Scanner - My Life In Modules

Welcome to the sound on sound electronic music podcast channel. My name is William Stokes and this is my life in modules a podcast about modular synthesis where each episode we invite the guest to select the euro at modules that have meant the most to them and talk to us about why before treating us to an exclusive performance using only that modest selection. In this, our first ever episode, we welcome Scanner, also known as Robin Rimbaud. Scanner has been a fixture on the UK experimental electronic music landscape for over 30 years now, with numerous critically acclaimed albums under his belt. He's composed upwards of 75 contemporary dance productions, including works for the London Royal Ballet and the legendary John Cage collaborator, Merce Cunningham. He can lay claim to the first sound art installation for the Tate Modern in London. And that's all aside from collaborations with the likes of Paulina Leveros, Michael Nyman, Brian Ferry, Laurie Anderson, and many more. Welcome Robin. Hello. That sounds very grand, doesn't it? It's all lies. It's all lies. Yeah. That was that the, it was the Tate Modern sound installation for the tanks. Or is that earlier than that? No earlier. I was, I can't even remember the year, 2006, 2007, something like that with a good friend of mine, Steven Vitiello and we were commissioned to make this sound work. And it appeared there. The funny thing is it's still hidden somewhere on the Tate site, but no one seems to know about it. There is actually a link to it, but it takes a lot of finding. You need to be a kind of a search engine expert to find such a thing. But I just find it remarkable that the Tate commission such works, but they don't really know where it is. They don't know how to promote it or anything, but it's there. It's a great sound piece. There's an amazing acoustic space under there now and one of the huge tanks I always think would be the location for an amazing, you know, electronic music performance. But it seems like they've somewhat underutilized it for live music. Yeah, they used it recently. There was a Friday night late. I know, my friend David Toop Played there and he did a performance. He chose he was offered the opportunity of performing in the theater a nice closed Muted space or that very industrial kind of huge reverb in a reverb Reverberation reverb space a space full of reverb and they said that was amazing because he was you know He uses very acoustic sounds the flute he uses amplified leaves these kind of things and just within that space would have probably sounded truly Amazing. Yeah, yeah I mean, they literally are old tanks, metal tanks from the power station, aren't they? Yeah. It's amazing to me, to be honest, the first time I went down there that they had been there for so long and not being used. But I'm sure that's another story. And I can't let you get away without telling me a bit about working with Laurie Anderson. It's a funny story. I was working in New York on something completely different in about 1997, 98. And I was staying in probably the crappiest hotel you could ever imagine. It was so horrendous, really, kind of, really right at the top of New York City. And I came out one day and there was a fax waiting for me. And the guy passed it over through this kind of security grill. It was that kind of a hotel where they had a security grill at their counter. And it was a message from Laurie and said, you know, do you fancy meeting up? So I had to go to a public phone box and call her. It's those kind of days and she said, come over, you know, I said, well, what time do you get up in the morning? Because I wake up very early and then I was jet lagged. So I was waking up really early and she said, Oh, I get up around 6, 6 30 in the morning. So I literally went to meet her at 6 30 in the morning, but I'd underestimated the amount of time it takes to walk. Across New York and I was on something like 60th Street and she's down at Broadway. So then I had to walk 60 blocks and I was sweating like a monster, but I got to her building and just the list of names on the doorbells is just mind blowing. It's all, you know, famous artists and musicians and she was home and it's quite a classic moment. So we just met up and we were. Just playing around in the studio and who should walk in, but Lou Reed, of course, well, I was going to ask about that. Yeah, yeah. So Lou Reed walked in her late husband and it was such a funny moment and she turned to Lou and said, Hey, Lou, you gotta meet scanner and Lou just kind of, he had sunglasses on, he had a leather jacket on. Remember, this is May and it's very warm in New York and he gave me this soft I'm not really interested handshake and just looked me in the eye and didn't say anything. So I just said, so Lou, what is it that you do? And just the air went cold. There was this long, long silence. And then he just looked to me and then Laurie started laughing and cause English humor can be a dangerous, you know, thing. Oh yes. British humor in that way. And she just said, Lou just said, I make rock and roll music. And I just kind of smiled and said, rock and roll music. Nobody listens to rock and roll music. And so we got into this ridiculous, you know, comical conversation and sort of stayed kind of buddies from then. Actually, it's quite funny. We were friends for quite some time, sort of, you know, back and forth. And then I performed with Laurie in London at a meltdown festival at the Southbank center. She curated it. And it went from being a duet with her to us both saying, Wouldn't it be great if we had a hundred tap dancers? So we've got tap dancers. We said, wouldn't it be great if we've got a hundred violin players? So then we auditioned violin. It was completely absurd. You know, it was eccentric and playful and fantastic fun. Wow, that's incredible. What a story. This kind of sounds like a kind of a Ligeti style sort of maximalist experimental. Yeah. How far can you, I mean, the thing was how far could you take it? That was the absurdity of it. Let's think it rather than just have two people on the stage, could we make it 200? Let's see how far we can actually push this kind of model of somebody being on stage. And can you lose the main figure within the body of all the other people in a sense? So you become this mass and we did, and it was just the most amazing show. Incredible. Yeah. So before we dive into your selection of modules, which you've done very well to keep under 84 HP, which a guideline, which I have a feeling we might have to enforce to varying degrees through the life of this podcast. But that is one thing about modular that I've always found challenging is sort of staving off that option paralysis. Kind of like we were talking about just before starting this interview when we about, you know, it's one thing to enjoy collecting things as a, you know, you described your studio as like a library, which I thought was a really lovely way of describing it, but of course, you know, a library, we must every now and then take books out. Exactly. Exactly. Or sell them. Before we dive in properly, I wanted to clear something up. There seems to be a few different accounts floating around about how the name Scanner came about. And I just wanted to ask you in person to set the record straight for us. Where did the name Scanner come from? It's remarkably dull when I tell you, which is that when I first began making music, early on, I would use my own name. And then I had kind of band names and so on. And then in the late eighties, a friend of mine, Greg from university was part of a hunt saboteur group. What he would do is use this radio device called a scanner and what they would do was listen to police transmissions because you can listen to all kinds of radio broadcasts and they would listen to see. If the police knew where they were, because what they would do was disrupt the hunts of very wealthy people hunting foxes and they didn't approve quite rightfully, I feel, and so they use this device. And I remember saying, look, I'd love to use that for my own work because what I was doing for years was trying to record voices. I was trying to record people on the bus, on the tube, my school friends, whatever it may be. But it was always all this extraneous noise around it. What this radio device called the scanner could do was go from zero to a thousand on the radio scale. So more than listening to FM radio and pop stations and classical and spoken word, you could go from earth to trans, earth to space transmissions at the very top, which you'd need a very big aerial for, but you could also pick up things like. , satellite systems, you could pick up communications from taxi drivers, but you could also pick up communications from pilots, which lots of people were using these devices for. What I discovered was around 900 Hertz, you could listen to people's private phone calls. You could listen to people on their mobiles on an analogue network. So it would be you, talking to your partner, talking to a friend, talking to your family and I would sit and listen to them and record them. And I thought, what name should I use for this? So I just used the name of the device. The joke being, at the time I would say, if I just used a cassette recorder for my work, I'd be known as Robin Rimbaud, the man formerly known as cassette recorder or something. But Scanner was just this kind of cool alien name that didn't say too much. It does mean that to this day, I still receive emails on a regular basis asking for advice about flatbed scanners. I receive emails from Chinese companies offering to buy my URL because they want to sell flatbed scanners, you know, this kind of thing. So that goes on. It's not the best name to have chosen, but I've kind of stuck with it to some sense. Well, it has an allure to it because certainly the name, you know, the flatbed scanner Sort of a slightly dated piece of technology. Yeah. Somehow still quite alluring for people. A lot of people making art with it. It's, I think it works really well. It's got just the right level of sort of nostalgia and enigma to it. Okay, that's good. I like enigma. Wow. Yeah. That's sort of like a slightly voyeuristic aspect to that, isn't it? Listening into conversations. Well, you have to remember this. I mean, when I was making, when I first started making that work, we were talking about 92, 93, before the internet was part of our world. Yeah. Daily lives before mobile phones had really taken off. So mobile phones belong to a certain either an elite kind of group of people who could afford them or basically to drug dealers. They were the people who were using these machines and it anticipated questions of public and private voyeurism. Of access to information, what is right, what should artists be using what moral rights exist in using public domain sound in sampling in terms of using voices and so on, you know, all those kind of questions, which today. are just as relevant. I feel, you know, they're just as relevant in our day and age of our interactions through these kinds of mediums. A hundred percent. I mean, I suppose we move on to a, the conversation there about people willfully sharing information, in a way that is almost coercive. But that is, I dare say a different discussion. It's a different podcast. Yeah. Okay, well let's dive into your selection. You started with a module that means a huge amount to me as well, actually the make noise morphogene. This is a tape and micro sound module that's based very much on the workflow of working with real to real tape and you can change pitch and you can, , divide audio into grains and splices and cycle through them and, you know, really dive into the sort of almost the microscopic elements of sound. Yeah. So when that first came out, , I realized it could be revolutionary when I saw the demos of it, and I thought this really looks like, it takes me back to using tape, an idea of kind of micro sound, I come from a background of using reel to reel recorders you know, when I first had a reel to recorder when I was about 15 or 16, my English teacher at school gave it to me, and what it suddenly offered to me, because before that what I was doing was recording sound in a linear fashion, I was recording on a cassette recorder, so I could record you, I'd hit pause, then I could record the sound of a train passing by. So everything was one after another. What the reel to reel suddenly offered me was a way of layering sounds. Suddenly the story could open up so I could record a sound and I could put something, I could go back in time and I could record on top of it. So this idea of kind of micro sound, of granular sound, was really fascinating. It's always something that's intrigued me. So when the morphogene came out, I realized that was kind of the module for me. In fact, I've got two of them now, two of them now, and I liked it so much. I bought the company. They're not quiet, but I liked it enough that I, you know, I have two of them. I know one of them lives permanently in my live case. I've got a six year modular case. I take out with me, which weighs eight kilos, which is fantastic. And I take that to. Whenever I do a show it's essential, but it means what I can do is layer up a whole body of sounds, but I don't label them in a sense of knowing what they are. I don't write down. Real number one is this, real number two, I just fill it up, which means during a performance, what I would do is hold down whatever the keys are, the shortcut, and I just randomly kind of spin the wheel to see what emerges, but it then means what I can do is run modulation into it, so I can take, let's say a simple sound of walking through leaves, or raindrops, and then suddenly I can start moving through the sound, and I can reverse it, and I can change the pitch, but because every, , CV input has an attenuator. I can then kind of increase and decrease this in really curious ways. So this very simple sound can become very alive and become kind of transformative in a way, you know, I still, you know, make noise. One of those companies that still look back at the past in, but towards the future in a really interesting way, they do a lot of time traveling with their modules. in a sense, you know, they make things that are closest to kind of analogue technology, like a tape machine, but allow you to use it in a very contemporary way. So yeah, it's something I've stuck with. It's interesting to me that you mentioned the link between sort of that heritage and sort of pushing that into kind of slightly more digital territory. Cause of course, Tony Rolando founder of make noise was formerly of Moog also based in Asheville in Carolina. And it kind of, when I first found that out, I think there was a kind of like a, ooh he's founded a rival company or something like that. But clearly it's nowhere near that kind of acrimony. There's certainly, I think a deep love from make noise tours. You know, all things legendary in the world of synthesis, particularly absolute in the analogue realm. Yeah. I mean, you've also, you've, your next module is also by make noise, the mim, the mimon, which is an effects processor broadly, let's say. Why don't you tell us more about that one? Again, it was programmed by a guy called Tom Erb who made the Erbverb, another make noise module. I'm not being sponsored by them. I buy these modules. But it's, what I like about it, , again, is that it's transformative. You know, it's based on historical devices in a sense, but it allows you to, introduce very gentle, you know, subtle developments in terms of echoes and reverbs. It has a filter on it. You can color the sound in a way it's like taking a picture and you can start to paint it. So what I can do is take a sound from. morphogene, which I can then send into the mimeophone. Again, this is in stereo, which is really pleasing. And the sound could be moving in morphogene, and then I can set this kind of delay going. So the sound starts spiraling off. And if you don't clock it, what I really like about it, when you start moving the knobs, you can hear it physically changing. You can hear the kind of ramping up and ramping down when you move it. If you clock it, of course you lose that kind of, That, that side of it, but it's something I really like. There's something very organic about it. And again, what I'm doing with this setup and a lot of my work is not based around essential clock always. It's not, I think when people think about modular and they think about synthesizers, often it's a kind of sub tangerine dream, stranger things, very sequenced. I don't use sequences. I very rarely ever use sequences. Interesting. Yeah, this setup doesn't have a sequencer in it, you know, and when I play live, I don't have a sequencer, you know, I like, , I like chance in a great way, you know, interesting, you know, I've spoken to Walker about this in the past and Walker and I are both great fans of John Cage and John Cage worked with a composer called David Tudor and I'm a big kind of David Tudor fanboy. This is Walker from Make Noise. Yeah, Walker from Make Noise. And we've had these conversations about such things and I know that Walker himself has made pieces which are, you know, exploring these very ideas, these kind of, you know. I mean, what's curious, when I was a teenager, I would go to shows in London at Sadler's Wells Ballet and I'd go and see the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And it would be composed by John Cage, but John Cage doesn't perform or didn't perform in the music. Often David Tudor would perform it, which meant you have this man in a very smart black suit, white shirt, black tie, nicely trimmed hair with spectacles, and he'd be, you know, sitting at a table just covered in these boxes. And I had no idea what they were. They were so mysterious, you know, these were boxes that basically that he made, they were filters, they were all kinds of things. There were oscillators, they were fantastic. But what I really loved about it was the mystery, you know, so when I first kind of even saw modulus, I thought maybe this is something close to what David Tudor was doing. And that was my kind of initial fascination. about sort of 15 years ago. And so the morphogene and the mimeophone in some ways echo that past for me. They echo that world of David Tudor of John Cage. So the chance factor coming in is really exciting. So mimeophone can be a very organic way of taking a sound and literally physically moving through the, through the knobs and just slowly morphing things. So you can introduce the reverb from zero to like a really full sound and. It's great, yeah, I love it actually, it's a beautiful module. And I love the way that Make Noise are quite open about the fact that there are certain functions that they've managed to program in a way that do something and they quite openly say, well, we don't actually know why it does this. It just seems to do it like the, on the morphogen, of course the eponymous morph function, you know, jumping the pitch of a sound. I remember reading in them, you know, when I first started to explore mine, mine was introduced to me by, Gareth Jones, synthesist. And a producer recommended I get one. And he's, he said the same thing. Oh, you know, it does this. And they're quite open about the fact that they don't know why, which is just brilliant, I think. And so creative. Okay. So onto the, , the next, , module that you've chosen. Which, , we, I think I'm gonna ban the term Swiss Army Knife. Because, , that is a lazily too often used in this kind of context. But it is a multifunction, module. This is the Equation Composer by Microbe Modular. Which is another digital module, which I'm interested to ask you in a minute about your sort of, , position on sort of, you know, philosophy on digital and analog. But, this is a very multifunctional module, isn't it? It's very flexible. Absolutely. And it's one that lots of people don't know. It's one I use, I've got two of them as well. It's a bit of a tragic story that the guy who built them essentially gave up on them and then sold them off on eBay for 50 each in the end, which is a bit heartbreaking. So there were many kinds of multiple failures of them because they use an Arduino kind of brain inside the machine, inside the module. Which is quite a readily available microprocessor, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But I guess I'm just speaking from what I, you know, what I'm kind of interpreting is that he maybe just got tired of it and it just kind of exhausted him trying to fix it and gave up. So literally just sold them off, which is awful. So I bought one when it first came out and I picked up another one secondhand some years later, it's based on a kind of 8 bit, I had to write it down, an 8 bit sampler, but it was inspired by the Bitwiz AudioSynth, apparently, which I wasn't familiar with, I looked it up this morning. Yeah, me neither. And it's now available for iOS, apparently, the Bitwiz AudioSynth software. But what I like about it, it's, there's never really been a full manual for the device. And it has how many, let me count them. Yeah, six knobs on it and CV, but the CV is really erratic. So sometimes you can basically clock it, but the other ones don't do what you think they would do. For example, there's a CV entry point at the bottom of the module. And you'd think that the, Panning or the, you know, the knob on it would align with that, but it doesn't quite, it doesn't quite align. It doesn't seem to always do what you think it's going to do, but basically it works from everything from kind of eight bit digital noise through to drums and percussion, which you can pitch up and down. Through to repeating kind of motifs in a kind of Philip Glass. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo kind of style way. , pulses, all kinds of things. You can CV it and play melodies, but again, it's kind of off and on. I've got two of them, and they work slightly differently to each other. You can also add the braids firmware, the Mutable Instruments Braids Firmware to it, if you want, so it can also act as that. Because it's a You know, because it's an Arduino, you can kind of load anything on it and so on. I like it. You know, it's a fun, , module, but what I like to do is work through the algorithms and just turn it and think, I'm not quite sure what's going to happen because you never, there's no fixed point on it. There's, you know, the knobs are not such that you, as you move them, you know, the next click is going to get somewhere they're free moving. Mm. So you can easily go completely wrong with it, which has happened on numerous times in live performances. I'm hoping that it's gonna land on this great drone, this kind of, nah, this great tone. And it doesn't, it lands on some horrible, which sounds like a broken cable, so I just go with it, you know? Yeah. But there's some, then what I would do is then throw it into Morpho gene and sample it, which will then go through the Mimeo phone, so you get into this Great. Sonic loop, which is interesting. I mean, when you were just talking before about the eight bit side of digital, you know, the morphogenes predecessor, of course, the phonogene was much more down sampled. And it had that kind of slightly more and had that slightly more lo fi almost hip hop aesthetic to it. But it is interesting that, you know, One, one thing I do love about the use of digital in modular and in synthesis in general, really, but generally this seems to be the case in modular is that digital doesn't really seem to equate to the quest for fidelity. It's often the other way around. Actually, it's about the rough edges of digital which I dare say you don't really find elsewhere in music even, , where digital represents those rough edges. Yeah, I come from a background of using Akai samplers. So, you know, I come from a background of extremely limited sample time and being able to time stretch sounds in a very kind of digital way. Something I used to absolutely love to kind of strip the sound apart like this. And I've never been one to argue for analog or digital. What I realized quite early on, , in modular was that you have to be careful with digital because it can use a lot more of the power up. So you need to be careful when you look at a case and seeing how much, if they have screens on them, how much they're going to kind of devour. I didn't think any of my, none of the modules I chose today have screens. So that's quite good. , but you know, I like low grade sounds. I, you know, I enjoy using low bit samplers. I have this. However, you say it, see at Lombard, Coco Qantas, this wooden device, which you can sample into is incredibly gritty and grainy, but sometimes it's when you get down into that grain that something kind of magical appears, you know, and that's kind of what I still like about the morphogene that I feel like I can get right into the grains of something and kind of split it apart. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. And that kind, I mean, it is funny. Maybe this is on the other side of the spectrum, but that sort of leads us a little bit onto, your next choice, which is, , from, , qubit in California. Mm. This is the prism. Yeah. Another, you know, they, another sort of microprocessor expert developer. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Tell us about the prism. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, the Cubic guys, I met them when they were still students at Berklee School of Music. So I was working at MIT in Boston on a, , or Cambridge in Massachusetts on 2013, 2014 on a residency as a visiting artist. And I went over to Berklee because I had a friend who worked there and met the guys there. And, We became friends at that point actually, that's just when they'd worked on the Nebulae, that had just come out, the Nebulae, the very kind of very first version, which is the kind of very early sampler, kind of granular machine. And over the years, I've seen them kind of grow in not only stature, but in kind of, Capability and functionality in a really exciting way. So Prism is a signal processor. You know, it allows you to delay sounds, to filter them, but also decimate them. So it goes, kind of follows on from what we were just saying, where you can take a sound and you can kind of introduce this grit into it. , you can change the settings so you can set the order of the way things go. So the filter can be before or after, however you want, you know, you decimate something. It's a bit like another module they produce called the Data Bender, which I really love. And the Data Bender allows you to put In a very rhythmic way, put sounds in and it just glitches them in the most fantastic way. So you can have a very simple pulse going in that's going and you have it. You can make it go in a really wonderful way, in a way that you could program, but it would take you hours of programming, you know, in software and kind of sampling. So it's a module that's really exciting in a very live way. I find, you know, it's very, what I've chosen here are modules are very hands-on for me. They aren't, you set things rolling and you just sit back and go, yeah, yeah, this is really something that's very, very manipulative all the time. It's very performative and I think what I was thinking with this 84, slightly less than 84 HP case, is I wanted something that's performative that could, I could record something in a minute for you that's this. I could do it half an hour later and it'd be something quite different. That's what I like about it. So, you know, the combination of Mimeophone and Prism, both exploring territory that's about delays and reverb with kind of decimation, , for the Prism is it's just, it allows you this great functionality in a very small case. Which is interesting to me because there is, I think in very traditional synthesis in general, but particularly in modular synthesis, I do feel like the kind of, you know, the sort of the Wendy Carlos school of creating a recognizable sound out of sort of simple wave forms. You know, I can create the, you know, the, the timbral characteristics of a xylophone with sine waves and that kind of thing. I think at worst that can lead to some kind of almost self flagellation for synthesis where they feel like they need to be able to, you know, they must you know, be using discrete components constantly to create every sound they do. And actually You know, like you say, having a compact case where there are things that you can go, Oh, thank goodness. This would normally take forever to achieve. And I can do it like this. I think that, obviously there's a line where we have to, you know, we like the hands on approach and we enjoy, you know, understanding the signal flow of what we're doing. But I think we can forgive ourselves when sounds are easy to achieve. I mean, I never even worry about it. Actually, I think, you know, it's important that you retain a voice that's yours. You know, ultimately that's how it works with any kind of level of creativity, whether you're a writer, a poet, a painter, it's about your voice. And my voice sits within this kind of setup. You know, my, my sonic voice hasn't been about these Particular synthetic worlds, you know, what we're hearing here is synthesis, but not in the same way, you know, it's synthesis, but in looking at it from a kind of micro sound tape experiment past into the present. And that's what I like. And these modules allow me to do that, you know, and most of all, they're fun, you know, they're not deep dive. I've got lots of modules, which I really love, but they're kind of deep dive where if I hold down this button with this one, and then I turn this knob and I wait for the color to turn blue. And if I quickly click this other button, I'm in this mode. I can't remember them. You know, nobody can remember these unless you're using them every day. And I think it's a common thing. Like I love electron instruments. I've got a kind of suite of electron instruments and every now and then I switch one on. I think I haven't used it in six months. What is the shortcut? What is the shortcut to get to this? You know, how do I do? So you have to go back to the manual. So my computers have always got a barrage of manuals just sitting there just to double check how something functions. So most of these don't need that. Most of what I've chosen are modules that are literally hands on and quite straightforward to use. And immediate in that way. You can get an immediate response from them. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that sort of, that immediacy, you know, takes us on to, , probably, well, actually no, not, I was about to say the most simple interface, of your system here but it's actually not that. And we'll come onto that shortly. But another qubit module, the nano RAND. Oh, yes. Yeah we're getting smaller now. This is, only we sort of four, four or six HP or something like that. I think it's , four hp. Yes. And it's a random module. It's acting as the clock to send things through the system. , but. Which means I can then take the clock and drop it into morphogene if I want to clock that to a rhythm that might emerge from the equation composer, that kind of thing. But it has lots of random CV in it that I really like. It generates random output, so it has sample and hold, it gives you random voltages, which again mean I can throw those over to any of the other modules, Mimeophone or whatever, which means if I want to, I can put it in, And just keep moving the sounds. It's to keep them alive. As I said before, this is a live case. This is a performative case. And so the idea is to keep it organic. You know, I come from a background of playing real instruments in, in, in real spaces with real people. And I like all the nuances of performing when things aren't exacting, you know, so digital is very much about exact. You know, precision, it's about the zeros and ones often being in the same place. And what I want to do is constantly shift these things to give a sense of flow as well. And for me to be surprised as well, I like to just take an output and drop it in somewhere else and see, I wonder what this will suddenly do. What will it offer me? You know, so it's not about being in command in some sense, in some way, I really like the, the openness of it, the flow of it. Yeah. And talking of flow, kind of, it's a nice segue into our next module, which, feels like it came from a very organic sort of collaborative, impulse between, , the Glaswegian developer Instruo and, and Divkid, the, the YouTuber, , reviewer, educator, I'm going to mispronounce this terribly the Ucht, The ucht, ucht, ocht, ocht. Could do it in a scottish accent, or is it ocht? Yeah, gonna have all offensive remarks made if we try and do a scottish accent, apologies to any scots listening. No, Ben is, Ben, otherwise known as Divkid, is fantastic like this, because he's a great thinker in terms of functionality of working with modular. You can see it through his videos, but also in the way he's able to think through the functionality of a very small modular. I mean, this is. 2HP or 4HP, , it's tiny. Gives you 8 analog LFOs that are musically tuned, they say. So they're not, people were frustrated at the time when it first came out saying, Yeah, but I can't clock it. Everything isn't all together. But actually what I love about it is the fact that You know, it's this again, it follows on from what I was just saying, which is why I've thought through these modules quite cleverly, hopefully, that it offers me additional kind of flow, organic, natural flow, you know, with them being musically, , tuned, what could happen if I take the clock speed to its lowest, the slowest LFO apparently takes 25 minutes. To run. So if we do a 25 minute session, you finally see, you finally hear a filter opening up or something, but we have to wait 25 minutes for it. But you know, Ben Divkid has released now a series of modules, all of which are just fantastically inspiring because they're so simple. But when you get them, you realize how do you survive without it before? That's what I like about them. You know, they're very clever like this. This is something that as well, I think ties into a lovely theme. With this corner of electronic music, where the intersection between musician and developer, is very strong. And it feels like a lot of the time when I'm interviewing, or where I have in the past interviewed, particularly people who design DIY kits, interestingly, but this is definitely true for a lot of, a lot of small companies is that, you know, the idea for certain modules came about because they wanted to furnish their own setup with something that they needed. And then they suddenly realized that other people said, Oh, I could use that. And it feels like it's absolutely true. Yeah. And I think that that relationship is something that's always appealed to me about modular is that very social side of it and the engagement with somebody who's making this. So, you know, buying synthesizers in the past, I would never dream of saying, dear Mr. Rowland synthesizer. I was thinking it could be quite interesting if you did this, you're not going to do that with these smaller, you know, boutique companies, as you might say, you can actually have a direct. communication. And often these things are introduced, aspects you might suggest, because lots of these modules are able to be updated in a way. I mean, I don't have it, but I know that a Divkid released an update, a kind of a, not an update, , , an expander apart for the, , OCT. , it's so terrible to say, I feel like I'm insulting somebody with the way I'm saying it. It's awful, but you know, it's lovingly done. It's lovingly done, exactly. It's with true commitment. But, you know, there's an expander, so it allows you even more possibilities, which I need to invest in at some point. You know, for what it offers is absolutely amazing and it's tiny kind of size body, basically. And Instro, of course, fantastic company, , Jason Lim is a real, you know, he's a generation leading designer, in my opinion, you know, completely. Yeah. And again, Jason's from Berkeley. So Jason, you know, was there with the cute qubit began at Berkeley and then went off their own ways. His qubit went one way. , in intro went their other way. And it's fantastic to see that kind of, they're both very dynamic and du , introduced and very innovative and inspiring modules and, you know, just the aesthetics of them as well are very appealing. Mm-Hmm. And not to underestimate the look of things, but they're very beautiful modules of some these. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's very much, I was gonna mention that earlier actually when we were talking about qubit. Their attention to aesthetic is. is, it's exuberant, and unfettered for sure. , it's, you know, it feels very Californian to me, dare I say it, but it's also, it's useful, which is amazing. These graphics light up in certain ways that actually gives you an idea of what's, Going on. And that's something that, you know, I think that Dieter Dupfer would not be particularly, , you know, , endorsing of that kind of aesthetic, but that's okay. You know, I think that's a, certainly the narrative of, modular, and to be honest, maybe electronic music in general, it's gone from this slightly more austere sober kind of aesthetic, for the musician anyway, into something that's a little bit more playful, maybe. Mm. No, I agree. And actually, aesthetics play a big part in how we live our lives, quite obviously, and the way we look at things, the way we watch a film, the way we read a book, and we just, we're drawn to a book by the cover quite often, whether it's either an e book or whether it's something in a store, the same with a magazine. I remember when Peter Gabriel was releasing his solo albums, he said he wanted his albums to look like magazines. So each one of them was called Peter Gabriel 1, Peter Gabriel 2, and so on for a while. And each of the covers We're always just a photo of him. So it was like each time was it was another magazine and it's an idea, a concept that's always appealed to me. And designers realize that some companies, I mean, I know that people had found make noise modules problematic in terms of their graphics and aesthetics, but it represents who they are. They're completely playful in a different way. They're slightly bonkers in a way. Sometimes you're looking at them thinking, what is that line really saying? But you follow them through and they make sense. So in fact, there is a third party company who make. Alternative panels that you can put on to your make noise modules if you have a problem with their graphics. But I really love their aesthetic. I really love that. That's definitely, that's, you know, that's endemic to, to, you know, the very foundation of, , of synthesis. Really. I remember reading about part of the design of the, original Minimoog, you know, giving it, wood, making it out of this beautiful walnut. Was, , primarily, if I'm not mistaken, I'm sure there are some Moog aficionados out there that would disagree with me, but as far as I understand it, there was an impulse to basically make it aesthetically belong among cellos and violins and wooden instruments that you would find in a sort of beautiful classical ensemble. You know, the idea that you're redignifying this instrument, the aesthetic was actually very much a gesture of, you know, this is, I'm laying down the gauntlet here that this is a, , an instrument to be reckoned with that way we will get virtuosos and we will, you know, there is, there's a skill that needs to be developed here. And I think that sort of dignification is important. Which is interesting when you get companies today who release their kind of copies of some of these and they put wood on it, but it's not real wood. It's kind of laminated, it's plastic with a wooden look and it's such a weird feeling to touch them and think, Oh, it feels wrong. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So let's move on to your, your final module, , which is, , one of, I have to say, I think it's one of my favorite modules of recent times. This is, , by a company, , Bella, who don't actually really have a massive stock so far in the world of Eurorack, they kind of specialize in, well, another company specializing somewhat in, , microprocessing and coding and that kind of thing. This is the gliss, which, to those unfamiliar, essentially resembles a single capacitive strip down a 4HP panel. And that's pretty much it. There's a, , a handful of there's a total of three, , jacks, , and one button, And yeah, that's more or less it. And Robin, I'll let you sort of give the general overview. Which kind of undersells it, doesn't it? As you probably know, it completely undersells it because for a number of years people have had kind of touch sensors where you can just run your finger up it and you can just kind of open a filter or introduce modulation. This is quite an advance on that. And I've known the guys for some years actually. In fact, the woman, , you know, who runs the company, , she was working as an intern for me many, many years ago. Fantastic. You know, when she was still a student and it's so pleasing to see people, you know, and I realized in my case, there were, you know, three companies that I met when they were still students kind of just. entering the world. And now they're all making these products that are inspiring, you know, generations of musicians today. But this is a beautiful module because it does far more than just running your finger up and down. You can actually record. So there are four different settings for it. I use mostly the record one where you can record up to 75 seconds. So you can run your finger up and down it and introduce all kinds of things. You could, you know, You can run a long pattern of modulation into something and completely make it move. But then as soon as you touch your finger again, you can, you know, introduce a new one. You can split the pad into two, so you can have two things running at the same time at the top and the bottom. They cleverly designed the module so you can switch the arrangement of it around, so you can have the outputs at the top or the bottom, which is very handy for cases. So they're very, very thoughtful. And when you buy it, you get two. Two covers for it in a sense you can swap them around. It's a very well thought through module and very very capable I really like it a lot, actually, and it's fantastic for performance. It's one of those modules, unfortunately, I think, I've got it, I need another one. You know, it's one of those, when I've seen their videos and the demos, and they've got four of them in a little box, and you think, that's kind of perfect for them. You can run, because you can, there's four different settings in there, you could run all four of them and do the most magical things. You know, it's got a little sequencer in there, and it's so easy. What I like about it, it's so easy. You hit the button and you put your two fingers down and you're in the settings. You put your finger on the button, you put three fingers on it and you're in another set. You know, it's brilliantly thought through in a very intuitive way. You don't need to return to the module, the manual once you're kind of, you've played with it a couple of times. It's almost completely nonverbal. I mean, it is completely nonverbal. It's all colors and it's almost, you know, it's almost, , Apple levels of interface. I mean, it's, you know, it's incredibly well thought out and it's. And, you know, it's got, you can, everything that you can sort of conceive that could be done with a. The blank canvas of a touch strip. It feels like they've done and they've made it open source so that everyone can sort of contribute their own code if they want to come up with different functionality for it, that you can separate it into buttons like a keyboard. You can use it as a VU meter, I think, you can, I can't remember all of the functions off the top of my head, but it's absolutely amazing. It's phenomenal for the scale of it. I mean, here we are looking at a very tiny case. It's incredibly capable, and it's not expensive either, for what it's actually offering you is quite amazing. Yeah. Okay that brings us to the end of your selection. Thank you so much, Robin, for that fascinating trip into your life in modules. Pleasure. I can't wait to hear what you do with them for us now. I'm curious too. Thank you so much for, for chatting to me today and, , yeah, please take it away. Thank-you. I will do. Thank you. Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts web page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels as well. My name is William Stokes, and this has been a production for Sound On Sound magazine.