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).