So Many Colours

I saw this post over on the patchpierre blog, which is all about Doepfer synths usually, but this post is about an album by Wendy Carlos called Secrets of Synthesis. I had never heard of it before which was a surprise because its an album of her talking about and demonstrating her take on synthesis. Wonk-tastic!

Taming The Paia

Here is a video of me trying to get to grips with the Paia. This thing was made in the mid 70s and has amazing sounding oscillators, filters and envelopes with tons of character. In fact the whole system is quirky and hard to work with and doesn't easily do what you want it to do, but thats its charm right? Like a frisky pony. Its the forgotten modular, get one cheap while you can! This patch uses just one VCO, VCF and ADSR, and another VCO and sequencer as modulation. The whole system has 6 VCOs, 4 VCFs, 4 ADSRs and other things. Big

Look In The Mirror

The Daily Mirror today....

Beam Me Up

Here is some film of the stunning Buchla 100 housed at the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio (BEAMS) near Boston. Eric Chasalow takes us on a rudimentary tour of some of its functions



I also found a beguiling album recorded in 1968 on the same system by a 14 year old girl. Its true. More info and free download here. The 100 has such a distinctive sound

Arp Attack

Me and Phil had a Wrangle yesterday, and came up with a sequence and drum pattern for a new song. So today I carried it on a bit on my own just for fun. The bass drum was made on the odyssey too, the clap from this session (made on the ARP 2500)

Top Scores

I was looking at some posts over on muffwigglers in the section called Buchla, EMS and Serge and saw this one. The poster was calling for tracks made on Buchla systems with the extra rule that the music has to have some kind of score to be included. He put up some pictures of classic pictorial electronic music scores from people such as Stockhausen and Ligetti. Aren't they beautiful?

Word of the Week #20

More Gig News

It has been announced that Tara Busch will be giving her support at some of our upcoming shows in october. This is really great news. Also Xeno & Oaklander will be doing some which makes me tremendously happy and excited. I love it when a plan comes together. Below are two more vids that Tara and Maf took when they came to the studio, go check out her blog!