Author: Starthief

I pre-ordered a DecadeBridge Sn (aka “Tin”) — a small desktop lo-fi FM drone synth. It’s kind of redundant and kind of not; obviously I have a great deal of FM capability among my hardware and software but this is a lo-fi example, with a couple of unique tricks. There is a small chance I’ll decide with this I don’t really need the Akemie’s Castle, but I’m not particularly counting on it. So this is probably just another flavor of that thing I like a lot.

---

MW now has banner ads. When SynthCube took over, they said they weren’t going to. As a Patreon supporter of the “Memorial Initiative” I was offered the new Power Wiggler status, which removes the ads but otherwise seems to be about the same. On my desktop I already don’t see them (thanks Adblock) and it’s a tiny strip on my phone. I’m not sure if I want to accept the new thing, continue as I was, or drop the Patreon. The proceeds were supposed to pay for a nice memorial gift for the McGrath family and also some kind of tchotchke for the supporters, but we haven’t heard anything about either yet. Kind of leaning toward dropping it. MW has been a helpful resource, and it’s also a pain at times, especially the way it tends to be administered.

---

Quite some time back, a reader of my blog recommended a book by Dr. John Sarno about back pain. I never did approve that post, because I looked into it and it seemed like quackery. The medical establishment pretty much thinks it’s bunk and the supposedly amazing results he’s gotten are a placebo/coincidence.

I saw another reference to it, and since my back was actively hurting at the time, I thought… OK, I’ll give it a shot. My thinking was: Qi Gong is not based on science at all, but the exercises feel pretty pleasant to do.

So the idea is, back pain (and a lot of other pain, fibromyalgia, etc.) are psychosomatic in nature. Real pain, but not mechanical damage. The physical cause is restriction of oxygen to certain muscle groups; the psychological cause is anxiety, anger, etc.

The book says both that (A) you should always see a doctor about pain in case it indicates a physical problem and (B) doctors don’t know what they’re talking about and will diagnose injuries that aren’t real, making your anxiety and thus your pain worse, and (C) if you have this “TMS” you should discontinue any physical treatment and just fix yourself by, essentially, being told that’s what’s wrong and telling your brain to stop it. The author is not a psychologist or psychiatrist and seems to be a fan of Freud, whose ideas are not terribly well respected today. And the book also keeps citing ulcers as a well-known and accepted example of psychosomatic effects, except oops, ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection. (This was proven before the book was published, but to be fair, the stress = ulcers thing had been believed by medical science and society as a whole and it took years for the new science to be widely accepted).

I’m not at all willing to discount the idea that the mind affects the body. Maybe a lot of cases of back pain are psychosomatic, and maybe by reading the book and thinking about it, that’ll help. I am not an entirely scientific, rational person and maybe this is magic that will work. I guess I’ll see.

I’ve finally gotten all the way through The Big Book of Cyberpunk.

I’ve seen people say “this isn’t the cyberpunk dystopia I signed up for” as a response to various news` about privacy and surveillance, social media, NFTs/crypto or whatever. (The converse being “this is the cyberpunk dystopia I signed up for” about military robots, police drones etc.)

We had Black Mirror with its uncomfortably close to home, disturbingly prescient stories. William Gibson continues to write, although “The Peripheral” had some pretty outlandish tech along with the entirely too plausible omnishambles of a near future. But as a whole I was generally unaware that there was a whole set of 21st-century spawned cyberpunk which no longer takes place “15 minutes into the future” but 5 minutes or less. Tactical neural implants replaced by social media, yakuza forgotten but corporations and corrupt officials stronger than ever, street samurai replaced by influencers and trolls, and AI trying to become human (and vice versa) replaced by people trying to use AI to cope with the pain of being human.

I am more of a novel reader than a short story enjoyer, but some of these stories really hit hard.

---

Not long after my post about Duolingo, I did in fact switch languages. It pretty much sidelined the regular practice to get me to work on hiragana, with the threat of katakana and kanji next. Not what I wanted to do. So I picked German.

That’s mostly been going pretty well. German and English are cousins, and sometimes you can guess. The grammar seems relatively straightforward, as grammar goes. Gendered words are odd (why is pizza feminine? Why is a male cat still eine Katze?) but aside from a few mistakes it hasn’t been too tricky. Some of the pronunciation is unfamiliar, and the app’s ability to judge that pronunciation is mixed (allowing some definite mistakes and sometimes flagging things I felt I got right). There are certainly a few long words… entschuldigung!… and a few places where the gendered versions are tricky (der Arzt, die Ärztin) but I find it more distinctive and easier to memorize than Japanese.

That said… Duolingo is doing some serious dark patterns / enshittification. They really, really want you to subscribe to Super Duolingo. The difference between the free and paid versions is all friction: frequent advertising, limits on usage (though you can earn “hearts” through practicing earlier material).

They don’t want to tell you how much this will cost until you get close to agreeing to pay it; even “how much does Super Duolingo cost?” in their FAQ does not answer how much Super Duolingo costs. A third-party site said it’s something like $12 a month or $155 a year — not cheap. But it could very well be a customized price determined by your usage patterns and whatever other data they can scrape about you from your advertiser ID, email etc. Das ist cool nie.

They keep offering free trials, but considering all of the rest of this, I bet cancelling is a hassle, so I do not want to do this. But then there was a screen that said I unlocked Super for three days (“you will not be charged”) and there was no option not to accept, only a single “Continue” button. It doesn’t ask for payment info, at least. And the experience is so much smoother… finish a lesson, move on to the next without sitting through ads (and the additional delaying screens before and after the ads). No “heart” system to slow me down. Am I going to hate it when that expires?

I miss the shareware days. Get that Commander Keen floppy and you could play the entire first game (which was substantial) without restrictions. If it entertained you enough, you’d mail-order the sequels.

I’ve been getting a bit tired of playing sudoku on my phone, and thought… how about Duolingo? Spanish because I took it back in high school? German, because I started to sort of learn a little German before (and tried to struggle through an Egyptology book in German, and listen to industrial music some of which is in German)? Or Japanese, because… taiko and anime? Right, Japanese it is.

It’s been going okay so far, but it just had me start learning some hiragana and that’s a bit more of an intimidating prospect. I’ll try trusting in the process for now but I might switch to German if things get too dicey.

---

Finished up my study of Morpheus, except I didn’t quite… I am going to look into the idea of using the filter sequencer, a feature I’ve completely ignored, as a kind of categorization system.

The other project has been to find an approximate software substitute for Djupviks Box of Angels, or at least, something that gives me similar vibes. The requirements are three bandpass filters — fairly steep ones I think — in parallel, with a gain control for each. There seems to be surprisingly little software that can do this, either feature-wise or to the satisfaction of my ears. So that’s meant cooking up stuff in Bitwig or VCV Rack.

Most of the filters I’ve tried need to be doubled up in series to get a steep enough response. I’ve had better luck with a couple of VCV Rack modules though:

NOI Sinensis is an all-in-one parallel multi bandpass filter where the tuning spread is controlled by a ratio. It needs a quiet input to not distort, and is not quite as steep as I’d like, but the results are excellent.

Prism Droplet is not to be confused with Sinevibes Droplet which is a reverb, or Finn Mitchel-Anyon’s Droplets, a generative sequencer. This one is a steep-Q bandpass that has a switch to engage a “second pass” built in, removing the need to put another one in serial, plus an envelope follower output.

---

While I was slowly writing and editing this, Bunker Archaeology arrived. It is definitely “the Bruxa of reverb”… except where Tony and Alessandro put a lot of thought and refinement into design and details, this module is punk AF. The knob ranges are bizarre, the white LED for the tremolo side is a blazing strobe light, it distorts easily, the tremolo sometimes seems to let the dry signal through. I stuck a bit of colored label over the bright LED but I kind of feel like it should be a Band-Aid. It’s great though. It’s raw, but with the rest of the modular plus the DAW I can “cook” it a bit to serve whatever my needs are at the time.

“it’s not the gear,” I said.

With all my recent exploration of “broken” lo-fi delay techniques I started wondering: what’s the reverb equivalent of Bruxa or Tyme Sefari or a Doepfer BBD, or a cassette tape loop?

There honestly isn’t much. “lo-fi reverb” tends to be something of a different nature:

• spring reverbs
• the Belton/Accusonics digital “bricks” that are supposed to emulate spring reverb
• terrible algorithms like Freeverb
• 80s budget reverbs
• the Radio Shack Realistic (brand) Electronic Reverb should not count, because it’s very obviously a BBD delay and not a reverb
• guitar pedals with built-in bitcrushing and/or distortion

Honestly I don’t think those 80s reverbs are that bad, just vaguely “electronic.” And Freeverb doesn’t sound bad in an interesting way.

Anyway, the hunt led me to Djupviks Bunker Archeology, which is based on the Belton brick but with some “attacking itself” feedback shenanigans. It’s paired with a frequency-driven VCA for stuttering/dropouts, which is post-reverb by default but can be patched the other way or used independently (and controlled with CV like a regular VCA). After watching demos and seeing what I could do in software — which was a lot of fun stuff but not quite there — I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

It will displace Peradam (which is kind of neat but I think I favor other forms of distortion more) and Zero-2 (which just hasn’t been getting much use).

Djupviks makes a lot of cool stuff. I’d like to try several of their modules, but especially Box of Angels and Sleeper Awakes. BOA is a triple bandpass filter with VCAs per filter and a noise source, which doesn’t seem like it’s that fancy, but it really sounds beautiful in demos and people who have it seem to love it dearly. I’m in the process of looking for that vibe without buying the actual hardware; we’ll see how that goes. Sleeper Awakes is a dual ISD-chip sampler/looper — very lo-fi, with a pronounce pop as it loops, and full of great vibes. The thing is, it might be kind of a one-trick pony, and I’ve previously replaced W/, Tyme Sefari, Phonogene and jroo Loop so I’m not convinced another sampler/looper would stay in the rack either.

---

I’ve started my deep dive into Rossum Morpheus. There is a LOT going on with this module — 280 filter “cubes” of wildly varying types and characters. I’m taking general notes, but the bigger project is going through all of the cubes and categorizing them in various ways, making a sort of catalog/chart. So far my schema is this:

• Type: LP, BP, HP, notch, peaks, comb, vowel, resonator, complex, etc. and combinations thereof. (Sometimes these are pretty subjective choices, but it’s still a general guideline.)
• Distortion? (For some background, Morpheus has true “cubes” with three dimensions of control, and “.4” filters with two dimensions, where Z controls distortion by default. The cubes can still access distortion from the menu, and the .4s can reassign it to flatten the frequency profile.) YES if distortion is rewarding, NEED if the filter is bland/bad without it, and DISABLE for .4 filters if reassigning the Z behavior is especially useful.
• Envelope friendly? YES or NO or MAYBE, depending on how the filter sounds in motion. (Unless you really like cheezy laser noises, peakier filters sound best when stable, sequenced, or maybe gently wavering than a wild sweep.)
• Audio rate? YES if applying some (carefully tuned) audio rate modulation to a parameter is especially cool. It depends on the nature of the filter
• Resonator? YES if (pre-filtered) white noise or clicks/pings cause it to sing nicely (may require distortion); ONLY if it really only acts as a resonator (or is otherwise awful)

I’ve gone through 186 cubes but I have some categories to backfill because I kept adding new things to my list. Everything after “type” came up when I realized I was writing the same notes about several of them.

I would add a subjective rating category of some sort… but I kept finding that “bad” cubes can shine with specific usages/material. Most likely, the ones I still don’t like, I might in the right context. Likewise, some of my favorite cubes turned out to be not the right tool in other patches.

---

I got myself a new pair of earbuds, after going for years with the dirt-cheap QY8 from (insert about five different forgettable Chinese brand names here). I chose Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro based on price and reviews. I’ve been wearing them today at work and walking around the office complex on breaks (it’s nice to not have to pause my music when I get up to make coffee or go to the bathroom).

These are slick and modern. No cord between the two sides to make tons of noise every time you move. Little charging case that the earbuds magnetically align themselves with, and the case itself does Qi wireless charging. Sensors to tell when you’re wearing the buds, touch sensors on the back for control, sensors for the buds’ orientation and relative angle to the phone, a feature to automatically check the earbud/rubber tip fit by listening for leaking sound. And active noise cancellation, which is… an experience.

It’s made me aware of how much noise is a part of regular home and office life. Air conditioners and fans especially, but everything from refrigerators to escalators to just general ambient room tone. Zap, gone. It’s almost disorienting, like you’ve been cut off from the world. Like I’m not going to compare it deafness, but that background noise carries (mostly) subtle information about the space you’re in as you move through it, which just gets removed. (Apparently a hearing person in a seriously good anechoic chamber can experience vertigo from this lack of cue, and can also hear their own blood and eyelids.) But I don’t want to say it’s a bad experience — there’s something really calming about being able to listen to chill ambient music (or accidentally oddly chill industrial music) all day at work without interrupting it at all (except for those rare occasions when I need to talk to someone). I even made a phone call and took another one without taking the earbuds out.

There’s a feature to reverse the process and bypass the isolation from the earbuds themselves to hear your surroundings better — optionally enabled when someone is speaking to you or you’re on a phone call, and toggled on at the touch of an earbud — and some options for partially hearing-impaired people too.

As for the sound… for my preferences it’s not as good as the GMP 8.35D headphones I use for music-making, but it’s still quite good. Really comfortable, too. These weren’t particularly expensive earbuds either, it’s just that technology has come that far.

Album’s done, mastering’s done, artwork is done, notes page is done… I just need to upload it to Bandcamp and publish, when I get home from work.

Usually after an album’s done, I tally up how much I used each piece of gear and see if there are any surprises or insights. This time I made the spreadsheet and then found I didn’t much care what the results were, so I closed it without even really looking at the numbers. Opening it again… okay fine, I used Harmonia three times and not Aalto, but what’s that mean really? I still like Aalto. I used more reverb plugins than delay plugins this time (but that’s because I leaned hard on Strega). Not really much of interest to learn there.

I guess I’m actually taking the “it’s not the gear” thing to heart.

I mean, it’s also not not the gear; I made the choices I did because I like a particular sound and those modules/plugins/etc. would help me contribute to it — and part of my process is to explore sounds and then when inspiration strikes, go into “music mode” and it’s the gear making sounds. But if you put someone else’s butt in my chair and they’d make something very different with the same stuff. If I swapped setups with someone else, once I got familiar with it, I’d end up making something that sounds like what I make with my own setup.

Done mastering the next album, I think — I need to do some test listening. It needs the art, notes written up etc.

I only gave the album a name yesterday (after one of the tracks; a name with a story that I’m not sure whether I will tell in words or just let the music speak). I have had another album name in mind for almost a year now and I haven’t used it yet. Maybe next time!

Have been playing Soulstone Survivors more than anything else lately, after learning some things about the mechanics that have led to some really great builds. And then they went and added a new class, the Myrmidon. Who’s really more mermaid than myrmidon, with sea-related powers. And queue the usual internet suspects complaining about historical accuracy because myrmidons were men, in a game that has a Dwarf with machine guns and robots, where you can swing a sword in a 60-foot radius 5 times per second, where you can throw an infinite number of knives while also casting fire spells and stabbing with a spear and wielding a warhammer made of ice. Okay. Anyway, I really dig the Myrmidon’s theme and she’s quite an effective character, much more capable than the Monkey King when he was introduced (at least before I learned the aforementioned mechanics stuff).

There’s a thread on MW, “Some thoughts on people asking for advice on their rack.” Long story short, this got me thinking about when I was a beginner. How would I have answered the common questions people ask? What sort of advice would 2024-me give to 2016-me if they started a “please advise” thread now?

At the time, my goal for modular was “Explore. Get some sounds I haven’t been getting from software.” My plan was to go for a small case of modules to give my Microbrute superpowers, or a single synth voice to complement the mostly-softsynth, linear MIDI sequencing habits I had known.

My original Plan A — precipitated mostly by Mutable Instruments donating modules to a KVR charity auction — was this:

Elements / Warps / Tides / Peaks / uZeus

In a DIY, approx. 75HP box. Because cases were expensive and I only wanted a few modules. Before I actually got started, this got mutated to:

Rings/ Tides / Peaks / uZeus

With hindsight I can say the following:

• Tiny cases seem like a good idea, but actually that’s expert difficulty. You need very well-defined goals and limitations; this is the opposite of what somewhat who wants to explore should be doing. Trying to cram a lot of stuff into a small amount of HP means you’re limiting your choices to some more mediocre options that compromise sound, features, playability etc. (A smarter choice for exploration on a budget would be software like VCV Rack and/or semi-modulars, or maybe AE Modular. Those weren’t so abundant and wonderful in 2016 though.)
• Utilities! This is what people always say. These modules being paired up with the Microbrute, it desperately needed attenuverters. I discovered that very quickly on my own though.
• A particular interface quirk of Peaks made it unfun for me to use, and it’s a particular interface quirk I hated on desktop synths before that and should have studiously avoided. But it would take several more modules that do this before I learned that lesson. (If there’s ever a preset or a mode that changes the value of a parameter out from under the knob that’s supposed to control it… yuck.)

Anyway… I started listening to some of my older, pre-Starthief, pre-modular music. Some of it I don’t enjoy, because I got so much better at production skills. Some of it’s obviously trying stuff and not quite reaching what I wanted. There was a lot of exploration of styles and genres…

But some of it sounds like I recorded it yesterday and even matches the specific aesthetic I’ve been into for the past few weeks. With no modular, no hardware of any kind, only a portion of the plugins I regularly use now, and linear MIDI sequencing in FL Studio. There’s even a moment that sounds like I used Rings.

So… it’s really not about gear.

I have suspected for some time now that, with the mindset and workflow that I’ve developed since getting into modular, I could go back to 100% software-based music creation, albeit with some nice MIDI controllers, and still make similar music. This is confirmation that even without what I have learned and developed and practiced since then, I could be making that music. It’s just sort of… me-music.

Our 20th wedding anniversary is this Sunday. There’s not much to say that isn’t repeating cliches and being all mushy, but I’ll say: I love her very much and I’m very glad the universe conspired to get us together.

We have general plans, or really more the idea, of taking a nice vacation for ourselves in the fall when the weather is more enjoyable. Probably through the Smoky Mountains to the East Coast — mountains and aquariums, islands and beaches and lighthouses.

My yearly performance review at work is Monday, which means I’m stressing about that. It always goes well and usually means at least a small raise (sometimes not small!) but the formality/bureaucracy/awkwardness of it sets off the anxiety. This time, I’m also sitting in as an observer on the other two developers’ reviews, but being nervous about mine overshadows that.

---

I’ve been reading The Big Book of Cyberpunk, which at 1116 pages is appropriately named (even if not all the stories are perhaps strictly cyberpunk). I should have gotten a digital version, it’d be much lighter. Anyway, some of the stories hit especially hard, with “Thoughts and Prayers” the thorniest — a story about tragedy, memory, media and internet trolls. It takes a storyteller to turn something that has become an everyday occurrence, a statistic, back into something that goes right to the heart. (Cyberpunk stories are fundamentally about being human in the face of an increasingly dehumanized society, both literally and figuratively.)

While working on some music, hitting the point where I knew I had the start of something I wanted to finish, and casting about for a title, “Thoughts and Prayers” immediately came to mind. And it kind of set the direction of the rest of the musical effort. So that’s track #5 for the next album. If it sounds both haunting and, well, pretty messed up… that’s why.

This may seem like a weird segue but bear with me for a minute:

The world (or at least, modest village) of tape simulation has two main regions. In one, there’s an attempt to make audio sound like it was recorded on a professional, well-maintained tape machine, on good high-quality media, in a fine studio. It’s very subtle, because those machines were intentionally as transparent as possible, and to me the benefits are questionable. But some people claim if you run every channel through those and then the full mix there’s some subliminal extra “warmth” or what have you.

The other one is going for extremes. Cheap tape (whether it’s cassette, reel-to-reel or VHS), erased and reused too many times, left in the heat to warp. Crinkles and dropouts. Misaligned, dirty tape heads. Hiss, maybe even a little hum or mechanical noise. Warble, wow and flutter. Saturation, compression, emphasis or loss of low and/or high end frequencies. Techniques that, if one were using real (or reel) tape, require some combination of neglect, shoddy equipment and intentional abuse of the media. Faking it with effects is maybe less “authentic” but more convenient and offers more control to the musician.

There are plenty of other lo-fi-ization options besides tape. There’s vinyl, old samplers and bad DACs, telephones, MP3 compression, mistuned radios… it goes on. But something about cassette (and to a lesser extent, vinyl) ramps up the melancholy factor — ask William Basinski or The Caretaker — and invites thinking about the nature of memory and nostalgia. There’s an association with ghosts and EVP. It can also bring some funk and swagger and street cred. It can harden or soften the music, or both simultaneously in different ways; it all just depends on what you’re putting into it and how you’re using it.

Wear & Tear by && (Ampersand Ampersand) is a module that is definitely on the more extreme side. (Maybe it could do subtle but that doesn’t seem to be the point.) I watched a couple of videos and was impressed by its particular charm, and started figuring out how I could make space for it. It had me going through my plugins, looking for something that, if not identical, offers as much satisfaction in similar ways.

Wavesfactory Cassette is one I’ve turned to many times, often using it to mask less desirable distortion artifacts or just rough up the sound a little bit. But it wasn’t delivering the flavors I wanted here. Nor were Tape Mello-Fi, Lo-fi-AF, Bad Tape, PlexiTape, Stardust 201, Echomelt, etc. Nor the demo of SketchCassette that I tried. But as I was starting to write a “please recommend a plugin so I don’t have to buy this module” post on the Lines forum, I remembered RC-20 Retro Color, which for some reason I didn’t have in my go-to list of lo-fi plugins.

Oh, there it is! Not identical of course, but it’s living on the same floor of the apartment. Good enough to keep me from buying more hardware right now. (I may still choose to grab W&T later on.) RC-20 in general is just really fantastic at a lot of different things and I’ll probably be going through a phase of using it a lot more in the near future.

Also during that quest I found a new appreciation for ValhallaDelay’s tape mode — with no delay or feedback and mix at 100%, the Drive/Age/Wow/Flutter and EQ settings can offer some lovely lo-fi-ness.

This all dovetails nicely with using Strega, Integer, Lair, etc. on this album.

---

There’s another new module that piqued a little interest too, though. Noise Engineering Gamut Repetitor seems (at first) to be their answer to Mutable Instruments Marbles — loopable random quantized pitches with trigger outputs. Though the more you compare them the less similar they seem.

GR offers CV over pattern length (which I’ve wished for on Marbles) and a reset input. But it doesn’t have an internal clock, the y section (which I honestly don’t use much), Deja Vu (which I use a lot, but sometimes it gets me in trouble and maybe the way GR works randomization can be “goosed” to only partially change a sequence), the ability to sample external CV (which is very cool even if I don’t use it a lot), the smart scale limiting (though it has a near equivalent) or slide.

It’s not a must-get, and I’m not really sure about it. I’d like to try it sometime, but now is not that time.

This week, Make Noise announced Bruxa, a module based on the prototype “Time/Filter Experiment” from the Strega. The delay is based on the PT2399 chip, a super cheap digital delay with analog feedback path, used in dozens of guitar pedals and quite a few Eurorack modules. It’s often meant to imitate an analog BBD, and it has similar characteristics — a fixed buffer length, limited fidelity — but it does use memory rather than capacitors. (Some marketing copy will call it an “analog delay” anyway, some hybrid, and some “digital”. It’s just words.)

The PT has a characteristic distortion, and when clocked too slowly (trying to extend the delay time longer/slower than it can handle) it tends to generate weird insectile/crunchy noises. In a lot of designs, the clock rate range is limited — using multiple chips in series if longer delays are needed, instead of slowing them down too much — and the signal is filtered and companded to reduce the noisiness but give pleasant, dark echoes. But in the Strega, and now the Bruxa, that noise and degradation is celebrated rather than suppressed. It does use multiple chips but also multiple parallel feedback paths to tailor the sound.

Bruxa is apparently only going to be available for preorders, and the price is a bit on the high side. Given that this one is quite close to what the Strega offers anyway — maybe some subtle differences in the feedback paths? — I don’t feel like I’d benefit all that much from also having this one, and making space for it means giving up something else. But contemplating it has got me patching up Strega in new ways, running other audio through it from the DAW or modular rather than using it as a self-contained instrument (or as a pair with the Minibrute 2S) and finding a new appreciation for not just the gritty delay, but its integrated filter and what happens when you modulate various things.

The sound of Strega’s delay fits with where this album has been naturally heading. Far from avoiding delay and reverb and going “dry” like I’d considered a few months ago, this one is celebrating noisy, distorted delay and reverb, and some similar textures achieved via other means. The new Aberrant DSP Lair reverb and Audiority Doomagorgon fuzz plugins have featured, as has Sinevibes Integer (which was inspired by BBD and PT delays). At one point so far, Noise Eng Morbus Legio adds some sub-audio noise to a distorted signal, which also has a crawly sort of texture though very different from the PT. (And again, I want to emphasize that while the gear certainly contributes to the sound and often its “natural” behavior inspires it, the biggest factor is me. This is the sound that is right to me at this time. If Lair and Doomagorgon and Bruxa hadn’t been released this month I’d still be heading in this direction, even if the exact path and destination are different.)

Anyway, I’m at about 34 minutes of material for the album and going strong. There was one rejected track, but that’s fine… a lot of the ideas that went into it (both in terms of patch design and general musical concepts) went into the next attempt, which worked. Sometimes you just have to let your brain reboot and take another stab.