Saturday 31 March 2012

Sergery

Here is a patch on the Serge Modular

Tuesday 27 March 2012

Voice Of Mal

Saw this over on ethe^ra's blog. Shame theres not more of this programme...

Sunday 25 March 2012

Sunday Afternoon

Sequence On!

Heres our new Wrangler seven inch vinyl but also video! Its out on the Disco_r.dance record label. This track is on one side and it features the awesome Stephen Mallinder on vocals. The synth sounds were ALL done on the Yamaha CS80...

The other side is a cover version of Delta 5's Mind Your Own Business. Go and buy it here

Saturday 24 March 2012

Creepy Keyboard

I always find things like this a bit creepy. The machines are getting more like us every day. Via Matrixsynth

Ebay of the Day

Look at this beautiful mixing console. The ebay seller has put it up in four separate lots - what a stupid idea!

It looks like it is a BBC / Glensound fully discrete Class-A germanium induction EQ equipped broadcast desk from the early 1970s. Wow. More info on my other blog here




City Genetic

I was asked to submit a track for my friend Tim (Maps & Diagrams) new project called City Genetic. Its a very interesting project, this is how he describes it:

Citygenetic is an ongoing project, a musical adventure and a meeting of musical minds. The project consists of a seed – the seed is a sixty second piece of music which has been created by Tim Martin (Maps and Diagrams). The seed has been passed onto different musicians of varying styles and genres for them to interpret and continue the music to form a branch. Over the course of the project four branches will be constructed, each branch will consist of ten artists and ten minutes of music which will be assembled to form a continuous embodiment of sound which will be forty minutes long. This project is on-going and will be constantly updated as new music is created

I did a 1 minute track called OmniCar, its on branch three

Patrolling The Borders



Theres a couple of great new John Foxx interviews out there, always a fascinating read...

This Is Not Retro

Deluxx Digital (Note: this is via a really cool online magazine system called issuu. If you are reading this far into the future, you need deluxxdigital issue 15 page 26)

Balmy

City Office

Strolled past this hidden gem the other day with Dan, its hidden inside its own courtyard and you can't see it easily from the street

Word of the Week #32

Sunday 18 March 2012

Another New Benge Release




For the second time this month I've got a new mini-album out! This time it is released on CASSETTE TAPE! Yes it's my first release on this format - and thats quite exciting isn't it? It won't surprise you that it is a synthesiser only recording and quite abstract again - I actually recorded it last year using very early modular systems - heres the track listing:

Side A
1-EMS VCS3 Putney
2-Moog Modular
Side B
1-Serge Modular
2-Paia Modular

It is released by the lovely cassette label Chemical Tapes, and you can buy it and read a review here: Norman Records, and here: Stashed Goods





Click below for some more info (from the J-Card)

Thursday 15 March 2012

Moog Phase

I bought a Moog 12 Stage Phaser today. Here is a Buchla patch incorporating it - it has CV input so you can control it externally - Yay Baby!

My House

I saw this beautiful thing on the way out of my house this morning:

Natural Habitats

New project alert! Heres me and Stephan Inchtime during final remix stage for a project on Stephan's label Mystery Plays. We're called Natural Habitats and the original song is by Shoeb Ahmad. Vox by Hannah!

Wednesday 14 March 2012

The Original Drum Machine

RIP Cedric Sharpley, an amazing drum machine

Rackwicked

Here is the first video from the new album by new band Magnetic North. Yes, it features Hannah Peel and it was mixed here at the studio by yours truly:

Hoppon

I was driving through Dalston today and I saw one of the new London hop-on busses. I really miss the old routemaster thing where you could jump on and off whenever you wanted - it's so much better than sitting on the bus for 15 minutes right in front of your stop / street because theres a traffic jam. Can I decide when to get off please? I can now

Benge Interview

Hello. Tara Busch has put up an interview with me on her blog Analog Suicide where I talk about my new album Abstraxa and working with the Buchla modular synthesiser



Sunday 11 March 2012

Feedback and Vactrol Gates

I was inspired by some posts over on Muff's that Rash sent me a link to regarding using the Buchla 292e Quad Dynamics Manager as a sound source. So here is a patch that demonstrates how wonderfully versatile the Buchla system is. The only sounds you hear on this clip are coming from the Low Pass Gates - I am using two of them to feedback on themselves thus producing voltage controllable oscillators, and then I'm using the envelopes and triggers to produce the rhythms. Deep

Word of the Week #31

Sefa Peel

What would you get if you were able to combine Hannah Peel and Serafina Steer into one person?

Wednesday 7 March 2012

First Foundation



I am a huge fan of Roland's beautiful publication The Synthesizer. In fact I have both 1st and 2nd editions of it. What makes it so good for me it its use of the Roland System 100 series modules in most of its patching examples, as I also have those modules. Well the good news is that Analog Industries have gone and scanned this long-out-of-print tome and you can download it from their website. Here is the excellent A Foundation For Electronic Music
RTS Foundation

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Infinite Grid

Theres a nice interview John and I did when we were in Belgium, before the sound check. Its here. Also, click on the link below for the full transcript...

JOHN FOXX AND THE MATHS

29/02/2012, Philippe BLACKMARQUIS

"Nostalgia doesn't interest me." John Foxx's voice is deep and soft. I am very happy to meet one of my heroes just before his concert in Aarschot. Despite his legendary status as an artist, he is very modest, even shy, a true English gentleman




Glass Sun

Thursday 1 March 2012

Abstraxa - New Album

Ive just put a new Benge album up exclusively on bandcamp. It's a synth-album!
You can download it in full-bandwith FLAC and theres a PDF of the artwork and liner notes. Here is the link: Benge Abstraxa





Abstraxa - exploring the outer reaches, using the Buchla Electronic Music Box

The six compositions featured on Abstraxa were realised on a Buchla modular synthesiser. Donald Buchla began makng electronic musical instruments in 1963, developing the first Buchla 100 series systems in conjunction with the San Francisco Tape Music Center. These first inventions coincided with the development of Robert Moog's 900 Series modular systems over on the west coast of america, and as such belong to the very first generation of commercially available synthesisers. One intersting aspect is that Don Buchla is still developing  and manufacturing his modular systems, using the same module format (now 200e series) that he introduced 50 years ago. The current 200e modules utilise a combination of analogue and digital components

The Buchla has a very unique way of producing sound, using electronic voltages to control the sound sources (oscillators and noise generators), sound modifiers (gates, filters, phase shifters, modulators, etc) and event timing generators (sequencers, random sources, pulse generators, etc). Systems can be built up from the available modules to suit the needs of the composer. The power of the system lies in the inter-modulation capabilities. This means that extremely deep patches can be set up with a myriad of connections interacting together in complex ways to produce evolving and self-generating soundscapes. It is anagolous to working with a living organism as opposed to a static machine, a brain rather than a computer

The pieces presented here were recorded to tape using overdubbing in places. Additional reverberation and delay lines were also incorporated into the system. See below for a full module list

Buchla 200e Electronic Music Box:
225e Midi Decoder (digital interface and preset manager)
227e System Interface (various audio mixing and panning functions)
251e Quad Sequential Voltage Source
255 CV Processor (octal slew and voltage source)
261e Complex Waveform Generator (dual digital VCO)
266e Source of Uncertainty (complex random and noise functions)
281e Quad Function Generator (quad LFO / envelope)
291e Triple Morphing Filter (three bandpass filters / VCAs plus sequencer)
292e Quad Dynamics Manager (four Vactrol lowpass gates)
077 (Eardrill) Pendulum / Ratchet (complex triggers and clock dividers)
254v (Verbos) Quad Voltage Processor
258v (Verbos) Dual Oscillator (clone of the 1970s Buchla analog VCO)
Boss DD3 Delay Unit (mono)
Ace Tone MP4 Spring Reverb (mono)

Track Listing:
1 - Alpha 4.55
2 - Beta 4.22
3 - Gamma 5.04
4 - Delta 4.20
5 - Epsilon 5.19
6 - Zeta (Abstraxa) 6.21
Total Duration 30.19

Recorded at Benge Studios, London, February 2012
All Music and Design by Benge (c)2012 Ben Edwards (Benge)
All Rights Reserved
Cover picture adapted from NASA Images lunar photograph
www.bengestudios.com  =////=  www.expandingrecords.com

Running Up That Hill

I'm back in LA for a week, and today I tried to run up this massive hill in Runyon Park. Thankfully I had my new Moog Sweatband that Tara gave me, otherwise I wouldn't have made it





Davy Jones

RIP...




Via Matrixsynth