Part 2

Portability has been one of the main drivers for music production over the past years. What importance does mobility have for you when it comes to production – and what strategies for making the modular portable have you developed?

Portability is definitely important for me, but not for reasons one might expect. It has less to do I think with playing shows or traveling, and more with the ability to change gears.

The way I see it, there are three ways you can go on this:

1) You have a giant Emerson, Lake, and Palmer style rig that takes up a whole room in your studio, and it’s nearly impossible (for me) to remain focused, as it brings about option paralysis.

2) You have a reasonably sized rig that you swap modules in and out of as needed, which is of course the true modular approach, though this is a bit more entropic and increases the likelihood of accidentally reversing the polarity of a power connection and destroying a module, power supply, or both.

3) You have bespoke system cases designed for specific needs that you can move around as needed, the same way you’d have a guitar with humbuckers for a certain type of sound, and another with single-coils for another.

In terms of cost, space, and time, this last approach has been the most productive.

With a keyboard and a traditional synth, I would instantly know what something would sound like if I pressed down the keys a certain way. Would you say the same is true for the modular and certain patches and modules? How does working with wires, cables, and plugs change your perspective on music?

Often when people who don’t have a lot of context for what I do ask how it works, my default is to have them think of it like a keyboard that has no keys, turned inside out, so all the guts are exposed.

I think there is a progression involved in exploring modular synths, or rather, a crossroad is reached. When you first start out, generally, you just make semi-random connections and poke around and see what happens. This is definitely a new and exciting phase of exploring the instrument, but eventually you have to decide, are you content to stay in that place where you don’t really understand what’s going on “under the hood”? (which is fine)

Or do you start to really dig deep and look at what’s really happening on an electronic level in order for the sounds you are hearing or desiring to be made manifest. It definitely can be a push/pull situation.

These days 99 times out of 100, I know exactly what is going to happen when I patch connections, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t from time to time miss those days of more ignorant explorations that yielded unprecedented results.

A system that can be addressed in a non-linear fashion reminds me a lot of the ocean: it terrifies some, and yet others see it as being representational of near limitless possibility.

Modulars suggest a more immediate relationship with sound. In how far does this hold true from your point of view and what has working with them taught you about sound in general?

You could very easily route the output of an oscillator directly to speakers and be drilled in the ear by a 4 kHz sine wave at extreme volume, which isn’t a lot of fun.

It’s immediate in that sense I suppose, if pure tone generation is all you are after, but I suspect more people are interested in orchestrating and arranging with their system, and the difficulty from that point trends toward the exponential. That’s an interesting question because it gets into the nuance of sound vs. noise vs. music.

Working with a modular taught me a lot about sound, but it also taught me about electricity. When I was a kid, I put a fork in an electric socket and blew myself halfway across the room. My thumb was black for a week, and I developed a healthy fear of electricity as a result.

So when I started interfacing with the modular, and moreso when I began designing and testing my own designs, I wasn’t content just to make fun sounds. I really wanted, or maybe needed, to understand the why behind it all, and not treat it as a black box. “What do you mean this oscillator tracks ‘1 volt per octave’?” “Red stripe down? Why?”

It all taught me to zoom in on everything I was doing and make correlations between the real world and the sounds I was hearing. Everything is connected to everything else.

In which way does the modular influence musical results and what kind of compositions does it encourage / foster?

The beauty and genius of modular synthesis is you can do quite literally whatever you want with it. But it’s also its Achilles' Heel for some, because you can do anything, often it results in doing nothing.

One thing I think it really excels at is providing some rather bizarre templates from which to build off of. The advent of digitally controlled sequencers and quantizers made it really easy to generate a set of random, yet harmonically pleasant, pitch values, and very quickly one can be off to the races with melody generation.

That can be a great starting point if you don’t know exactly what you want to hear, but you at least have some sense of what the key you want to be in.

Describe the creative process for your current release Kicking A Dark Horse, please.

For a long time I wanted to write something about my home, which is very influential to me and my work.

Though a lot of time was spent writing the passages in the book before anything was recorded, the whole of Kicking A Dark Horse was co-conceived from the beginning and was always meant to be something that should be experienced at the same time as one singular work. The cadence of the written words on the page is similar to that of the sounds, in that there is room to breathe in both, and one medium can fill in for the other when there is a break or rest.

The audio portion of the album was made with a Eurorack system containing modules (mostly) designed and built by Xaoc Devices (Poland), specifically their Leibniz Subsystem, a group of 8-bit signal processors that offer digital signal manipulation, as well as audio signal, control voltage, trigger, and gate generation.

The Subsystem was one of the few remaining workflows in Eurorack that didn’t seem very intuitive to me (I do not natively count in binary) so I took it on as a challenge and wanted to see if I could squeeze water from a stone. It was a deliberate strategy of working against a tool set that, while seemingly rather opaque, was in fact designed to talk to itself in very logical ways, and the hope was that I could either use or abuse it as a way of forcing outcomes that were hopefully surprising.

Most of the composition existed in my head before I ever touched the equipment, so the trick was figuring out how to bend this thing appropriately. When I did sit down to produce the music, it was often treated like a balancing act; spinning plates. I was interested in winding up motifs that felt like they were wobbling; on their way to falling apart, but never quite would. Passages seem like they are looping, but if you listen close, you’ll hear they aren’t seamless.

Between that and things like the intentional use of quantization noise and sample truncation, the final audio offering mirrors the written words (and by association, its subject matter): Discontinuous. Unstable.

Many modular set-ups still do not support saving patches or quickly switching between them. What possible benefits or inspiring consequences does this quite severe limitation have for your own music and creative practice?

My system(s) have a pretty interesting mixture of volatile and non-volatile memory. I have sequencers and modulators that can recall states, but I also have things like samplers that clear their buffers on power cycle.

Early on, it used to annoy me that things wouldn’t retain their state, but as I spent more time with them, I found that I actually prefer in some cases that they don’t, because it forces me to be more present in the moment as I am working and listening, knowing I may very well not get it back again.

Sometimes that means capturing it in a recording. Other times, it means leaning into the ephemerality and spending time just enjoying its dynamic quality. The really interesting stuff happens with things that have non-volatile memory but also have potentially volatile points of modulation. Case in point, my A Reliquary EP.



The backbone for 90% of that recording is samples that were left inside of a Rossum Assimil8or Eurorack sampler from the album I had worked on previously (An Anxious Host) except that all the modulation had been ripped out, since I rewired the system to do other things upon completion of that recording.

The audio in the sampler memory was maintained, but it either wasn’t being animated the same way, or at all in some instances, which to me was very much an enjoyable play from Julio Cortazar’s playbook (see his novel ‘Hopscotch’, which allows readers to follow a traditional path or "hopscotch" through the text in a non-linear fashion.)

I am under the impression that choosing the modular is not just a musical decision, but somehow extends into other parts of one’s life as well. Can you reflect on this a little bit?

At least for me, it certainly asks a lot of me in the way of time and resource management.

I might caution against a modular environment if one is not comfortable with an instrument holding their equity hostage.

For you personally, is the goal to become as proficient and fluent on the modular as others might get at the piano – or to keep discovery mode on forever?

Though I have been called fastidious, I wouldn’t say that proficiency or fluency is the end goal per se, but I’m also not quite capable of working strictly in discovery mode either because I’ve looked behind the curtain too many times.

Really, I prefer a balance between the two. Working to accurately communicate my vision, but also be open to the idea of surprising myself, whether intentionally or unintentionally, all the while being as authentic to my person as can be in the process.

You can certainly push things further the more you understand how things work, but I also believe it’s important not to kick yourself when you end up in left field because something didn’t go the way you thought it should have. Maybe that’s the start to something even better than what you intended.