Author: Starthief

It’s the little things… quite literally. I ordered a tin of Befaco Knurlies, specialized screws for Eurorack that have nylon washers built in to prevent scratches, and can be tightened with a flat or Philips screwdriver, a hex driver, or even by hand.

Honestly, I think for someone who doesn’t move modules often, M3 hex screws and separate washers (as I’ve been using, and you’ll see in the image here) are the way to go. They’re a lot cheaper! And low profile, good looking, and more secure if you go to trade shows or live gigs and don’t want individual modules to wander off in someone’s bag too easily. Knurlies are nice for quicker changes, or modules like Desmodus Versio where you need to get to the back to update firmware a little more often.

Also recently arrived: some new knobs to update the look and feel of my Mystic Circuits modules. They came with the sort of knobs that have shiny metallic tops, and the direction is indicated with a shaped bump on the side. Ana did have purple-sided knobs, and purple is sort of this company’s thing, and I think the colors work well here. The slightly larger Wrap knob is “MXR mini style” — pretty much the same as the Root knob on Ensemble Oscillator — and the others are Davies 1900h clones, a common type used in Eurorack.

I also have some Rogan soft-touch knobs on the way — the same kind that Make Noise and Mutable Instruments use, and I like them very much. Noise Engineering’s knobs are classy and have a solid feel, but they have glossy tops where glare obscures the pointer direction. In the past I’ve found they are very firmly mounted and can be challenging to remove, but the increase in visibility makes it worth replacing them.

Less little: I ordered a Xaoc Katowice “stereo variable-band isolator.” It splits the incoming signal into low, mid and high frequency bands. There is CV and manual control over the middle band’s center and width, and over the levels of each band — making it kind of a multiband VCA, or shelving/peaking EQ. There are stereo mix outputs and individual low, mid and high outputs, so you can route or process the bands separately. I also picked up a small, cheap After Later 3:1 mixer, so after such processing I can merge back to stereo without taking up 6 inputs on my audio interface.

It’s basically the hardware version of the Multiband device in Bitwig Studio. Hardware gives it the advantage of direct hands-on and CV control and zero latency. Feedback patches and interesting FM/AM/RM should be possible, and I expect it will also lead to different usage patterns than the software.

With the exception of that tiny mixer, this entire spring 2021 update to my modular has consisted of Xaoc Devices and Noise Engineering modules. Xaoc is apparently pronounced “chaos” and has a very Eastern Bloc, almost-Communist-chic, test equipment aesthetic that looks rather classy. All their modules are named after the Polish names of European cities (really putting the Euro in Eurorack). NE is very much inspired by 90s gothic-tinged dark and yet nerdy industrial music, and their module names are in psuedo Latin. They couldn’t be more different, and yet I think they complement each other well, and really have been suiting my music nicely. This kind of diversity is one of the coolest things about Eurorack, compared to other modular formats.

Just yesterday, Polyend released version 4.0 firmware for the Medusa hybrid synth, adding a digital FM mode among some other things. There were a few unfortunate bits:

• The “extra” analog oscillator in FM mode is only accessible via external MIDI, not the Medusa’s own grid controller/sequencer which is its primary defining feature. Minor quibble though.
• The behavior of P1 and P2 (paraphonic) modes changed. Previously, if you set one of the oscillator sliders at minimum, it would be skipped during voice allocation — so the sequence would play all specified notes with whatever oscillators it has available. Since you can set oscillator tuning, waveshape, sync and FM individually, this could be exploited to create polyrhythmic patterns that you could change on the fly. This behavior is unique and what makes me want to keep the Medusa rather than going for something else. But someone reported it as a bug, so Version 4.0 stopped skipping silenced oscillators and just left silent notes instead…
• A bug in Grid mode where polyphony stopped working and it played monophonically using oscillator 1.

I grumbled, reverted to the previous firmware (which I was very glad I’d kept), and reported it to Polyend. I was surprised to get a message this morning with a new version to try — which fixed the bug and added a “Skip muted voices” option to restore the behavior I love. So… hooray! New FM mode plus it still does the crazy stuff that I like.

At this point I have finished my retrospective, critical listen to all my Starthief releases since 2018. Here’s what stands out:

The first album, Nereus kind of doesn’t fit the rest stylistically, at all. I think of this style as “my 0-Coast period” — plucky bassline/melodic hybrids with particular sequencing techniques, which I was doing a lot of in 2017. I liked it better than the more experimental sounds I was trying at the time, and in fact this is the “my sound” I thought I found at first. But it was definitely a stepping stone I don’t need to traverse again. Also, I’m hearing a generally lower production quality, possibly some stereo phase correlation issues. I’m honestly tempted to remove this one from Bandcamp, because it seems so out of place.

The second album, Shelter In Place, was much closer to what I think of as “the Starthief sound.” I was thinking about a more abstract sort of drone techno that hints at industrial, and that’s where this one went. In the future I might introduce a bit more of this flavor, but I don’t want to push toward it.

The third, Vox Inhumana, I backed off on the drone but went to a more… not quite Berlin School sound, but a “collaboration with the synthesizer” attitude. And I think that one really nailed it and still stands as one of my favorite albums.

After that there’s not so much of a progression as a wandering through different interests. At certain times I had particular near-obsessions, like sustaining feedback or FM, or particular gear I was highlighting.

My music is at its best when I follow it instead of trying too hard to lead it. But also, I need to keep a hand on the reins — some of the more experimental “leaks” into my albums feel like weaker points rather than the breaths of fresh air that I intended.

The horribly named Gearslutz is finally changing its name to Gearspace. Years of pressure from the community to be more inclusive and professional can actually work. I might actually take a look around there once it’s done.

Your move, Muffwiggler.com.

I’ve been listening to my albums today, reviewing my own starting from the very recent Luminous Phenomena and working backwards, in a combination of enjoyment and judgement. I’m not taking notes on technical issues or anything like that, but just the overall emotional impact and enjoyability (granted that’s in my current mental state, so these opinions are always subject to change).

So far I’m finding confirmation that I have a “sound” in a general sense, and should stick to it. I would rank my 5 most recent albums in this order:

• Luminous Phenomena: an intense ride, with a good balance of continuity and contrast. I want to keep doing things in this vein.
• Unfolding: really solid, some great textures and an emotional ambiguity and tension that I like. Not as intense as LP, but good.
• Pieces: pretty strong, with some good melodic use of the Medusa. I didn’t enjoy “Energy Exchange” as much; it goes a bit outside my Goldilocks Zone.
• Carefully Introducing Problems: there’s certainly some good work here, but some of it just isn’t grabbing me as much — a bit uneven.
• The Sky Above the Port — this was a difficult album; I was trying to make music for specific scenes and settings, and not really doing what comes naturally to me. It feels like my weakest recent work. So I’m asking myself some questions about the process. Was the concept doomed, did I need to change the plan a bit, or just spend more time on it and be more discriminating? Or is there not really anything wrong with it and it just didn’t hit me in the right frame of mind today?

I’ll probably keep listening to my older work and contemplating until I get back to Nereus, but I feel that the most recent work is the most relevant.

Just a second… why the title of the previous post? I was going to say something about the musical term ostinato, which of course, means obstinate.

“A motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, frequently in the same pitch.” Examples given include Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love”

This is something I latched onto at a young age, before electronic music (and thus simple sequenced loops) was common. I used to noodle a repeating passage on the piano, sometimes playing with nuances of timing, sometimes just repeating it obstinately. Though I hadn’t heard of Brian Eno, I was exploring the idea that repetition is a form of change. It infuriated my grandma because I “wasn’t playing proper music” — which meant a tune someone else wrote and was printed as sheet music. Improvisation barely counted as music to her; my proto-exploration of drones and reverb with the sustain pedal most certainly did not. We were both obstinate toward each other quite a lot.

Of course ostinato in Western music dates back at least to the 13th century and has (appropriately) never stopped. It’s also prominent in sub-Saharan African and Indian classical music and probably appears in most cultures’ music, honestly.

Anyway, I’ve been using short repeating sequences as part of music for a while now, and it occurred to me it’s somewhat related to drone. I only recently recalled the term — being more used to thinking of them as “loops” or even (incorrectly) “arps” (for arpeggio, which should only refer to spreading out the notes of a chord). I had a good chuckle about the meaning of the name.

So: Drezno! A few days ago I described what it is, and what I thought I could use it for. Now I have some practical experience, and opinions.

As a waveshaper, it is fantastic. By simply blocking a bit, you add kinks into the waveform, and thus harmonic content, which varies with the dynamics of the input. Much like a wavefolder! You can also rearrange bit order or plug other sources in, for instance, to mix two oscillators in unusual ways.

As a digital noisifier it’s also pretty amazing. Simply blocking lower-ordered bits reduces resolution. Since lower-ordered bits tend to change faster (and thus have more high frequency content) and be more subject to analog noise, replacing them or boosting their positions up the chain can have some nice effects, and using them to clock the DAC is also very nice. I’m getting sounds reminiscent of the YM2612 and also some more unique artifacts.

These things hold true for LFOs and envelopes too, turning smooth ramps and curves into steppy fractal patterns, and shifting the levels of steppy CV sequences.

Patching a couple of low-order bit outputs into the high-order inputs and clocking the DAC externally gives those “Atari noises” I was looking for, and with feedback from the DAC to ADC and slower clocks, shift register patterns. The patterns tend to be more volatile than typical LFSRs like Zorlon Cannon — probably because analog noise is a factor, and because exactly matching the scale and offset of both ADC and DAC is difficult. But there are some interesting results. I’m currently deciding whether or not to keep Zorlon Cannon — my current modular plan still has room for it, but I should be able to cover its abilities well enough between Drezno and Teletype and plugins.

Experiments have shown me that clock dividers, logic etc. aren’t going to be all that fun when processing audio through Drezno, and Teletype and other stuff can handle it should I want to use it at lower rates. Maybe a switch/rotator of some kind eventually, such as the upcoming Noise Engineering Vice Virga or one of the 4-way options, but I’m not necessarily going to plan on it now. I also won’t bother with the Lipsk expander. Jena is a yes for sure though — more waveshaping and patterns, Walsh functions and phase modulation sound like great options to add.

So, right now I am figuring out how I might rearrange the case — the gaps are looking a bit weird with E520 and Zorlon out. The goal:

• The mult+passthru needs to be on the left, with a 1HP gap to pass cables through. The ES-3 needs to be very nearby.
• Teletype needs to be on the right, next to TXb or a 1HP gap to allow the i2c cable to pass through. (This could balance the other 1HP gap.)
• Drezno/Jena need to be adjacent.
• Planar should be on the front/bottom row.
• LCDs should be at a good reading angle.
• All the free space should be contiguous, like defragging a hard drive, to prevent having to rearrange to fit other modules later.
• It’s helpful to have certain modules that can act as mults (Shades, the Ladik switch, O’Tool+, maybe an actual mult) near the horizontal center.
• Preferably, black panels aren’t adjacent — I find they tend to get a bit lost that way.
• Some modules “like” to be near each other — Shades and the Ladik switch, Clep Diaz near an attenuator, Drezno near O’Tool+, etc.

That’s a lot of priorities to shuffle, and there will be some failure of the less important goals. Oh well!

Surprise! I have all the material I need for another album release. All I need to do is master it, make the art and the webpage, and release.

The first half of the material was recorded from March 11 through 14 — spurred by the arrival of Odessa. And the second half was recorded from March 18 through 21, spurred by the arrival of Manis Iteritas and Clep Diaz.

The new (and “new”) gear is good stuff, but it doesn’t get all of the credit for inspiration. There’s the recent read of Monolithic Undertow, and the Stridulation-Yukon-Relay set that I recorded for The Neon Hospice, pushing me toward more of a long form, continuous mix, reaffirmation of “the spirit of drone” sort of thing. There’s a bit of influence from the music I’ve been listening to more lately — the spooky synthy retro-SF/horror (psuedo-)soundtrack stuff, a collection of xenharmonic albums and a few heavy drones. There’s perhaps some influence from the horror podcasts (Old Gods of Appalachia, The Magnus Archive) and paranormal YouTubers my spouse has been listening to and I’ve been half-listening to. There was a technique cribbed from Mylar Melodies, of running vocal samples through Rings for a sort of metallic ringing echo, which reminded me of the Front Line Assembly song “Right Hand of Heaven.”

The use of Odessa, and thinking about letting go of the E520 led me to playing with spectral processing a bit more than usual — and Rings, which is kind of an indirect form of spectral processing. Spontaneous musical phrases and pulsation can happen as a result of the source material passing into and out of processing bands, and on Odessa, through cancellation and reinforcement of partials that have been twisted until their frequencies overlap.

The new album will be called Luminous Phenomena (unless I change my mind). It consists of three tracks, ranging in length from 16:26 to 28:17. Like Stridulation-Yukon-Relay, each track was recorded in two or three shorter sessions and mixed into a continuous piece with transitions.

Even though I record “live” and improvise, before the recording is a lot of not audience-friendly patching, tuning, setting up FX, and planning and practicing maneuvers. After, some editing (cleanup of glitches, taming some harshness, and occasionally more). Extending my editing process a little bit, and adding just a little bit of planning for smooth transitions, fits naturally in this process.

While I probably have the gear to perform longer single-take pieces of, say 20-30 minutes, it would impose limitations that I don’t have with this method. People who perform longer sets with modular tend to have bigger rigs with duplicates of favorite modules, and spend more time patching and planning things out — ironically, live performance can lead to less spontaneous creativity because of a need to prepare more and to manage risk.

And also this method works out creatively. The overall pieces have a sense of scale, with more weight and more time to build up and more time for the listener to settle into it, and offer some continuity while also giving a sense of travel from one scene to another. I’m really happy with how both S-Y-R and Luminous Phenomena have turned out — they give me chills.

Manis Iteritas is not new to me, but it’s been about 3 years since I sold the previous one, so there’s been a bit of a process of rediscovery.

Manis can range from simple “sawtooth through a filter” sounds, to dark, heavy, pulsating drones, to whippy percussion and gritty swarms. While I like a lot of its sonic range, but the raw “chaotic beehive” sound of the Smash parameter is… not my favorite. And the Bash parameter applies the internal envelope to Smash along with the others, so things can feel a bit limited. I think this might have been one of the reasons I let go of the module in the first place.

But this time I know more, and have learned to put every feature of the module to work for me. Subtle use of Smash can be very rewarding. It also works well with heavy processing — such as Rings, SpecOps, or massive dark reverb. The key, as with many other modules, is to not treat it as a self-contained voice in isolation but as part of a whole.

Clep Diaz, or Clepsydra Diazoma, is a nice addition. It primarily generates “stair step” signals — upward, downward, or alternating. The Count control/CV determines how many steps are in the cycle, from 0 to 16 — and like a staircase, fewer steps means a bigger rise per step. The levels can be even or randomized, and there’s also an LFO mode that does smooth random that’s still somehow related to the input clock in a way I haven’t really investigated yet. There’s also a “beginning of cycle” gate output so you can use the module like a clock divider, and a reset input if you want to shake the pattern up some.

I’ve made good use of it and feel like this is a keeper. It’s helped bring some interesting animation to drones, and I’ve used it for pitch both with and without quantization. Using it to play with clock speeds is also fun!

I do wish that it was 6HP rather than 4, and a little less crowded. (And I think the tighter jacks that NE has been using contributes to this cramped feeling somehow.) The LEDs count steps in binary, which isn’t the most intuitive thing even for a nerd like me; it could have had a little one-digit hexadecimal display like some of their other modules. Since there’s no attenuator on board, I think the bipolar output could have been skipped, in favor of a Reverse gate input to flip the step direction. But it’s still a handy little module that is going to get a lot of use.

Drezno arrived in the mail just now — experimenting with that will be my next project. I’ll need to determine what I can and can’t do with it, whether I want to keep or sell Zorlon Cannon, as well as determining what else I might want to accompany Drezno — Jena, Lipsk, CMOS clock divider, CMOS boolean logic, a simple pattern sequencer, some kind of addressable switch, etc. I will have plenty of space to work with here, and want to keep my modulation and processing pretty interesting.

I’m now certain that I want to grab one of the Versio modules — probably Desmodus with its bat logo, or the new Ruina for its beholder logo and DOOM knob. Ruina (distortion/wavefolding) and Elector (clocked delay/reverb based on Desmodus) both sound fantastic, and I no longer believe that waiting for the Desmodus VST plugin is going to be enough for me 😉

Other than that, I’m also still kind of thinking that an Erica Pico BBD and/or a WMD/SSF DPLR could offer a lot of character in a little space for not much money. And I should leave some space for beta testing (they said hopefully) or surprise must-haves.

I have emerged from deep contemplation and have plotted a course for the next leg of the modular journey:

I really don’t want to give up Akemie’s Castle. So I won’t.

But the more I think about it, the less sure I am that the E520 is the best use of its space. I have told myself that it does things I haven’t been able to replicate elsewhere in hardware or software, and convinced myself that those effects are valuable to me. But my findings are, in short:

• Spectral Crusher/Threshold is my favorite effect by far… but I recently found I can get very close in Unfiltered Audio SpecOps, with the MP3ify and Decapitate filters.
• Spectral Crusher/PeakHold is a bit more unique, with SpecOps’ Freeze and Resonant Freeze being closest perhaps, though without the decay time. But I haven’t used this one in any recordings.
• Spectral Time Machine is unique! But I haven’t used it that much. SpecOps does cover freezing, which seems like my most likely use for it.
• Spectral Delay can be almost covered by two instances of Melda MSpectralDelay. Close enough.
• Granular Pitch and Dirt: I can cover these with Bitwig or plugins quite well.
• All the delays, all the modulation: some of these are very good, but I have so many options here that I rarely use the E520 for them.
• The rest: not my cup of tea really.

So I’m thinking, despite my initial excitement and ongoing appreciation for the E520, I will probably sell it and free up a lot of space to give myself options.

And then there’s… the bits.

I’ve been considering the Xaoc Devices “Leibniz Binary Subsystem” off and on since it was first announced. It’s a bit esoteric in usage, but the basic pieces are:

Drezno: an 8-bit analog-to-digital converter paired with a digital-to-analog converter. It provides jacks for each bit (out and in) as well as scale and offset controls and external clock inputs for both of the converters.

Lipsk: an expander with buttons and gates to invert/XOR individual bits. Or it can connect to Odessa instead, to enable individual spectral banks.

Jena: an expander that acts as a lookup table of various waveshapes, rhythms and Walsh functions, addressed by the 8 bits from Drezno (or Lipsk), returning 8 bits as output, with a phase offset CV.

I’m thinking I would skip Lipsk (unless using the other two shows me it’d be super useful). With those, I could:

• Extract individual bits from an LFO for rhythmic gates, or from audio for “Atari noises.”
• Skip low-order bits to decrease resolution, or skip high-order bits for a crude wavefolding effect.
• Tweak the scaling and offset to clip/decimate.
• Rearrange bit order, skip middle bits or use logic to change the shape of waves.
• Use high-order bit as a comparator.
• Use the DAC separately to create stepped CV from other gates.
• Clock the DAC and/or ADC at lower rates for sample rate reduction, or sample-and-hold.
• Use Jena for wavetables or nonlinear distortion, alternate rhythms and noise, override some but not all of the original bits, etc.
• Feed the DAC output back to the ADC, and use scaling, bit order changes, Jena and/or analog shaping to create a (non)linear feedback shift register, to produce patterns of CV and gates/squarewaves. Possibly externally clocked, possibly just at its maximum internal rate.
• Clock the DAC from one of the bits of the ADC, effectively holding values for different lengths related to their level…???
• Probably other things I haven’t thought of!

In fact, I have just talked myself into buying Drezno, without even the Jena at first. I am betting that its flexibility will beat Zorlon’s dual clocks and multiple (but less flexible) LFSRs. A new Drezno is less than the resale value of the Zorlon, and a little smaller — I could rearrange things to fit Jena without even selling the E520. But I’ll see how it does on its own first.

Odessa arrived yesterday and I love it. Lots of textures are bursting out of it. Simple sawtooth or square waves with tilt EQ. Very sweet or very exotic flangers/phasers. Surprisingly resonant-sounding “filter” sweeps by cutting back on the number of partials. Vocal formants. Shimmery glassy tones. Train horns. Eerie atonal chords. Deep growls. Resonant wind noises. Harmonically tuned casino slot machines. Between-radio-stations atmospheric noises. Crickets singing while a silver UFO descends in a dew-covered field. Gentle, smooth tones that fade in and out gently like the waves of a lake lapping at the shore. A ghostly confetti of arpeggios that alternate between left and right as they descend in an orderly but complex fractal pattern.

It’s also great as an FM carrier or modulator.

In two weekdays I’ve already used it in two ten-minute recordings. And, thanks to a noisy fan vibrating my desk in harmony with today’s work, a bit of transition to glue them together — so I’m well on my way into the next album project.

The one hesitation I have with this longer-form idea is that, when I choose albums to listen to, I have tended to prefer a more moderate track length and individual tracks over a continuous mix. I might be starting to come around, though. Maybe I’ll decide to keep it glued together but still use separate track markers; maybe I’ll do it both ways with the final “track” of the album being a continuous mix, as some recent releases by others have done.

As pleased as I am with Odessa, I found I still want that Manis Iteritas again. So, having sold two of the three modules I pulled out so far, I went ahead and bought one along with a Clep Diaz.

I could rearrange things and make space for up to a 4HP module, but for now I think I’m going to put changes back on hold for a bit. Akemie’s Castle will move when it needs to — to make room for a beta test module or if some other “must have” comes along (which could be Sport Modulator v2, but I’m kind of cooling on the idea at the moment).

A small part of me wishes I could say at the end of 2021 that I stuck strictly to my plan. But getting Odessa instead of Shelves and A-110-4 was definitely the right thing for me to do, and once my mind was made up it felt silly to postpone it. I’m also confident that Manis/Clep will serve me better than VCFQ, nice as VCFQ may be.

I finished reading Monolithic Undertow. Here are my thoughts.

The first part of the book, a general intro and discussion of the drone in ancient times, was pretty fascinating. The conclusion/outro was brief, but resonated with me (so to speak).

The bulk of the book was pretty much “the begats.” This artist influenced that band, which influenced that artist, who started this movement, which this other artist combined with other influences, which influenced another artist. From Ravi Shankar’s influence on the Beatles and psychedelic rock, through free jazz, kosmische music, no wave, drone metal, ambient, chillout, drone techno etc. there’s arguably some clear lines of succession, rather than convergent evolution.

And speaking of influence, it seems most of them were under the. The book dwells a lot on drugs, which… I suppose is central to psychedelia. But I started to wonder if there were any 20th century musicians who could break down barriers of thought without chemical assistance, or if the author just really likes his acid and weed. And I guess in an area of music that on a scale of 0=Apollonian to 10=Dionysian, lives somewhere between 9.5 and 11, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.

Anyway, through that evolution, it was good to see a not terribly strict and literal definition of “drone” — and yet, a coherent one. The drone does tend to change one’s perception of time in music, but that doesn’t mean it has to completely obliterate time. It doesn’t have to be hours long (or infinite) and purely static. It can shift. It can have texture and even articulation. It can be the harmonic basis of a song, in lieu of chord progressions. There can be melody, harmony and rhythm playing off of it. The drone can be all, or explicitly central, or implicit.

Often when I read books on music history, genres, technology, philosophies etc. I make myself a list of things to listen to. And most of the time, most of it disappoints me. Music and techniques that were groundbreaking at the time might have become commonplace afterward, or evolved into more compelling forms. Sometimes the examples are more academic and experimental than musically engaging. And sometimes I just don’t appreciate particular genre/style elements as much as the author did. For instance, I’m just really not going to get into the Velvet Underground, no matter how important a node they were in the graph, nor Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. But maybe I’ll like something on this list — I am enjoying the Blackmoon1348 album I found after the author mentioned them in an earlier section.

I found the book inspiring overall. The set I was working on was originally, more or less, going to be a short album of individual pieces. Instead, it wound up as a triptych of drone improvisations that fit together seamlessly into one half-hour work. It gets pretty intense at times, and I am generally very pleased with it. This might be the direction my future music goes.

The set, “Stridulation-Yukon-Relay,” is scheduled for May 15 on Sonic Sound Synthesis at The Neon Hospice.