Category: Instruments

• 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.

• 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!

• 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.