Not surreality, though it can be. Not serialism either, because I mostly don’t like that. And not too serious either!
The main idea behind this album was that each song would use just one voice. What constitutes a “voice” is… pretty much whatever I would count as a voice in my previous notes. Not necessarily a single oscillator, not necessarily monophonic, but one cohesive source. Like a part in a score, if I were the kind to write scores.
I don’t really make gear demos — I’m not trying to show the range or capabilities or typical sound of any particular module, synth or technique here. Music was the goal.
Just one voice per song sounds like it would be minimalism, and I suppose there’s the element of “doing more with less” to it. But it didn’t feel minimalist at all, and the result definitely doesn’t sound that way. I gave myself permission to go absolutely overboard with processing (not that I normally am restrained about it), stretching that “single voice” into a full ensemble.
I also gave myself permission to be silly with it — to just not take it too seriously. Around the time the project started, there was a new forum thread that asked “How do you stay innocent?” and my answer was “remember that it’s called playing music.” At the same time I was reading Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson, which absolutely encourages mischief and fun. I’ve also recently read Stephen Nachmanovitch’s Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, as well as How Poetry Can Change Your Heart by Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley, and those had their influences.
This “challenge” that I gave myself turned out to be extremely easy and fun, in terms of creative flow. I’d be recording one piece and have two more “try this next” ideas in the pipeline. It was a very rapid, experimental, freeing way to create — so much so that I recorded about 20 pieces in 20 days, without feeling at all like I was rushing. Two songs didn’t make it to the album — let’s have a moment of silence for “Ten Round Stun” and “Unintentionally Not Left Blank” — and some of these were second or third takes that came out very differently from the original direction I had started in, and some were edited down considerably from longer recordings. A sort of creative agility was an important factor.
One thing that emerged during the process was using more than my usual dose of EQ, filters and phasers to bring additional movement and make the most of that single voice. In a few cases, their resonances changed the perceived pitch and contributed to a sense of melody. Quite often I’m doing something overt with one or two effects but something more subtle with others — either during the recording or applied afterward.
I have a very hands-on, improvised approach to recording, as opposed to setting up a patch and letting it play itself. On other albums I’m typically working a faderbank as well as expression pedals, maybe pressure pads and occasionally a module’s own knobs. On this one, I usually just had the pedals set up — but then once the virtual tape was rolling, I’d reach for the knobs anyway to create unplanned variations or an ending. It’s a little more risky, because it’s not the easiest thing to get back to the previous state once I start messing with stuff. But that was also part of the fun.
As much fun as it was, as swift the creative flow, I don’t intend to do things this way all the time in the future. But maybe more than I have been.
(It kind of sucks that I feel the need to even say it, but: no generative AI, or any other kind of LLM etc. was used to create the music, the art, or this text, and to the best of my knowledge I don’t use any vibe-coded or AI-assisted tools. AI as it exists in 2026 is gross, and the AI industry even grosser.)
In the following descriptions I often leave out some basic EQ, dynamics, cleanup plugins etc. and sometimes simple modulation sources. Bold items are hardware and italic ones are software. REDACTED could be anything, it could be right behind you right now!
01 Coyote
Recording of a very aliased “banjo” patch on a crappy 90s Kawasaki toy keyboard that I had hoped to circuit-bend, looped in Spectral/Reharm mode in Bitwig Grid. Big Swarma, 2x Mesmeriser pedals in stereo.
(Mostly droning at a constant pitch, with some of the “bloops” occurring spontaneously as a result of the wonky spectral processing. But I set up two of my expression pedals to transpose to the higher “bleeps” at different intervals.)
02 Don’t Even Know What’s Going On
Toros Iteritas Alia, Mimeophon, Ovis Legio, Darkstar V3, Slöer. Modulation of Mimeophon and Toros from Stages LFOs.
03 In The Blood
VCV Rack [Keos Ogham], Valhalla Delay, Ruina, Bitwig Grid [comb, S-K and vowel filters], Filter Table. LFO modulation of Ogham and EQ/filters.
04 Raccoon Array
Strega‘s main output through Mesmeriser, and its triangle output through cDVCA (mostly as distortion), REDACTED, Silhouette (mostly for its reverb); Cassette, Velvet Machine. Sequence from Mimetic Digitwolis, with Strega disrupting its own pitch.
05 Curtains for Zoosha?
Toros Iteritas Alia, QPAS, FutureVerb, Ratshack Reverb, Cassette. Toros & QPAS modulation from Multimod; played on 0-Ctrl.
(To be fair this is probably what this whole section looks like to anyone who’s not a synth nerd.)
06 Softspoken
Cymbal Legio, Blades, 2x Sinusoidal Run Rhythm in stereo, Uzu, SpecOps.
07 Círculo
Walk 4, Silhouette, Lines, Darkstar V3, Slöer, Cassette, Valhalla Room, Valhalla Delay, Efx Refract.
(The pitch “sequence” comes from Sil’s Spot rotation selecting different outputs of Walk 4, with DC offsets and an LFO patched to its Trend inputs.)
08 Wiser
Odessa captured in Multimod, Mimeophon, cDVCA modulated by Function, Spectraphon, Nearness, Character, 2x Octaves in series, Ratshack Reverb.
(Two kinds of phasing going on: Odessa’s hundreds of sines dephasing due to just having tapped the Voices button, and Multimod playing back the capture at different rates with occasional small tweaks of the Phase knob. The second kind made me think of the Bud-weis-er frogs from 1995…)
09 Ritual Mischief
Synclavier V played on Linnstrument, Anina, Codec, Maim, Filter Table, Tube Modulator, FutureVerb
10 Fall Away
VCV Rack [Sofia’s Daughter, 2x CF100 in stereo], Futureverb.
(This is all the same patch, with nothing changing except I’m playing pedals for the filter drive & cutoff, octave select, and blend/decay on the reverb.)
11 Unhanced
Akemie’s Castle output A through Futureverb, B through Beads & Finisher Retro. Operator levels modulated by Function and K-Accumulator‘s UFG.
(The seemingly rhythmic steps at first are caused by the 5-bit resolution of the Yamaha OPN chip’s level registers. There is no pitch sequencing or modulation; the sense of pitch change comes from the differing level balances.)
12 Seed and Feed
Bass guitar, Beads and Rings in a feedback loop, Pyros, and then two parallel effects chains: Velvet Machine > Anina > Silhouette > Speakers and cDVCA into REDACTED.
(Beads is in lowest quality mode with the gain maxed out, so mainly we’re looking at a heavy feedback distortion thing and then softening and filtering it. cDVCA’s frequency is being controlled by a zero crossing detector in Bitwig Grid, allowed to wander around and make those weird wails.)
13 Huntokar
VCV Rack [Sofia’s Daughter], Lair. Entire recording slowed/pitched down.
(Sofia’s Daughter is a software interpretation of Xaoc Sofia with some added features. It’s capable of generating more conventional tones but what’s the fun in that?)
14 Barley a Figment
Gator Legio, Natural Gate, Echobode, Sinusoidal Run Rhythm, Darkstar V3, Filter Table, Uhbik Ambience.
The pitch of Gator is constant, but modulating the effects and NG’s filtering, plus occasional shifts in Saw Mod, emphasize different sets of harmonics. SRR’s modulation shape is what is creating the glitchy little hitches.
15 Off-Axis
Akemie’s Castle, 2x Mesmeriser in stereo, and at the end Velvet Machine.
Castle is droning with all operator levels at minimum, and is amplified in the DAW to emphasize its noise. Gliss controls/modulates OP4’s wave, and I mess a little with OP4 feedback and one of the multipliers.
16 Changeling
AT Legio into two FX chains: A130-8 VCA > Beads > REDACTED, and droning > QPAS > Pyros > VintageVerb.
(The main sequence is from Mimetic Digitwolis, with Marbles handling the clocking and secondary modulation.)
17 Breathing Space
Two phone recordings of a quiet air-conditioned room made while I was meditating on different nights, mixed in stereo and looped; Whirl, Anina, SpecOps, FutureVerb.
(You may hear the occasional sound of a bell gently tinkling. These are hanging from the ceiling near the AC vent, but only sound once in a while. The main point of those recordings was to try to capture them, but there’s not much there to capture.)
18 no es importante ahora mismo
K-Accumulator into two FX chains: ValhallaDelay > ValhallaDelay, and Multimod > Beads > Imitor > Lo-Fi AF. FutureVerb & Velvet Machine at the end. Sequence and modulation from the pair of Mimetic Digitwolis and 0-Ctrl.
MD2 is set to a Partch-style tuning system, with some transposition from 0-Ctrl, but then K-A requantizes it into one of its own exotic JI scales, so who really knows what’s going on there? Multimod is dropping the pitch an octave, while Beads is trying to restore it