Created as a collaboration between musician Jason Forrest and Agile Partners, Star6 not only lets you record your own samples or play a variety of pre-loaded sampled sounds, but you can send your own sounds to your phone over a Wi-Fi connection. All you need is a WAV or AIFF file and a web browser and you can upload it to your iPhone for use in your sampladelic creations.

The Star6 engine lets you manipulate your sounds live, adding delays, filters and distortions to your tracks. You can even use the accelerometer to adjust pitch, speed, sample order, sample size and randomness by simply adjusting the angle of your iPhone. And while the sample pads don’t support multi-touch, the sound manipulation controls do, letting you layer multiple effects onto your sounds.

You can even record your live performances and turn them into samples that you can attach to one of the six playback pads, or easily download them back to your computer for further editing. Check out the video clip below to see Star6 in action:

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Star6 is available now over at the iTunes App Store for $6.99 (USD). I already took the opportunity to download it and play with a copy on my iPhone, and it’s quite a blast. If you’re into electronic music, you should definitely check it out.

The theater group La Machine terrorized performed at the Yokohama Bayside Area, bringing with them their 40 ft tall, 37-ton giant robot spiders. Finally, something weird and robotic that’s not from Japan.

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As you saw from the video, the spiders can move their legs but are really anchored to a crane. They also spout water from their mouth and butt. Yech. The robots are operated by 13 of the luckiest people in the world, people who get to control and ride on giant robot spiders. But La Machine’s performance isn’t limited to the robots alone; the production includes live music as well as fireworks. You can check out La Machine’s gallery for more pics; The Boston Globe also has some amazing pictures from La Machine’s performance in Liverpool, England last year courtesy of photographer Peter Carr.

[via hacknmod]

Looking more like an uber-modern electric guitar than a turntable, the Vestax S-1 Premium lets DJs move around the stage just like other members of the band. By incorporating a 12-inch platter controller which operates a skip-proof CD/MP3 player, musicians can spin tunes complete with all the effects that they’re used to having on traditional turntable. There’s also a built-in sampler, but it’s limited to just 8 seconds of recording for some odd reason.

Vestax custom makes each S-1 Premium controller to order, and they sell for around $3000 each.

[photo via ScratchWorx]