp. I still have a large mp3 library, and I thought about setting up a self-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy and wound up just listening to albums I downloaded from the Bandcamp app. Then I ran out of storage on my phone, and the amount of music I had available on-the-go shrank even more.

When I came to Tokyo, a friend took me to a store that sold cheap portable cassette players, and I knew it wouldn’t be a huge leap to take my music listening fully offline. The walkman I bought is unbranded and has a transparent plastic shell, allowing you to watch all the little mechanical gears turning inside as the tape spools around the wheels and past the playheads. It was one of the easiest purchasing decisions I’ve made in recent memory: After years of psychic damage from social media and other phone-based distractions, I was ready to once again have a dedicated device that does nothing but play music.

There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids’ Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather.” Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit “skip.” Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.

Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification — with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits.

Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call “user friction,” turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes “Content,” flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by “perfect fit” algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized “vibes.”

What we now call “AI Slop” is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses — a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, we’re simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class.

On one hand, I empathize with those who still feel like they get something out of streaming. Having access to so much music can feel empowering, especially when so many people feel like they lack the time and resources to develop a music-listening practice. “What streaming service should I use instead of Spotify?” is a question I’ve been seeing constantly over the past few months. 

Here’s my contrarian answer: What if there’s no ethical way to have unlimited access to every book, film, and record ever created? And moreover, what if that’s not something we should want?

What if we simply decided to consume less media, allowing us to have a deeper appreciation for the art we choose to spend our time with? What if, instead of having an on-demand consumer mindset that requires us to systematically strip art of all its human context, we developed better relationships with creators and built new structures to support them? What if we developed a politics of refusal — the ability to say enough is enough — and recognized that we aren’t powerless to the whims of rich tech CEOs who force this dystopian garbage down our throats while claiming it’s “inevitable?”

Tapes and other physical media aren’t a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals.

More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.

Firefox is my web browser of choice. It does a lot of things right. In particular, with the uBlock Origin add-on, it’s got the best ad blocking you can get on desktop and Android.

Firefox is run by a charity, Mozilla. Unfortunately, the AI bros have found their way to the top of Mozilla. And over the past year, Firefox has been adding as much chatbot garbage as they can get away with.

In January, Mozilla AI product lead Jolie Huang posted about a great new extra feature in Firefox: [Mozilla]

after an initial soft launch, we’re gradually rolling out the AI Chatbot access to everyone.

They seeded the comments with Mozilla employees being really excited about the feature! The astroturf didn’t work. The users were not happy.

A lot of users pointed out the obvious thing — if you want to add a chatbot to Firefox, why not make it an … add-on? You could do all the chatbot stuff in Mozilla with add-ons. So people could opt in to using the chatbot. If you cared about user choice.

Finally this month, Mozilla got a new CEO, Anthony Enzor-Demeo. Anthony is a product manager with an MBA, not one of those programmers. What’s Anthony’s vision for Firefox? [Mozilla]

It will evolve into a modern AI browser.

Enzor-Demeo’s already done deals with Perplexity, and he’s got AI plans for the next three years.

Enzor-Demeo did a puff piece interview with the Verge, where he floated the idea of blocking ad blockers in Firefox. You could sure make money that way! [Verge]

He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that.

Enzor-Demeo has been running the Firefox team for the last year. The AI stuff is his doing. And we’ve experienced his attitude to user consent. When Anthony says he definitely won’t do something, he means “maybe later”. So we should expect Firefox to break the adblockers some time next year.

Firefox has heard the backlash to the CEO’s comments — that is, everyone hates this. So they sent Jake Archibald, a Developer Relations guy — a job title that means PR damage control — to reassure us that Mozilla’s going to make AI opt-in! And they’ll put in an AI kill switch!

Now, you might think for two seconds and go “if it’s opt in … why do I need a kill switch?”

And you’re right to think that! Because here’s Jake asking, well, what does opt-in mean, really, when you think about it? [Bluesky, archive]

I’ve spoken to a lot of folks about what counts as opt-in. Some say a toolbar button that does nothing until pressed is opt-in. Some say the only acceptable opt-in is a build-time flag that would need manually compiled. So it’s a grey area.

That’s the words of a guy you need to watch your drink around.

Well, if you don’t like all this rat poop in your food, you can just pick it out! There’s a pile of browser settings. They’re in the hidden settings, under about:config, which Firefox warns you not to touch. You search on “browser.ml” and you disable them all.

So guess what Mozilla did? When you update Firefox, it re-enables the AI! And if you disable the AI again, it re-enables it again next update! Choose correctly, user!

Jake also made out he didn’t know about the AI switching itself back on with every update. He’s lying. The users have been yelling about it for months. He knows.

Meanwhile, Firefox updates, and deploys another new AI feature — “Use AI to suggest tabs.” A perfect dumb AI feature, when you have no idea what to do with the chatbot and make up something to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. But guess what? Firefox defaults it to enabled! Very opt-in! [Bluesky]

Firefox has fallen to AI brain rot. But David — what can we do? Is there something we can use instead of Firefox or Chrome?

No. Your alternatives all suck. There’s two browser engines that work — Chrome and Firefox. They’re your choices.

Anything Chrome-based has bad adblocking, because Google made it that way. Look up Manifest v3, which Google added to Chrome to sabotage ad blockers.

The least-worst of the Chrome reskins is Vivaldi, which has no AI. It has its own adblocker, but it’s not as good a blocker as FIrefox with uBlock Origin. And Vivaldi’s not open source. But they’re relatively non-evil.

I’m going to get a bunch of gullible fools recommending Brave. Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, after he was kicked out of Mozilla for being a massive homophobe. Brave is into weird cryptocurrency nonsense and I’ve written up their dodgy behaviours in the past. Brave also has a whole webpage about how much they love AI. So Brave is not the non-AI option. Stop recommending people use Brave. [Brave]

Some bozo’s going to say Ladybird, which is an unfinished experimental browser that doesn’t work. Project leader Andreas Kling has a number of bad opinions, like his endorsement of the white replacement conspiracy theory. [Twitter]

But almost as bad, Kling vibe-codes Ladybird with Copilot. Yeah, Ladybird’s going to go great. Feel the vibe shift. [YouTube]

Servo’s another unfinished experimental browser. Servo is progressing well, but it doesn’t work yet either. Send them some money. But they’re not a browser yet. [Servo]

So what I’m actually going to do is stay on Firefox until the AI is intolerable. Then I’ll move to one of the spinoffs.

If you cannot tolerate the AI in Firefox, there’s a lot of good and noble spinoffs of Firefox, like Librewolf and Waterfox, or IronFox on Android.

All of these three have stated very loudly they’re not using generative AI. They don’t have the resources to run a whole browser engine, so they still depend on Firefox. But they seem pretty nice.

On my phone, I stick to Firefox with uBlock Origin. It’s the best mobile browser with ad blocking. Even gets the YouTube ads. If you watch Pivot to AI with uBlock Origin, feel free to drop me some pennies if you have any.

• Video — Podcast