#analogue synthesiser

[naphthu]

a walk beside the river with your estranged cosmic mother

I'm especially proud of this one. it's been by far the most involved process since starting to record & share my sounds at the start of last year. everything was recorded aloud through a bass amplifier in the late afternoons/evenings of 4 nonconsecutive days in the june heatwave, at the end of a 2 month period of intensive daily prayer & journalling

on one of the between-days I woke up with an almost magnetic feeling pulling me towards a small muddy river just outside of town. so there, by the tadpole-rich riverbed, I prayed for an hour or so to Holy Sophia for help and guidance, for answers to questions I'd been asking all my life and questions the answers to which I had always been too afraid of to sincerely & humbly ask for, until then. I sobbed for about twenty minutes the moment I got home, feeling answers that came one by one lodged like gems in the tender flesh of my heart, and a well of healing & forgiveness where once had been a pit of fear & shame. "return to the water" is one of the smaller of these gems, and the decision to title the track this way came that afternoon

"return to the water" is not necessarily an instruction to return to a physical body of water, but the cosmological primordial water that the Spirit rested over before the creation of the Heavens & the Earth (in the Genesis version of the cosmos' beginnings), a water that can be accessed both exoterically through the living water of Creation and esoterically through the Spirit in prayer or meditation. it is a surrender of will, of selfhood, of all the trappings of culture, identity, and circumstance, to be temporarily removed from the fantasy world we have collectively & individually built up around ourselves and returned to the inconceivable ambiguity of reality, bringing a little back with us each time in the hope that someday we might live free of blake's "mind forg'd manacles". you are a saint, nothing more, and everything less

god bless

hope you enjoy

naph

[anny-chovy]

saturday's morning's beeping not really music but I couldn't get into this week's junto in between tracks i repeatedly listened to demi lovato's "cool for the summer" then made up a recipe for cocoa walnut cookies :-)

sequence 1 /2 parts C Eflat to 6 silence 1:3/ as with a clock - / LFO rate 7 / OSC MOD 3 / resonance 12/ vcf mod 12 / vca mode on / adjust time divids and cutoff

[cassette-amateur]

_1981

[kekwcomics]

I HAZ A NEW ALBUM OUT.

TRANSIENT SOLIDS by BRAM Van BARTEK

"Lo-Fi science-fiction music from a parallel-1980s: eccentric, slowly evolving minimal electronic poly-rhythms that stumble and trip over their own analogue shoelaces. Raw, unpolished synth sequences that unzip and unspool themselves like broken DNA helices. File under: Failed Futures." Available as a digital download or a super-limited physical CD here:

[gaijin-fujin-resonance]

スブロサ - SUBROSA

This was one of the few album tracks that was legally previewable before the album launch, and even just from a brief SMS snippet, it was clear that this was metal-banging Industrial EBM at its finest. The prowling panther beat of Yuta’s hip-hop bass plays off a sproingy synth-bass lick, the backbone of the 80s Industrial sound*. Endlessly repeating, weird electronic squiggles of sound are run through heavy filters to emulate robotic chatter. It even features a mentasm Hoover Synth. And, of course, the Aphex Twin-pioneered micro-edited, infinitely fast snarerushes and LFO-twiddling that seem to collapse the song into itself during the breaks.

*There’s some controversy as to the original of this tone: depending on who you ask, it was invented by either NU Unruh hammering a giant spring with Einstuerzende Neubauten (the ‘Bassfeder’ comes in about 0:17); or Chrislo Haas’ analogue synth work, as one of the founders of DAF, a band whose aggressive minimalism would become the blueprint for the European EDM sound.

Yokoyama-san’s working notes on the track reveal the incredibly complex editing work, like an auditory jigsaw puzzle. (The track names are incredible: "Dissonance Progress"; "Pitch Black Night"; "Future Breaks"!) You can see the beats double, quadruple, multiply exponentially as the cuts become smaller and denser. The stereo manipulation is mindblowing - truly a song made for headphones! - as sounds flicker and skitter and pan in every direction. He said that Imai “insisted on leaving out his guitar (even though the guitar can still be heard)”. £5 reward to anyone who can spot any guitar on the track!

Imai also revealed in an interview, that this song was originally written during the Izora sessions, and rewritten for Subrosa. Imai’s playful raps and dizzying flow are so perfect for the song’s swaggering attitude that I can’t imagine how Sakurai would have sung it. I fear it might have become something in a playful, slightly silly vein a la Gustave. (I love Gustave as much as anyone, but it has a very different atmosphere.) But instead, Imai created a blueprint for a far more dance-oriented, synthesiser-based B-T Mk II. Vocals here are just another instrument: more of a rhythmic element than a melodic one; a background textural element to provide colour, rather than the main figure of the foreground.

Favourite moments: oh, there are just too many to count. Maybe the very end of the ecstatic drop, where the Jungle beats from 2:20 give way to the scratched (phased out? Leslie-speakered?) vocals coming in at 2:34. Very Beastie Boys – memories of my first time hearing their mixture of acid rock and hip-hop on Check Your Head in pot-scented student digs in New York. Can you imagine the stereophonic fun they could have with a pair of these babies?

The NOIZE solos at 3:11 and 3:27 (these would sound great live on a theremin, Mr. Imai, hint hint!) The stereo-panned sawtooth tremolo synth that comes in during the very last verse (starting at about 4:05) like a flash forward to the extreme noise-gating of Muyubyo’s guitars? It’s the tiny sonic details that make Buck-Tick so moreish – I’ve listened to this song dozens of times and on each deep listen, I catch another tiny sound I hadn’t noticed before. (I just caught a tiny stereo twitch in the synths at 1:58!) It works as a pop song – the irresistible panther rhythm and the strutting vocals drive it along with charismatic velocity – but the detail and complexity of the soundscape is like the whirling, ornate pattern of a Persian carpet you can lose yourself in forever.

[junk-culture]

their first all electronic album + so futuristic and timeless etc but also so beautifully analogue. big clunky synthesisers and knobs and dials and diy electronic drums. the physicality of it all. ..turn the dials with your hands til you find the shortwave end. .. human connection...the muffled voices on the radio ..... global sharing of music and information.... lonely ethereal sounds....... childlike melodies....the emotion that ohm sweet ohm evokes.....those pulses of sound in antenna which are kind of like a loud sleazy reverby guitar but in an electronic style.....the weak/soft vocals which amplify the overwhelmingly human feel to it all...................... i can't articulate it very well but basically i love you radio-activity by kraftwerk.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#32 - 'Love Yourself' (1999 version) (non-album track)

It was not so easily escapable, unfortunately. ‘Love yourself / You are the one thing I needed’ – there was something about those lyrics, that message, that required closer inspection. How foolish that nobody had thought of it before – so simple, yet so, so important. He had to do it proper justice, and the seventy-six seconds of guitar and vocals that he had wrestled together in 1996 wasn’t going to cut it.

As with all of life’s greatest problems, an answer (though in the end not the answer) came via the synthesiser.

The 1999 treatment of ‘Love Yourself’, a song which was at that time a scrap of melody written three years ago during his earliest musical experiments, shows an element of Sufjan’s character that would prove to be utterly key to his success: instinct. You don’t return to an idea that you attempted, and then abandoned, three years prior, without a preternatural instinct: no, there really was something there. Of course, his instincts were totally vindicated – the eventual 7” release of ‘Love Yourself’ became one of only two Sufjan singles to chart in the United States. Some creative traits are only cultivated with time, but Sufjan’s ability to discern which songs are worth pursuing for major release is downright prodigious, and seemingly has been since the beginning of his career. Instinct is what gave us a wide release of ‘Love Yourself’ and not, say, ‘In the Words of the Governor’. You may scoff, but when you look at all your songs as scruffy little extensions of yourself, it’s a damn hard choice.

Okay. Instinct led Sufjan’s mind back to ‘Love Yourself’ – what to do now? His eventual decision to pursue the icy, glitchy trappings that would constitute the 1999 version (and all future ones) was assuredly a product of this time in Sufjan’s life. The turn of the millennium marked an explosion of creative interest from Sufjan in the synthesiser, out of which came ‘The First Full Moon’, ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’, the early versions of ‘All Delighted People’ and ‘Year of the Ox’, and then, as culmination, the entirety of Enjoy Your Rabbit. This man is nothing if not a quick learner – synthesisers went from total exclusion from his instrumental repertoire (not a single synthesiser was used on A Sun Came per the album’s credits) to, for a brief period, dominating it. One wonders if the difficulties that accompanied moving to New York – new neighbours, a cramped apartment, minimal recording setup – led him to digital instruments partly by necessity. But his creativity and drive were durable, and the music that bled out of his first salvo with electronics was, given his inexperience, convincing. Mostly.

The instinct that ‘Love Yourself’ might have a future as a warped bit of electronica was evidently a correct one. But this second iteration of ‘Love Yourself’, the earliest complete electronic song we have from Sufjan, exists in a weird no man’s land between a fleshing-out of the 1996 take and a degeneration of it. Sufjan does not seem to be one to do things by halves – like ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’, its closest analogue, this is a properly synthetic song, with squawking drum machines, chopped-up fragments of noise and stuttering vocal effects. The few elements here of acoustic origin, most notably a small drum part under the first verse and a polyrhythmic glockenspiel loop reminiscent of ‘Tahquamenon Falls’, are merely rhythmic foundations for the electronic top-line elements. There are all sorts of attempts at all sorts of sounds here, sounds that pop in seemingly at will and disappear just as quickly. Many of them are quite unlike anything else in Sufjan’s oeuvre – there is a strangely compelling instrumental break at 1:20 featuring a quasi-acid house synth arpeggio that would fit just fine on a Shpongle song, as out-of-place as it seems here.

As with other early Sufjan electronica, it is clear from the outset that a lot of work and care went into this one. Tracks like these are not so much recorded as they are constructed, and this one is a veritable mosaic of instrumental sections with just about everything possible thrown at the wall: a dancefloor-ready drum machine design here, a hip hop break there, a dissonant loop or two to send us off in the outro. Where the 1999 ‘Love Yourself’ differs from ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is that its maximalism is more structural and less everything-all-of-the-time. Individual sections, though many in number, are actually texturally sparse. The focus remains on the vocal melody, the lyrics, and a mellow, tonal synth ostinato that probably evolved into the one on the 2018 version. These elements – the message – persist, even in the face of hostility.

Songwriting-wise, not much has changed from the 1996 version. We’re in 4/4 now, and it’s a careful, relaxed 4/4, slower than its older siblings. Sufjan’s voice carries the verses, which are few in number and very similar to the first version (minus, sadly, the ‘Change yourself / Love yourself’ section), in the same thin, breathy tone that dominates this era. The melody remains unchanged, except in the second and second-to-last verses, which see Sufjan singing the same line in a higher octave and under heavy effects. Everything is normal, everything is standard, everything is fine. And then the bizarre bridge section, exclusively created for this version (and no other), comes in like a left hook and annihilates the peace.

Out of a sense of dutiful writerly diligence, I made an attempt at a transcription for this bridge since none exists online – and understandably so, given how heavily treated it is. After dozens of close, methodical listens, the best I could come up with is this:

‘When you try to [elongate/allocate?] all things,

we always knew you

always knew your things

we try to [advocate?]’

Doesn’t much help, does it? It is quite a jarring moment, and one that was eliminated in all future versions for understandable reasons. Sufjan really strains to sing the melody here, but cannot do so with any reasonable competence, and ends the section on probably the most painful flat note you will hear on any of his recordings. For a man who so often produces clean, methodical music, it is remarkably messy.

And so is nearly everything else here. This is a messy, messy version of ‘Love Yourself’ that feels in some senses like a step backward for the song, even if it ends up being bigger, bolder and brasher than the 1996 demo. There’s a part of me that wants to intellectualise those characteristics – love and loving oneself can be a difficult, confusing process – but I really do not detect intentionality on Sufjan’s part there. It is easier to just conclude that 1999’s ‘Love Yourself’ is a very valid experiment that correctly identified the need for a lateral shift towards electronic music, but ultimately did not amount to the arrangement the song needed. Sufjan himself must have come to much the same conclusion: this version remained unreleased until a surprise blog post in 2013, and the song itself was seemingly not revisited for over a decade. It was not to be gone forever though. ‘Love yourself / You are the one thing I needed’ – yes, there really is something there...

[burlveneer-music]

Domenico Lancellotti - sramba

Tom Zé, Faust and João Gilberto collide in Domenico Lancellotti’s “machine samba” It’s midwinter in Lisbon and Domenico Lancellotti has invited Ricardo Dias Gomes to stay for a while. They waste no time in doing what they always do, heading down to their underground studio, appropriately nicknamed The Cave, to make music. The fact that Ricardo had just been sent a bunch of Russian-designed synths and was eager to try them out, instantly signalled a direction for the album. “Ricardo had his instruments, modular machines” remembers Domenico, “and I had my guitar, some percussion instruments. On the first day we started making sounds and recording them, and songs started to appear, sambas started to appear.” In just a couple of months the duo recorded the majority of what would become SRAMBA, an album that reaches back to the roots of samba, but does so whilst completely revamping its blueprint, indoctrinating guitar and percussion-led rhythms with analogue synthesisers, Ricardo’s beloved machines. Domenico and Ricardo instantly saw how the synthesisers were not at odds with the sambas they were playing, instead they had a similar sound to its typical percussion instruments (ganza, repinique, surdo, tarol). What’s more, they saw a connection with roots samba, the samba that existed before bossa nova and samba jazz came along. This was rhythmic samba, with grooves that could go on ad infinitum. “It’s samba de clave, geometrically structured” says Domenico. “It’s ostinato samba”, adds Ricardo. Both Domenico Lancellotti and Ricardo Dias Gomes are revered names within Brazilian music over the past 20 years. As a member of the +2’s, with Moreno Veloso and Kassin, Domenico released a trio of albums on Luaka Bop in the early 00s that pioneered a new Rio samba sound with elements of funk and psychedelia. With Veloso and Kassin he would later form Orquestra Imperial, a big band intent on reviving ballroom (gafieira) samba, and that has worked with guest vocalists such as Seu Jorge, Elza Soares and Ed Motta. SRAMBA is his fourth solo album. Multi-instrumentalist Ricardo Dias Gomes first came to notice as a member of Caetano Veloso’s band Cê which helped reinvigorate Caetano’s career with a sound influenced by British new wave. As well as collaborations with Lucas Santtana, Negro Leo and Thiago Nassif, and work with his own group Do Amor, he has released a series of acclaimed solo albums that reveal a restless music-maker. Domenico- guitarras, voz, mpc-1000, bateria eletrônica, caxixi Ricardo- baixo, bateria eletrônica, rodhes Aquiles Morais-trompete Everson Morais- trombone Arranjo de metais- Aquiles Morais

[datarobotsuggestion]

Date a robot who is an early analogue cabinet style music synthesiser

[dtsoverdrive]

DTS Overdrive Unveils The Ninth Chevron: A Bold Tribute to Stargate Universe

DTS Overdrive proudly announces the release of their latest studio album, The Ninth Chevron, an evocative and imaginative sonic journey inspired by the acclaimed television series Stargate Universe. Originally conceived as an unused soundtrack for the cancelled third season, the album transforms its conceptual roots into a standalone musical odyssey, weaving the narrative threads of the original series with an imagined continuation among the stars.

Drawing deeply from the show’s premise of exploration aboard the million-year-old starship Destiny, DTS Overdrive has composed a wholly original score, paying homage to the late Joel Goldsmith, whose work on Stargate Universe remains iconic. With The Ninth Chevron, the grandeur of science fiction orchestrations merges seamlessly with the timeless allure of analogue synthesisers, conjuring vivid images of distant galaxies, ancient alien worlds, and the unyielding human spirit.

The story crafted through the album’s music propels the listener to the very edge of the cosmos: having bridged the gulf between galaxies, Destiny drops out of hyperspace to refuel within the fiery embrace of a star. The crew awakens to face their final confrontation—a lone drone ship guarding the gates of a mysterious machine world, a relic at the end of the universe. A climactic battle ensues, culminating in the ship docking at this ancient, abandoned realm.

Here lies the origin of the universe itself, a place where galaxies were forged and which now stands silent. As the narrative unfolds, Chloe succumbs to her alien affliction, only to transcend her humanity and ascend as an Ancient, using her newfound powers to return the crew to Earth through the Stargate. Meanwhile, Rush remains behind, merging with the machine spirit to safeguard the enigmatic world.

With The Ninth Chevron, DTS Overdrive has created an intricate and immersive homage to one of science fiction’s most beloved series. This album invites listeners to journey across the stars, where music breathes life into the infinite and stories of heroism and sacrifice resonate through the cosmos.

[grrlmusic]

Analogue Synthesiser Melodies | The Art of Production: Olof Dreijer

[dwarvendiaries]

Boy meets girl. Boy makes analogue synthesiser. Girl meets analogue synthesiser. Boy loses girl. Girl gains analogue synthesiser.

[thedoctorwhocompanion]

Here's How Peter Howell Remixed the Doctor Who Theme Tune in the 1980s

Here's How Peter Howell Remixed the #DoctorWho Theme Tune in the 1980s

Fans of the Doctor Who theme (and who isn’t, eh?) should check out this BBC report from 1982 in which Peter Howell describes how he went about revamping the programme’s famous opening tune. The clip was originally screened on 2nd February 1982 as part of The Music Arcade: Electricity in Music. Peter gives a detailed run through of his use of polyphonic analogue synthesisers, a vocoder, and an…

[breaking-noose]

Landscape Noon Passive Analogue drum machine/synthesiser, what a beauty

From Found Sound in Melbourne

[fragariavescana]

Early music group that plays on period-appropriate reconstructions of 18th century analogue synthesisers

[burpenterprisejournal]

MAT POGO AT EAVESDROP

2024/11/7 eavesdrop ILPO VÄISÄNEN NINA GARCIA MAT POGO NIMA AGHIANI DJ JESSICA EKOMANE Silent Green Berlin - DE

On Thursday 7 November Mat Pogo will perform a set of solo vocals and electronics on the second day of the third edition of the eavesdrop festival 6 – 7 November 2024, silent green, Betonhalle The two-day festival eavesdrop presents contemporary electronic music and sound art from more than a dozen outstanding Berlin-based and international artists. Taking place at silent green’s Betonhalle, the festival’s 3rd edition uniquely brings together a group of adventurous composer/performers and installation artists that share a common practice in electronic sound composition whilst spanning a diversity of inter-related contemporary tendencies. Electronic is understood in its broadest and most curious sense to include turntablism, DIY analogue electronics, AI voice synthesis, generative sound installation, electric guitar manipulations, analogue synthesisers and the human-machine relations apparent in processed, extended vocal techniques.

Doors, Installations & DJs 19:00 / Concert Start: 20:00

6th November MARIAM REZAEI AUDREY CHEN & HUGO ESQUINCA RASHAD BECKER DJs Oren Ambarchi & crys cole

7th November ILPO VÄISÄNEN NINA GARCIA MAT POGO NIMA AGHIANI DJ Jessica Ekomane

Installations throughout the festival by Louis Cameron, Jasmine Guffond & ilan katin and Lottie Sebes.

‘To eavesdrop’ is a mode of listening intently and eavesdrop invites listeners to consider, from multiple perspectives, new social and technical developments in international music and sound cultures. FB event @eavesdrop.festival