Follin and Chips

Check out the amazing music of Tim Follin. He composed the soundtracks to lots of computer games, back in the days when computers had very limited sound chips or in some cases no sound chips - so he programmed code that would make the speakers vibrate directly. Crazy! The music itself is really beautiful and extremely complex, like prog rock made by robots. In this very good interview he describes how he would program the music in code without hearing it - i.e. by entering numbers for the pitch and duration of the notes. He also tells us his influences - such as early Genesis and YES, and you can really hear it in the music

All Packed

...and ready to go to Cornwall!

Fast Computer

I have just discovered an amazing album by Larry Fast / Synergy called Computer Experiments Volume One. There never was a Volume Two which is too bad because this is one of the best examples of computer / synth music from that era, an album highly rigorous in concept and execution. Read the album notes in the second picture above. Its a really beautiful album, and explores an area that I am very interested in myself - which is why it was such a pleasure to discover this gem. He used a computer program to create the music called "Pink Tunes" which is awesome. You can still buy this record in CD form I think. Do a Google

Heres the first track, and a bit of video I stole off the tubes and messed with in AE, and below that is a picture of Larry's set-up for this recording. You can see the Paia controller keyboard below the Prophet 5

Magic Lanterns

Walks

Its so good in the forest in the mornings, with the headphones on, listening to the the previous day's mixes

Ice Moon

Here are some pictures I took in Iceland. I made them into Moon photos! And at the bottom is a page from the book I am reading at the moment called The Outward Urge by John Wyndham

172 Delays

Here's a patch on the Roland 100m. I wanted to explore the 172 modular FX module a bit and see if I could push it a bit deeper than its normal duties as a kind of simple doubler effect. The module itself has two functions because the top half is a really nice phaser, the middle is the analog delay and the bottom has an LFO. The analog delay has no feedback and its got a very short delay time (too short for distinct repeats to be created) so I used some other 100m modules to enhance it. First I set up a sequence using two VCOs and the ring modulator, an envelope and a VCA. Then I sent the output to a multiple so I could send it to both the output mixer and the input to the analog delay. Then I fed back the delayed output to a second mixer to produce repeated delays. To overcome the limited delay time I sent the CV input to the delay a racking great voltage and managed to produce the following results. Note that when the delay time is increased the clock driving the delay circuit becomes audible as a high pitched whine so I sent the output of the delayed signal to a LPF to filter it out. This was then mixed with the dry signal, and voila:

Me and Serge

Do you know about Electronic Sound Magazine all about electronic music? Its really good, and probably how all mags will be one day. Anyway, theres a review of Twenty Systems in the current issue. Heres a pic they took of me and Serge when they visited the studio last month:

Remixing From A Hilltop

Do you remember when we (Wrangler) were sectioned? Well here is the finished remix on Walter's fine Klang Galerie label in Vienna

Artrock TV

Heres a couple of interviews conducted by ArtRocker Magazine