- "Hivemind II", Max Ravitz
The "Mavis" is a single-oscillator budget Moog synth; it's a more expensive, less interesting version of their old "Werkstatt" kit. But it did give us this really interesting video where a Moog employee densely cross-wires seven Mavises to produce every sound in this complex idm track. (The eurorack at the bottom does sequencing and adds a little bit of echo.) Never mind the product demo, this is some good dance techno.
Video contains a slowly flashing light
- "20230226 - live @ Baitattack!", nonmateria
"Orca" is a 2D programming language / music production environment by 100 Rabbits. This is a livecoding performance with Orca, recorded at a concert space in Trentino, Italy that turns out to literally be in someone's garage. They also run a sort of bed and breakfast thing for traveling artists. The set is mostly made of physical-modeling plucked-string sounds in dense generated sequences; the Karplus is very Strong in this one.
The announcement post on Mastodon links some other sets from the same night.
- "Grongy Time", eYe-Q Team
Another Spectrum ZX demo, from 2022. This one is entirely self-explanatory from the title. It is Grongy time
(I really like the recurring isometric visuals at 1:47/3:38/3:56.)
- "Noise Box War Drums", Paisley Computer
Contact microphones are magic. This is a jam session that sounds like an entire room of percussionists directed by Bear McCreary. In fact you can see what it's being made by, and it's… a small wooden box attached to some springs, rubber bands attached to screws, a doorstop, and one of those head massage scratcher things? being smashed with a single commemorative basketball pen. Sounds great actually.
- "Interlaced", MKustomAudio
This is a 27-minute eurorack performance of dark, cinematic atmospheric textures. There's no rhythmic elements but the progression between different ambiances is deliberate and thoughtful and there's a lot of energy in parts. If I imagine this to be the score to a short film set on a haunted spaceship I feel like I can break down each 3-minute segment of this and imagine what is happening in the accompanying scene.
⬇️ Click below for more Werkstatt Matlak and more Karplus-Strong ⬇️
- "Roland JX-3P & PG-200 (1984)", Werkstatt Matlak
Another final test after servicing from that Bavarian synth repair shop, this time on a Juno variant that was¹ Roland's first MIDI-supporting synth.
As with the last time I linked Werkstatt Matlak I must compare Boards of Canada, as this sounds like one of the half-tracks BOC used to put in between songs. What really interests me here is that in order to make the video Werkstatt Matlak balanced the synth on the arms of a deskchair. Werkstatt Matlak what are you doing. That is a valuable customer device. Werkstatt Matlak fears nothing.
A moody, melodic eurorack performance driven from a Deluge in CV control mode, made of physical-modeling string and drum synths pushed just slightly past the line where the model makes sounds any real object could produce. Slow but rewarding, it evolves over 15 minutes from crunchy anti-strings to tomdrums jittering like a nervous leg, to breathy distorted moans to harps and clicks in fog.
¹ Though there seems to be some historical disagreement about whether the JX-3P or Jupiter-6 hit the market first.