Trash_Audio

One of our Workspace and Environment interviewees came into down a couple weeks ago. Here is his performance. Here is his interview.

At long last, Keith Fullerton Whitman makes his Lampo debut. To mark the special occasion, he offers the U.S. premiere of “Rhythmes Naturels,” created at the legendary INA-GRM studios, plus a live modular synth improvisation.

Alors, last October Whitman spent a week in Paris, commissioned to develop a new piece for François Bayle’s Acousmonium, an 80-speaker sound system designed in 1974 for the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Pierre Schaeffer formed GRM, a studio and collective, in the late 1950s to encourage the development of electronic music. Members included Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani, among other lions; in the late 1960s Bayle became its director. For a whelp like Keith, the residency was “a life-long dream come true.” And, he says, “The piece turned out exactly as I hoped.”

Here, he’ll do his new work in a 4-channel mix. Here, he talks about the residency, etc.

Keith Fullerton Whitman (b. 1973, Bergen County, N.J.) is a composer and performer obsessed with electronic music, from its mid-century origins in Europe to its contemporary worldwide incarnation as digital music. Currently he is working towards implementing a complete system for live performance of improvised electronic music, which incorporates elements from nearly every era. He has recorded albums influenced by many genres, including ambient music, drone, drill and bass, musique concrète and krautrock. He has recorded and performed using several aliases, of which the most familiar is Hrvatski. Today most of his work is recorded under his real name. Whitman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Taken from Massive Attack’s Facebook

The Micro Hadron Collider Filter is a simple module with a common routing scheme found in other filters like the Sherman Filterbank or Schippman Ebb & Flute that, for the uninitiated, can get confusing. To put it in one sentence: The Micro Hadron Collider is a dual channel and dual filter module that utilizes serial and parallel modes.

- WMD Micro Hadron Collider

Flowchart

When receiving the Synchrodyne, I decided to explore it without a manual. This manual-less approach yielded hours of incredible sounds and lots of, “what the hell am I doing?”. I thought it was a self contained experimental noise maker (which it can be), a strong PLL audio modifier (which it can be), or a distortion unit (which it can be). After some research and taking notes, the lightbulb went off and it made sense. I found that the Synchrodyne is “supposed” to be used as an audio modifier. Throw a VCO or any noise source into the filter input and it’ll properly mangle your sound with its 5 sections: VCO, PLL, VCA, Wavefolder, Filter. In short, the VCO’s Pulse Output clocks the PLL and the PLL controls the Filter. This strange signal path creates incredible sounds and can be broken/intercepted anywhere in between.

The WMD Synchrodyne has so much going on, is so deep functionality wise and complex with intricate internal routing paths but I made an overview video that is essentially a ‘getting started’ tutorial.

The WMD official video and manuals contain a lot more information such as:

- The VCO is temperature compensated
- The Filter outputs can self oscilate while the 4p (-24dB) output is more stable.
- Input level of the Wavefolder has a trim-pot on the back that will be easily accessible on the planned expansion.

- WMD Synchrodyne Information
- Analog Haven

Flowchart

I shouldn’t be this excited for a utility module…

This part includes the VU meter, Peak meter, Spectrum analyzer, and X/Y display modes. The firmware is not finished yet, so this is a pre-production demo of the module being developed by Dave Jones Design

- Dave Jones Deesign

Richard Devine’s received his RiSP vinyl. Beautiful!

- Richard Devine – RiSP EP

Our good friend Moe Espinosa, Drumcell!

In January 2012, the I Dream of Wires team stopped by the studio of techno producer Drumcell, to discuss his evolution from producing with hardware, to software, and now back to hardware again, with a focus on eurorack modular synthesis. The interview was conducted for inclusion in “I Dream of Wires: the Modular Synthesizer Documentary.” Drumcell is also the founder of Droid Recordings, and co-founder of Droid Behavior, one of LA’s longest running techno event promotion companies, standing at the centre of the West Coast techno community for nearly a decade.

I DREAM OF WIRES is a forthcoming documentary film about the history and resurgence of modular synthesizers. The film is currently in production. This is the 3rd in a series of extended interviews, which will be produced and released in various formats throughout the production, and following the release, of the film. I DREAM OF WIRES extended interview segments are sponsored by MATRIXSYNTH (m.matrixsynth.com).

- I Dream of Wires
- soundcloud.com/drumcell

Formally known as Modular – The Documentary, I Dream of Wires has been updating its “artists and participants” section on Facebook with its recent interviews. Jason Amm, AKA Solvent, really has a talent for finding “special” pictures of us.

Schematic / Warp Records recording artist and sound designer, Richard Devine.

Surachai – modular-based black metal artist, and Trash Audio member.

Alessandro Cortini – producer (Ladytron), recording artist (SONOIO, Blindoldfreak, Modwheelmood), and master of the Buchla.

- I Dream of Wires

Local farmer Megan Paska has witnessed beekeeping as it morphed from an illegal (and possibly crazy) habit to a sustainable, community-supported skill. Mirroring beekeeping’s own ascendance, she found more than just a living: “This is the first time in my life when I’ve just felt absolutely on the right path.”

Music – Alessandro Cortini

Danjel of Intellijel on Muffwiggler.

Introducing the Intellijel Mutamix, the successor to the now discontinued Mutagen.

I went through many iterations and design changes to arrive at this final version (hence the long delay). Some of the designs involved elaborate integration of VC mixing, panning and bussing (based on the requests of many users) but the design became way too complex and convoluted. I have ended up with something that I think is unique and will allow for some creative applications (especially with regards to CV) but it is not necessarily meant to be a traditional audio mixer. I plan to make another companion product that will be purely focused on audio in the future (mono/stereo, panning, aux sends etc.).

So here is how it works:
In “NORMAL” mode all the buttons at the top act as mute on/off switches with a single click. The leds in the slider illuminate to indicate a muted channel. If I double click I will SOLO the channel and that channels led will flash on/off. I remain in SOLO state until all channels are unsoloed.

I can save the state of the muted channels into 6 possible locations (and recall them) by pressing the [SAVE] or [LOAD] buttons for about 1 second.

If I activate [KILL] all inputs and outputs are muted and all the leds flash at a rapid rate. Pressing any button will immediately exit KILL mode and return to the previous state.

[GATE] and [PULSE] allow me to select whether a corresponding channel MUTE CTRL jack toggles mute on/off (PULSE mode) or the channel is gated on/off (GATE mode) when the controlling signal is HIGH. On the mutagen this mode selection was done via jumpers on the back and the gating was inverted.

[XMODE] is a special mode. In XMODE single clicks of the buttons no longer toggle muting. Instead they instantly recall a mute state preset (the 6 possible memory locations that you would have stored using the SAVE function).
In addition to this, all of the MUTE CTRL jacks now become XMODE controls:
CLK: cycle through all the presets in a given direction (default forward) on every pulse
RESET: Start back at preset 1
DIR: toggle the direction that the presets cycle through
RANDOM: every pulse selects a preset at random.
INV: the current mute state is inverted (i.e if channels 1, 3 and 5 are muted then after a pulse, 2,4, and 6 are muted and the rest are unmuted)
MUTE-ALL: no matter what the current state, all channels are muted.

With all of these functions it becomes clear you can turn the Mutamix into an unusual sequencer!
For example: I could take a steady voltage source and feed it to a Buff Mult. I then take the 6 outputs of the buff mult and patch each one to one of the Mutamix inputs. Now the sliders will act as attenuators for the voltage and allow me to set a pitch cv level. If I then program 6 different presets where on each one only one channel is unmuted, cycling through the presets will give me a traditional pitch sequencer (although it is 6 stages).
It becomes more interesting if I replace some of the steady DC sources with audio or lfo cv and I store presets with more than one channel unmuted. Now I would get a weird sequence where different modulations are unmuted on different steps to get a very complex modulation control.

-18HP
-Skiff friendly
-6 led linear sliders for input attenuation control (leds can be easily replaced with other colors, they just slide out).
-jumpers to select pseudo log curve (instead of linear)
-All muting realised via VCAs opening/closing
-6 audio/cv inputs
-6 mute/function inputs (depends on mode)
-6 three way bus routing switches.
-3 audio/cv bus outputs
-2 linear master output level controls.
-6 control buttons + status led
-header to normal HexVCA output to the 6 inputs. (same as Mutagen).
-Expected price: $250.00

Availability. They are built! But I am just about to go on vacation and will be back in one week. When I am back Haven and I will program and test the batch and have them ready to ship out asap.

Big thanks to Haven for all the help with the feature set!

- Muffwiggler Thread