Author: Al Gordon

• O_c T4.1.

  

  “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects”

  Perhaps the most stunning of revelations recently have been c/o the spate (there are currently 3x, as pictured above, respecitvely: Tunefish/TLM Audio – who beat most to the marketplace w/ a superbly well-considered build, to the point where I later ended up picking many of their riffs on Emilie Gillet’s designs up, all of which preserve and/or improve on aesthetics – made a chunky 12hp one w/ the USB, trigger, and TRS MIDI jacks organized in their own column on the right, followed closely by After-Later Audio w/a slimmer 10hp build w/ integrated trigger jacks & an optional 2hp panel for USB & MIDI, then finally CalSynth whose 16hp (?) XLOC2 purports to a larger screen, clearly displaying an improved ergonomic spec by placing the USB & MIDI bottom left, audio bottom right, creating a safe buffer for fingers around the two functional knobs that essentially drive things here) of Teensy 4.1-powered “O.R.N.8” generation O_c modules running 4 discrete, parallel-lane CV & 5 sequential-lane dual-mono audio-apps; the former branched from Nicholas Michalek’s ongoing “Phazerville” suite (itself a branch of Ben Rosenbach’s Benisphere; a twig, essentially) & the latter & the hardware itself conceived by Paul Stoffregen. Jim Matheson is in there somewhere as well; Max Stadler, Tim Churches, and Patrick Dowling are the original architects… admittedly, attribution of specific aspects of the Gesamtkunstwerk gets fuzzy given the open-source nature of it all.

  Around them, I’ve built a setup comprised entirely of other small computers; and this is precisely where this current wave of Euro-computers gets interesting. Pushing aside the concept of firmware-flashing hardware into entirely different things… if we transverse the codebases, then compare say the computational bottlenecks of the VST 1.0 spec (barely) running on a whole-ass laptop in 2000 w/ what is on the table here in a comparably modest, low-voltage, tiny footprint, it’s easy to see just how much generational & Moore’s Law creep has transpired in the interim. Functionally, it’s academic really to see any difference in “Use” re: signal flow between the patch-cable paradigm of “Analogue” & the clearly “Digital” one here, with the only appreciable change being the need for physical connections vs. the introduction of virtual ones, allowing you to ship perfectly “Buffered” digital copies around to different algorithms w/o needing to physically patch.

  Limiting this to the apps that I’ve been recording & performing with for the past 6 months alone, there’s already enough here to warrant a complete rethink of ones modular setup, as many of the individual apps could ostensibly depreciate the majority of utility modules, at floating-point accuracy. For example, within the remit of a single one of these (I am currently running two, with a third on the way) you could set up an app to both power & receive notes from a USB MIDI controller, with which you can then use to re-transpose notes from a simple LFO fed into a second app trigger-jockeying between a pair of quantizers set a static interval apart, then send that note-stream into a pair of shift registers w/ real-time CV-programmable index (up to 255!) yielding a 4-voice canon where each note is then again offset either within or outside of the current scale/quantizer, or even a further 4 quantizers; one for each voice with its own offset, scale, and temperament! You can even then simultaneously use the audio-layer to feed your master audio output directly into your phone (using only that layer as an audio interface) to film videos w/ direct sound. Again, just one of countless scenarios.

  I’ve just been granted access to the 2.0α, which promises to be yet another refinement & further extension into what is possible with sound and control and automation thereof in this tiny field; will report shortly…

• SB26.

  An international festival (or trade conference, of sorts: interference?) happens in May, and through peer-pressure & a certain keeping-up-with-the-joneses energy this has become the bottleneck through which entire yearsworths of ideation, development, & market-speculation get simultaneously rammed, for hundreds of boutique, cottage-industry concerns adjacent to the production of electronic music. I have been scouring the announcements w/ bated breath while simultaneously drawing the pursestrings oh so tight; one wonders how this spontaneous, Vesuviusian eruption of produkt benefits the greater marketplace, as a majority of similar-category devices are swiftly ruled out in a brutal cage-match ladder-tournament, the victorious always being the one w/ exaggerated feature-creep & mission-bloat. Let’s take a look:

  

  This effete gentleman right here ostensibly brings the psychological rein of the OG “Elite” bespoke synthesizer concern to an end by offering a seemingly-nerfed (yet quite capable, feature-laden) just-above-triple-digit desktop unit rife with glorious connectivity. That said, eyes closed, (dancing) in my head I’m struggling to visualize the person for whom this is: generational boffins that matter (or have the resources to appear so) have already fuxxed with this whole ecosystem via the deluge of Antipodean & now domestic easels & the younger svelte/uptight techno-ambients will assuredly cringe in extremis at the ah chopped Space Weasel unc aspect, so I guess its someone like me (modest pocketbook, glory days visible albeit fading in rearview; still in the mindset of success if not necessarily chasing the global criticality, wanting to continue to tinker until the dying of the light). Bold move for Fox & friends; very glad to see them taking wild swings & the IP / Don’s legacy deserve such radical departures: definitely on board.

  

  Honestly love the Afro-Futurist connotations here; I’ve spent a little time w/ this digital-generation of modules & objects from the Czech developer & have found them to be the exact level of overengineered (both endless keycombing to be unlocked & firmware revisions adding features long after the fact) to keep the spark alive as romance dwindles. This tiny handheld rejuvenates the immediacy of Waisvisz’ Cracklebox into a 21st Century possibility-set that feels novel, although we’ll see just how loud & at what response that embedded speaker operates.

  

  Ostler has put two things out into the void; most impressively a 4hp audio/CV interface that lets you pipe 8 signals from your phone/computer directly into Euro via USB-C. Would have killed for such a simple thing BITD; wrestled with all of that ADAT/lightpipe crap for so long that by the time the ES-8 came in I had already jumped ship. There’s also an 8hp triple-mono audio-freezer that people are going to want, although I do wonder about the sort of music this leads to & if any of the folks sweating the hardware have considered any of it.

  

  Tom & Tony are each royalty, and as such this (full stereo!) update of the Echophon/Erbe-Verb (the OG “Playable” Euro reverb; an instrument more than either an effect or an algorithm) is a major cause célèbre. While the recent NUSS innovations have been incredible, they insist on a system-wide integration that feels like commitment… whereas the processors & effect-modules can be dropped into extant setups at a moment’s notice. Excited to hear this one in person.

  I’ll get to the ALM, Instruo (10hp mic/line input module w/ EF & Phantom), Jasmine & Olive Trees, Oxi, Polyend, RYK, Vostok (10hp Quad triangle/square LFO w/ logic), WMD (the superb Cosmic Debris 16-tap delay-line plugin-in-a-module, which is already here), etc. things shortly; looks to be a good year for innovation after a somewhat sleepy phase defined by the detour into trade-policy instability.

• Vortices.

  I have been very much back in Euro, since Autumn, after taking many years off to focus on software & the portability & power of computers in an attempt to give people the things that I assume are what they think they want, from me. Impossible to gauge at any meaninfgul metric; I’m most certainly wrong.

  That said, this particular switch-up; really only the last in a long series of them that, accumulated over time, make allegiances seem flippant & inconsquential, was set in motion by the arrival of the new O_c modules. Around them, I’ve built a setup comprised entirely of other small computers; it’s academic really to see any difference in signal flow between the two things, with the only appreciable change being physical connections vs. virtual ones.

  In truth, you can be all things; certainly so to yourself, and the outward appearances of any one endeavour are not within ones own control anyways.

  Either way objects are carrying out tasks in software, whether on dedicated processors or shared. In the latter case it became a central concern as to how these would all be channeled into one stereo image, and for this I am, once again, entirely impressed by the foresight & design of SSF’s Vortices range of mixers, and how the specific use case it seems to have in mind exactly matches my own.

  

  To divert into signal flow for a second, you really can’t ask for more in such a small package: 3 stereo channels, four mono (a pair each of pan-able & cross-fade-able) in 12hp, each with dedicated VCAs on a separate breakout 2hp. The genius move IMO is in how much (useful) redunancy & accessory they’ve added: the discrete stereo & mono sections each have their own 2-channel aux inputs & outputs (this in addition to a sum master output) & this creates essentially a 2-stereo-bus Aux section which, while always on at 100% send, plays incredibly nice with any number of effects unit (I’m using every single input & output of an H90 in “Dual” mode where a very lush algo reverb & pitch-shifting stage gets the stereo fieldd, then a selective granular “glitching” & reverb gets activated when volume thresholds are met; the H90 does the gain-staging gorgeously, to the point that I’ve never needed any kind of voltage step-down/up system).

  While you’ll have to have something downstream to reintroduce the effects (the 6hp Befaco STMix does a wonderful job here, passing the Vortices “Master” through its lower stereo aux, with the H90 A & B each on their own pot, leaving an extra two stereo channels for other modules/effects within & without the synth) without creating a time-travel-paradox, it’s still a wonder that so much can be accomplished w/ the relatively small footprint & it all sounds great & transparent (opted for the HiFi variant for this leg, which doesn’t introduce itself in any perceivable way as opposed to the OG’s “Tape” emulation).

• Model 12.

  It all started (as it tends to) with a searchstring: “Audio Interface XLR Output”.

  At some point during 3 decades of peforming with computers/electronics, it dawned on me that the weakest link in any live music signal chain is the onstage output into the house sound infrastructure. For a long time during the early Eurorack years (2008-2012) I’d been traveling around w/ one of those forest-green-steel Radial stereo DI Boxes which, admittedly, sound terrible… and yet I blanket-recommended them to pretty much everyone looking for a same-solution (maybe misdirection, certainly sabotage; never easy to know what was going on re: my brain-chemistries back then, though I’ve softened in my resolve to hinder in the interim by a wide margin).

  Then, recently, too many times to count, the balanced outputs of Universal Audio’s Apollo | Solo were swiftly unbalanced; hastily jammed with TS cables then sent into additional DI, which is like putting salt on salt. Some culpability, sure: I never carried around the requisite nonstandard-kit-issue TRS-XLR cable-pair. I never carry around any cables, really (went out to dinner once with Keith Rowe, and after talking Tal Farlow & Barney Kessel for some time we shot straight into the heart of the touring musician’s primary concern: the weight & physical footprint of equipment brought overseas & his hammering into me that cables are the biggest culprit really sunk in; I’ve taken it to heart for 20 years now). Yearning for something to inject directly into stage-boxes, and ruling out say Neural DSP’s Quad Cortex (overkill; essentially a second laptop) there really isn’t much on the market that dwells on this need aside from those corny-ass (Radial, Whirlwind) USB DI bricks.

  Everything recording-wise in the early days (1991-2002) came out of a multitrack (Tascam 238, 424, Fostex X-18) or sampler (Kurzweil K2500R, Akai S2800, S3000XL) into the (matching, 828) mixer (came close then to pulling up on a 388, which would in retrospect have been a great aesthetic & stylistic move; some of my all-time favorite music has the unmistakeable signature of this blessed machine, including virtually the entire Twisted Village catalogue) into an (Aiwa HHB; forever locked on 48k) DAT Machine, so the “Mixing As Real-Time Performance” concept has long been baked in. Later, I had a Mackie Onyx for a minute, and aside from the bevy of baked-in issues (crackle central; buffer overruns, lack of reliable limiters in the preamp stage pre-Nyquist) the idea of a physical mixer/fader channel-set that can be piped into with multi-channel audio via a single cable (and not, solely, vice-versa) has always been appealing.

  So, at length, it’s a familiar way of thinking about how music is organized & re-arranged in real time; physical interaction with potentiometers shaping music as it progresses in a linear fashion. The mixer-model itself is a control-paradigm that I’m personally comfortable with; if we’re splitting hairs on what constitutes “Performance” within this remit, I’d wager that it’s the best analogue for an “Electronic Instrument” short of the sort of Waiswisz-lineage (I truly deeply loved Michel after spending time w/ him at STEIM in the years before he passed; definitely no slight) gesture-flailing that may look great on grant proposals or NIME/ICMC papers but always makes my skin bubble when encountered out in the wild (like seeing a trapped bird). David Tudor certainly had it right when he built cybernetic-lineage circuits as, essentially, labor-saving devices, thus creating easily some of the most “Expressive” Electronic Music; all of it expressed, in advance, by design.

  

  Which brings us to the Model 12; it cleanly ticks boxes from two wholly separate hypothetical columns. XLR 1/2 outs; check. Physical interaction of 8 separate (6 mono, 2 stereo) streams from digital systems (not necessarily computers; by all reports this works beautifully with standalones such as Akai’s MPC line); check. Rudimentary but present onboard effects; check. Per-channel EQ w/ sweepable band, twin sends, pans, mutes, “One Knob” compressor, assignment to “Alt” 3/4 outputs; all check.

  But perhaps most salient of all: while shopping for a replacement for Jetpack’s Prime Backpack (which I’ve enjoyed vastly as a lone “Weekend Warrior” vessel, but alas does not fit my ergonomic needs/form & has resulted in 30+ lbs. of boxy plastic/metal precariously hanging off of a single wounded shoulderblade) I came across Analogue Cases’ Trakpack & nestled deep within the press imagery (the 17th slide, no less) is a glamour shot of the Model 12 so snugly asleep inside, lulled no doubt by the dancing, unmistakeable light-refractions from the contours of its dedicated Decksaver.

  I had this pegged, years back, as a “Large Thing” (possibly the Models 16, 24 moreso, but the 12 is less than two inches per dimension larger than an LP record, weighing roughly the same as 20 of them, which is usually what I’m hauling back from the majority of trips anyways) & seeing it comfortably aslumber inside a backpack not much larger than what I’d already been lugging quickly & forcibly shattered my thinking & I instantly skipped the usual more exhaustive reasoning & haggled one (with the bonus carrot of a frayed CS-Model 12 Carrying Bag) down to $400 (or, to put it within a greater context; $70 more than Zoom’s LiveTrak L6, which everyone has been going on & on about & offers so little of of what’s promised here, esp. on the return-voyage side) & pounced on it.

  I’ve long been an advocate for not necessarily using the latest & greatest & that this has been on the market for a solid 5 (the SOS review is dated December 2020) means than plenty have had their chance to break bread w/ one of these, make peace, & move on. Early, pre-TB / USB-3 units (RME are famous for never having contemporized beyond this generation of chipsets & guess what? They’re widely regarded as some of the most stable interfaces out there) are often bargains; those $2k+ “Boutique” Lynx/Prism interfaces can be had for a song now & they’re just as effective/great as during their initial marketing phases.

• 4700 Series.

  Spotted this in the daily Reverb trawl (that they’ve co-opted us into a non-transferable FunBucks™ situation was a surprise, though it just leads to just a couple of things coming in as so many go out).

  

  A spry $1400 gets you the keyboard, plus two powered/conjoined cabinets with:

  4712 Reverb
  4740 Envelope Generator (x2)
  4710 Balanced Modulator (x2)
  4711 4/2 Mixer
  4720 VCO (x3 total)
  4730 VCF
  4770 Watt Block (x3)
  Control Oscillator
  4761 Wing
  4780 Sequencer

  So tempted; it’s out in the near boroughs of Long Island & I have in no great detail envisioned the idea of the walk (about 13 min, 0.5 mi) to Atlantic Terminal to catch the LIRR to Jamaica (21 min, 3 stops) to transfer to the LIRR to Ronkonkoma (37 min, 4 stops) to catch the Bus4 Amityville Railroad via Brentwood Railroad to Wyandanch (9 min, 11 stops) to walk & transfer to the Bus10 Babylon Railroad via North Lindenhurst (5 min, non-stop) to walk another 24 min (1.1 mi) into the heart of West Babylon (Darkness) with a hand-truck /dolly in tow to maybe fit all of this before doing it all again in reverse w/ easily > 200 lbs. of dead/wood/tolex weight, thereby saving $200 in postage.

  PS. PAiA has left a long-lasting psychic imprint in my life. My younger brother built a FatMan before I had even really fully clocked what synth kits could entail; a decade later I put a dent in a complete 9700 Series row / frac / rak, to capitulate only halfway through (so many flying wires!) before it had made a sound. I’ve been jonesing for a copy of the Richard Bugg demo flexi for some time now, or even reasonably-priced copies of the Non Compos Mentis Cosmic Debris LPs & Tapes; get in touch if you’re hodlin!

• Atelier.

  There was time back in November to have a coffee & sit down with Matthias to see how this was coming along (he’d been hired to aid Emmanuel & Diego in 2021 on the strength of his DSP wizardry for embedded platforms, most famously the “Parasites” suite for Mutable & the r.2 of XAOC’s Batumi, leading into the stellar collaborations with 4ms).

  I’ve been in thrall to the plugins & workflow for ages (dating back to the mid 90s!) & seeing it all brought kicking & screaming into 21st Century architectural frameworks while hinging heavily on the standalone “player” app was instantly appealing, and that Matthias has brought along his own codebases (there’s a 1:1 of the Tapographic Delay in here, amongst many other salient concepts) only furthers this.

  After only working briefly with a late-stage beta, the retail 1.0 is everything I’d hoped for; MIDI mapping has been seamless & the discrete lane for modulation is an excellent UX choice. I will always love (you) the patch-cable paradigm & that you can multi-segment them here is, pleasantly, giving Reason 1.0. Instantly came up with several novel processing chains & even the beginnings of a performance solution that would have taken weeks to hammer through in Bitwig or Max; the stability is palpable, everything feels intuitive.

  

  I let it simmer on an evolving granular multi-head scrub around a single Coupigny recording & it instantly sounded like music, which is something I can’t say for most of the “Clever” DSP concepts of recent; so many concerned with apeing flavor-of-the-Instagram top-downs (the Tascam 424 preamp was absolutely something through which we suffered in times of austerity while dreaming of better gear; certainly not a nostalgia-point for anyone short of those whose older brothers/grand/uncles hipped them to “Niandra LaDes” ) than pushing things forward.

  Honestly, I could really just go for another Argeïphontes Lyre or CDP at this stage; there are echoes in the singularity & pecularity of choice throughout. At its core, this is designed to make arrhythmic, decentralized music free from the shackles of time-coded temporality & by this virtue alone clearly bucks trend with virtually every other facet of music technology ca. now & I love that, for you, specifically. Go grab the demo (Google it; I’m not going to link things here) & then send over (audio or patch files) what you’re working on; I’m instantly curious.

  Side note: I love this as a hypothetical canonic replacement/update of the SYTER ecosystem, with which I’d long had a contentious, then ultimately wholly appreciative relationship (sparked after seeing a Teruggi-led marathon at Wesleyan 25y back while deeply loyal to all of the 70s work, only much later digging into the 90s Computer era & realizing how far ahead of the curve it was).

• October Music.

  After a tight five posts on equipment, let’s get up-to-date with records releasing this month.

  SickElixir (XL Recordings #XL1560LP)

  It’s important to keep a toe in different lanes & subcultures these days. I scan r/TheOverload sporadically; its a headerless stab at a sound that its own parishioners can’t seem to come to a consensus over, hinging on a general embrace of larger, left-of-center (generally more in the sound-design & stylistic/production lanes than anything formal: many brains there would melt over the first 5 seconds of Mark’s entry below… incidentally it’s a 20 minute drive down the M1 from Jamie’s hometown of Barnsley to Rotherham, switching to the Wortley Rd at Thorpe Hesley) approaches to contemporary Electronic Music & I’ve genuinely been taken aback by a few records that have been propped up there (Barker’s “Stochastic Drift” LP for example caught me offguard & is wonderful).

  This one’s great; hard to judge it en toto from the two “Free” songs on BC (although it’s always great to see virtually anything with a few hundred owners there; that this is even possible) but the rest of the record is far more concerned with a kind of shouted-megaphone-American-Industrial-lineage mutant-munchkin vocal thing over fairly straightforward rhythms. To paraphrase Zim, there’s sound all over this thing; every element was seemingly, haphazardly run through an endless signal chain of processing. I do question whether the attention paid to these details in particular would have been better placed in the structure/arrangements as they tend to loop on or stick to a single chord/tonality until the next, but that’s just so much of Ableton-typ USB-C Gerät/Gerausch these days; a flattening of the myriad components of song into a mere branch of automations.

  Nite Closures EP (National Centre For Mark Fell Studies #fell01)

  This has been something of a banger-year for Mark, riding high on the essentially simultaneously-released (yet still forthcoming?) “Psychic Resynthesis” for Ian Fenton’s Double Reeds (the poster label for a sort of extremely vetted anti-prolificity; only the 8th release in 13 years & when something gets announced your ears certainly perk up given the 100% fill rate of hits) & the understated “Remarks on Process” double-tape set with Studio Dan from over the summer (which presents an unedited rehearsal marathon of conceptual acoustic works that rivals the scope & pause-pregnancy of Wandelweiser, entirely bereft of ornament).

  While (assuredly Conor’s, god) marketing materials would seem to hinge on the relationship between the inauguration of this new (impeccably titled) series to the Sensate Focus project, in fact this breaks cleanly from the penciled-in computer-house squares & resumes the stutter-effect explorations of easily my favorite of his formative work, the Multistability suite. The feel here is entirely algorithmic, with the composer’s invisible puppet-master strings subtly influencing the outcome of a software solution.

  When I sing, I slip into the microphone. Into that void, I bring comrade “prayers”, then, turning to face the outside, together we explode. (Black Truffle #BT135)

  “Era Of Sad Wings” was always the go-to street-facing-speaker music on Halloween, which makes the timing of this issue of further recorded, yet hitherto unreleased material extremely prescient.

  Many were turned onto this obscure Haino Keiji project (which also involved, in fits & starts, Nanjo from Psychedelic Speed Freaks / High Rise / Toho Sara, a long pre-“Boogie” Tetuzi Akiyama, & Shizuo Uchida from Hasegawa-Shizuo & Kito Mizukumi Rouber) by their disc in the 1997 “Driftworks” box (which also featured a great Thomas Köner set captured at Paul Panhuysen’s Apollohuis, Paul Schütze of the underrated early Australian tape-music group Laughing Hands, & of course Pauline Oliveros with Randy Raine-Reusch).

  Working a year after “Era” as a trio of Haino, Akiyama, and Takashi Matsuoka (who plays on “Wind Synthesizer” on Catalyst Night’s Deep Being tape from 1986 & piano on the original 1990 “With or without blurring” session, which is either conceptually/logisitically a solo Haino or solo Matsuoka session depending on which lore you take as sacred) the three-part suite “When I sing, I slip into the microphone. Into that void, I bring comrade “prayers”, then, turning to face the outside, together we explode.” makes up the majority of the record, augmented by an astonishingly great early 70s noise recording, “The kotodama that attempts to take back all energy into itself” that harkens back to Haino’s “1973 Live = Milky Way”

• TR-1000.

  I’ve been pacing, back and forth in a loose secondary structure motif between desire and outrage and bargaining and calm and acceptance and then desire again. The poor rug under my feet.

  The master idea-set concept is great: that it’s the centerpiece of a series of related, yet discrete approaches to music, the exploration of which would certainly bring joy & with her joy’s closest relatives: the generation of an abundance of material & a general unwillingness to make concise decisions while in the moment, thus rendering all of that mania largely inoperable after the fact.

  Functionally appealing is yes the analogue signal path under tight digital control (the thought of an audiorate trill out of one of Mark Fell’s Max patches pushing this thing into absolute glubber feels apocalyptic & will assuredly sound great) & the sampler’s finer peculiarities (the bit with the timestretched breaks in one of the many, many, many demos by people that will never stand in front of an audience feels like the sort of misplaced-nostalgia regression that fuels every crisis-of-conscience). I haven’t even grappled with it as an “Analogue Effects Box” (as, come on; you could buy any number of studio-grade processors for the asking here) nor a sequencer for other boxes as I’m sure that’s all fairly cut & dry.

  

  Hefty; physically imposing (Height: 4.92″ Width: 19.13″ Depth: 12.24″ Weight: 12.12 lbs). While one could hypothetically fit this in a backpack and zoot off to places where people aggregate to hear things like this, loud, it would need a more commitment-based transport-solution that would also mean commitment itself (I once went on tour with someone who transported an 808 from squat to squat in, essentially, a tote bag and I think often in abject horror about how frequently it banged against TGV doors, etc.) And that’s the operative principle here; you’d need to commit to this hardware device that is both somehow more expensive than a top-tier MacBook Pro (with all that this entails!) and is physically imposing to the point of having to butterfly-wing essentially a bowling ball through those winding, dimly lit backstage-lanes rife with jutting wood-work.

  That said; a rock-solid metal-thing that ostensibly does not ding nor cease against hard cement club floors after falling a standardized bar-table-height of 40 inches (100 centimeters) feels warranted in critical environments, yet will universally fall into hands that cannot begin to fathom to wager the transaction of issuing self, and will sit forever lit yet paused in the war chests of the elite.

• M8 Tracker Model:02.

  Fully bereft of longstanding Generationlength Audioequipment Stockpile tendencies (through being autofictioned into rationalizing everything, then publicly stoned for doing so) I celebrated a Cotton Anniversary milestone by getting in on a pre-release round of this wonderful, wonderful handheld.

  It is really, really something; utter catnip for the music boffin of a certain age that came up through the C64/Amiga/130XE/1040ST era (speaking of which I’m finally friends with Emile “Dr. T” Tobenfeld on Facebook after sending him yearsworth of requests; will propose the Spinal Tap style mock-rockumentary of his life starring Double Leopards, Religious Knives, & sometime Model Home member Mike Bernstein shortly) & followed this vertical throughline all the way to, say, Bloody Fist.

  I have never, never ever been more motivated to memorize the documentation of a thing as quickly; you absolutely need to do this as there are a meager 8 buttons as the sole tactile control regimen & the keycomboing does carry on in Draconian proportions. That said, once you wraparound your thumb-eye-brain cöördinations you are rewarded in myriad ways.

  

  Lurking within the (impressively solid!) metal chassis are a proper USB Typ-C Gerät MIDI / audio / charging interface & minijack TRS connections for both MIDI in / out & stereo audio in / out. There’s a tiny MEMS microphone (ala the Audiomoth), a pair of smartphone-grade stereo speakers (in a quiet environment you theoretically wouldn’t even need headphones for basic composition or assembly, although the frequency response is beyond meager). I learned just now while looking at the documentation that the screen is actually a “High quality 3.5” IPS display with capacitive touch” – had no idea it was a touchscreen! Not that this changes anything.

  Internally there are multiple instruments: a fully fleshed out sampler, “Macrosynth” (ake Emilie Gillet’s Braids; itself with 34 separate models), FM Synth, Hypersynth, audio passthrough for the onboard effects, etc. There are also endless inline Sequencer & Instrument FX Commands that get deep into automations & even generative concepts, and this is where my inner child & present late-stage decrepit wonk meet; I’m already making breakcore with nonrepetitive basslines & sprinkling linear automations that resolve in prime-number cycles and honestly in that moment all is right.

  I say this often in respect to the Euro world, but when a piece of gear starts to dictate, to you the owner & operator, what & how music is being made its (often) time to step back and take stock of why it’s in your life in the first place. There have definitely been moments, already, where I simply could use more resolution (its measly 24 PPQ feels positively embryonic) but then I take a breath and listen to what it’s actually doing based on what I’m putting in & it’s often some glorious miasma of misaligned chaos & brutality & honestly it’s just all so beautiful & dareisay soulful.

  I can only imagine what my 18yo mind would have made of this Retrofuturist microminiature wristcommunicator slash beatstudio back then; it’s frankly incredible how far we’ve come w/r/t embedded computing power, and that this sort of enterprise is even viable at such a small scale (a single person is essentially overseeing both software & hardware design & development along with fulfillment; insane) is something to embrace. An absolute masterpiece.

• Welcome.

  This site is, along with many over the years, temporary & intended as something of an anonymous repository of stray-thoughts-into-extended-observations around music & its adjacencies, away from day zero marketing phases & greater commercial properties. I have this domain / host paid up (a whopping $95.88 all-in) through October, 2026 & it’ll be a miracle if the focus perserveres; time will tell (generally speaking, it tends to).

  Style-wise I’d been thinking of the three-columns-of-liner-notes-on-the-back trope when putting all of this together & hopefully I’ll be able to flesh the design out accordingly (although the single center column reads beautifully on phones; exactly how I would assume folks engage anyways).

  Not to hammer this point, but there are no ads on this site (or even links aside from “Dictionary” style traceback & clarifications); the time & resources used to generate all of this should have been applied in a far more efficient manner via therapy, but so it goes. A majority of the equipment or gear discussed in non-speculative terms was purchased; music (for the most part, in one form or another) similarly. Posts are constantly in flux; I’ll bang them out one moment while high on insomnia and/or caffeine, then recoil in factors of cringe the next & whittle them back from the brink; it’s a process.

  Get in touch if you need anything clarified; email is algodon@difficult.music. Thanks for reading.