Top 5 albums I listened to in 2015

Well another year is finally over! I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, and best wishes to everyone over the rest of the holiday season.

As the year draws to a close I thought I`d throw up the five albums that inspired me the most this year. Not all of these actually came out this year, but since I discovered them this year they still count for me.

5. Alessandro Cortini - Sonno (2014)

Alessandro Cortini has been working with Nine Inch Nails since forever, and has a ridiculously expensive collection of synths and guitar pedals (including a Buchla easel), but there is a rawness and simplicity to his recordings that belies all his gear. Slow, pulsing and droning pads with large helpings of space echo and reverb puts your brain waves in sync with it. It sounds like he`s done it all live with no overdubs (you can hear him flipping switches occasionally throughout) and you have to give him props for that. Very minimal and raw synth tones.

4. Villages - Procession Acts (2015)

This sounds exactly like what I`m aiming for with my own music - layer upon layer of field recordings, acoustic instruments and noise meticulously pieced together to make two seamless twenty-minute epics. This guy must have the patience of Gandhi. It has an amazing flow from start to finish, and a beautiful haunting undertone to it. It`s a soundtrack waiting for a movie.

3. Benoit Pioulard - Sonnet (2015)

Benoit Pioulard has had an astounding year, with no less than five releases! His music style is often rather eclectic, jumping rather haphazardly between lo-fi acoustic shoegaze (think Dodos or Bibio) and looping drones on many albums. Personally I am just here for the drones, and thankfully this album is nothing but! Gritty low-fi tape recordings of guitar, synth, a bit of voice and various acoustic instruments moaning and grumbling, with some beautiful builds and a lovely flow.

2. Ben Frost - Steel Wound (2003)

This is an oldie, and despite discovering Ben Frost last year and falling in love with By The Throat, I had somehow missed this one. Room40 recently re-released it on vinyl so I nabbed a copy quick-sharp. Ben recorded this one in a cabin along the south coast of Victoria, Australia, and the slow, haunting tone really reflects what it must have been like with the cold, grey Arctic ocean as his only companion in that time. Wonderfully arranged murky layers of slow guitar strums punctuated with snippets of mangled voices and field recordings make for a very gloomy but engaging listen.

1. Ian William Craig - Cloudmarks (2012)

This one I have to thank good ol` last.fm for; I was browsing "similar artists" to my own music and this guy was up there in the "super similar". I am flattered that I would be compared with him, although I must say his work is much more polished and carefully thought-out.
Ian William Craig is an artist and muscian in Vancouver, who explains his work as being composed using piano, synthesizer, tape and hand-built instruments (which he destroys after the recording is finished). I`m not sure what those instruments are, but they sound like dirty switch boxes and distortion/fuzz effects.
Transitions between instruments or parts of the song are made by gritty pops, fuzz-ins and sputter-outs that have a great organic feeling for someone who`s spent a lot of time using vintage electronic instruments with dirty switches and dials. His melodies are simple and often repeated as a theme throughout the album, each time mangled or otherwise treated in some new way. Much like Fennesz did in the title track of "Becs", he layers distortion over and over in a way that is really sonically pleasing. This is a fantastic album and I highly recommend everyone check it out. He has a few others up on his bandcamp too, all equally good.

The Poly 800 "Polybeast"

A few years ago, I bought a Poly 800 for something like 3500 yen ($35USD). It was my first real synthesizer, and as cheesy as it sounded and as limited as its controls were, it was my gateway drug to the world of synth addiction. It was light (at least for an 80`s machine), ran on batteries, and the joystick was super fun. I got tired of having to control all the parameters using the button system tho.

Then one day during a google dive I stumbled on the "Moog Slayer" mod, and couldn`t wait to try it out. Physical controls for filter cutoff and resonance! My soldering skills were reasonable enough that it survived the surgery, and came out a new machine. However, I ended up buying a lot more synths not long after that and I stopped using it so much, so I flipped it on eBay.

Then, earlier this year, I stumbled on circuitbenders.com`s Poly800 page. They had managed to really push the limits of those mods! Not only did they have filter controls (including a slope selector switch), but auxiliary inputs, an input selector for the "FM" control and CV controls for the filter!

I was keen to dive back in and try my hand at modding another one, to see what I could squeeze out of it. Unfortunately, in the two years since I bought my first one, they had gone up quite a bit in price!

And here is the result!

 

Clusterfuck demos up!

Click here for some demos of the Clusterfuck.

Beware, some of it is super LOUD!

Bent Pedal #1: Rocktek DIR-01 "Clusterfuck"

Thanks to my darling brother for the name. :P

OK so technically my first two pedal bends were a Boss DS2 and CS3, though unfortunately the DS2 died. The CS3 is still a bit of a mess so while it`s waiting to be finished, I give you my first success - the Rocktek DIR-01!

I`d never seen any Rocktek pedals before I stumbled upon this guy super cheap on Yahoo! Auction, although from a cursory Google search it seems they`ve long been a favorite of circuit benders. Stock, it is a horribly boring piece of garbage, but within minutes I discovered it`s a bender`s paradise! Almost everything I touched made a fantastic gritty sound!

It has five (numbered) stages of distortion, each offering a slightly different flavor of grit, wails and crackles. They`re numbered because when I was searching for bends, I left the previous ones connected up. This means that if I turn off a previous (lower-numbered) bend, it more often than not shuts off all bends higher than it too.

For instance, if you hit switches 2-5 without turning on 1, you won`t hear anything. If you switch on 1, you then have access to 2-5. If you leave 2 on, you can turn off 1 and still use 3-5 but if you then turn 2 off, 3-5 are once again muted. Lastly, 5 has two "EQ" settings - "up" is treble-heavy, and "down" is bass-heavy. However, the "treble" setting seems to only work if the input signal is sufficiently hot. If you succeed in triggering it, however, you are rewarded with a lovely gravelly/screechy tone that would belong perfectly on a Fennesz or Ben Frost record. The big red button is for effect off/on.

The original dials still have some small influence on the new effects, but this motha is freakin LOUD with all the bends active! I`m not sure if it`ll ever see use as a live tool due to the massive volume difference between clean and distorted, but it`ll definitely see a lot of use in the studio.
I will post audio examples soon!

Hello World!

I started this blog to document my misadventures in electronics. I started building a modular synthesizer from PCBs about year ago, and every now and then I have circuit bent the odd toy keyboard. However, I recently started getting more serious about building my own synthesizers and doing more adventurous bending projects. So, well, here we go!