In July 2019 Modulisme was born, Bana Haffar and I contributing the very first 2 Sessions. It was very important that my first guest be a woman, and I’d so much like more Ladies to respond to my invitations, for Modulisme to offer more of a female presence… And fully document our Electronic Music community…
Over the years, I’ve heard it said that the platform offers so much information that the newcomer doesn’t know how to take it in, where to start, that there’s too much to read… A simple reply would be « take your time » because Modulisme wants to share information, give composers a voice and make sure they have the opportunity to be well presented. The fuller their message, the better off I am, so here it’s all about transmission, and of course it may take time to digest… For the better !!!
We are celebrating 5 years of activism and offering more than 1 000 exclusive works showcasing the importance of analog electronic music !
For this series I wanted to emphasize the alliance of acoustic and electronic with a collection of works showing that Modulisme isn’t dealing with Modular synthesis only and that what matters is the composition rather than the tools.
ACOUSTRONIQUE features music composed of sounds artificially created using the modular instrument, enriched with natural sounds (field recordings/voices) or acoustic material (instruments).
This is volume 6 which I chose to limit to 2 hours so as to keep it digest…
01. Sooji (Rachael Kim) – Nothing is as it seems (04:21)
Rachael Kim is a Naarm-based instrumentalist, collaborator, and composer. She is currently interested in recontextualising her western classical training within the electroacoustic world, utilising analogue synths, processed samples, improvisation and collaboration.
Sooji is one-third of composer collective STATHIS//DAVEY//KIM, a Melbourne based collective of three female composers whose practice spans large scale site-responsive sound installations, to live electronic music performance and a member of new electroacoustic chamber ensemble ‘Golden Sands’.
Having been a violinist since an early age, I have redirected my arts practice over the last couple of decades away from the rigidity of traditional classical repertoire towards synthesisers and experimentation. The Synthesiser as a contemporary invention presents a perfect vehicle for musical experimentation, devoid of cultural baggage and transcending traditional musical norms. As a first generation Korean-Australian I strongly identify with this instrument and this freedom that it offers to musically define oneself anew.
In my music I am drawn to the mirroring of acoustic and synthetic sounds, integrating my past into the present. This analogy of opposition, reveals many opportunities for exploration and play through which I am generating a new language for myself, a sum of many influences.’
I always improvise in a context outside of functional harmony, preferring to explore the abstract world of timbre through synthesis. For this piece, I allowed myself to dive into functional harmony, without shirking or judgement- to see where it led. I returned to the violin, my first instrument as I’ve long been wanting to find ways that my Buchla and it might sit together. The multiple lines of this piece just fell together, first takes, with harmony and timing innately present with few edits necessary. I’m always looking for that woodwind tone in the Buchla which here, immediately provides a place with which the violin can coexist.
02. Kathryn & Scot Gresham Lancaster – SexusTrack pt.2 (12:02)
Kathryn Gresham-Lancaster is a writer, playwright, performer, and teacher currently living in Brunswick, Maine. She co-founded a puppet troupe and wrote and performed children’s puppet shows in schools festivals and private homes. She has spent much of her life in Oakland, CA where she taught programs in puppetry, playwriting, and an ongoing arts program for parents and children. She has written and acted in performance art pieces in the SF Bay area + has published poems, short stories and flash fiction in a number of literary journals and two print anthologies.
Scot Gresham Lancaster is a composer, performer, instrument builder and pioneer in the use of Modular Synthesizer (working for Buchla and Serge back in the early days) and educator working at the boundary between science and art, specifically developing advanced techniques in sonification. He does research and performance using the expanding capabilities of computer networks to create new environments for cross-discipline expression. His interest is in the behavior of interconnected music machines to create innovative ways for performers and computers to interact. Gresham Lancaster has collaborated in »co-located« performances in real time over networks. He has worked with multimedia prototyping and user interface theory.
« Sexus » was first published in 1949. It is the first volume of Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy.This autobiographical novel explores his tumultuous relationships, creative struggles, and sexual experiences, delving into themes of desire, freedom, and self-discovery.
This was a collaboration between Kathryn and Scot Gresham-Lancaster in the fall of 1983. Part 1 can be heard in our previous Acoustronique volume #5, Session 119. Although the voice sounds like a man, this was voiced by Kathryn and pitched down an octave to make it sound more in a man’s voice range. Richard Zvonar,of Diamanda Galas fame, lent the Eventide H949 Harmonizer to do this task. The excerpts were chosen by Kathryn from various parts of the book and recorded by her in the living room of their Oakland home. The voice track was then used in a live performance at the Intersection Gallery on Union St. in San Francisco. Later the material from that performance was excerpted and remixed at the Mills Center for Contemporary Music with some assistance from Edward Tywaniak. The instruments used were a Buchla 400 system prototype on loan from Don Buchla to CCM, Scot’s six panel Serge Modular, Lexicon Super PrimeTime and PCM70 and the aforementioned Eventide Harmonizer. This piece is the recorded part of the live performance. Kathryn performed the sections regarding the character “June/Mara” live with the slides, set pieces and shadow puppets which were, unfortunately, not recorded.
03. Sig Valax & Alex January – Ossobuco I (08:23)
Sig : Eowave Persephone & Quadrantid Swarm, Ms20 filter clone, Bastl soft pop 1 & 2, Boss Octave OC5, Strymon Blue Sky, Strymon Volante.
Alex : Electric guitar, amplifier, reverb tank, speaker.
Ossobuco is a collaborative and improvisational platform, where Alex January invites other artists to try and establish a dialogue between his guitar feedback practice and some of their own.
This is the first Ossobuco release, an invitation to Sig Valax.
04. Philippe Petit – Automnal (11:44)
Nepalese Bowl + Buchla 200 Synthesizer + Moogerfooger Ring Modulator + Tape Manipulations
In France, to mark the passage from Summer to Autumn, the state imposes a time change, so we have to set our watches back an hour and it gets dark earlier. In October, the rains arrive, the leaves fall into the gullies, the autumnal dawn brings nostalgia, the air fills with a damp tepidness and hovers with a strange regret and slight chill.
That morning I thought of a patch that would give my Buchla synthesizer a sound to match what I could see from my window, and that day, along with Autumn, my instrument began to sound like nothing I’d ever heard from a Buchla before.
Metallic yet silky, saturated yet coated, powerful yet evocative, mesmerizing to the point where I never wanted it to stop !!!
After the recording, however, I unplugged the cables, because to freeze such a moment would have been heresy.
Let this recording remain, complexified/composed, enriched by a few touches of Nepalese bowl, towards a desire for otherness… All the more than in Autumn, nature takes on a thousand colors, giving way to a captivating biodiversity.
05. Kevin Rix – Mockingbird (11:11)
Kevin Rix is a film/tv trailer composer who has worked in the industry for two decades with iconic publishers like Audiomachine and Ninja Tracks. His compositions have appeared in trailers for films such as Avatar, How to Train Your Dragon, Robin Hood, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Aquaman, Frozen 2, Black Widow, Top Gun Maverick, The King’s Man, Joker, Raya the Last Dragon, Justice League Snyder Cut, Mortal Kombat, Free Guy, Cruella, 007 No Time To Die, Avatar 2, Dune 2, Deadpool and Wolverine.
Much of this music is also available on YouTube and music streaming platforms and has generated over 100 million views. He is also a solo artist releasing albums under his own name and Channel Z200e.
I’ve always been fascinated by the songs of mockingbirds and how they never repeat the same thing twice. Many sleepless nights I would hear these birds singing and would anticipate with much delight their next random phrase. It’s also what I love about Buchla. My personal practice for the Buchla is to try and build a sonic story in the moment. Like the mockingbird’s song, I’m always amazed by Buchla and its endless world of discovery. My day job is all about preparation, planning and ultimately requires a fuck ton of production, editing, programming, and mixing. I enjoy it for my day work and it’s absolutely necessary to compete in today’s marketplace, but I never want to bring that method into my Buchla experience. To me, Buchla represents an immediate medium for creativity and expression. I want to capture a spontaneous personal moment. All of my Buchla recordings are one take. Recently, I began the practice of adding field recordings. Over the summer I’ve been captivated by the album “Sounds” by Sawako. Each song is a number with no explanation and the atmospheres captured in each track transport the listener to a different part of the world and drops them in the middle of a story. You can almost see what’s going on. She was really gifted at allowing moments to happen and being in the perfect place at the perfect time and playing all the right notes. It’s the epitome of living the artist’s way. I’m just starting out with this method and find it very therapeutic to hit ‘record’ and let nature do its thing. I hope to someday be as daring as people like Nathan Moody and Ben Frost who travel to volcanos, forest fires, and record sounds in abandoned ships. For now I record the beautiful sounds on my daily hikes or in extreme weather situations where I live in Southern California. Later I augment these sounds with Buchla performances. If I’ve lived the artist’s way correctly everything should just work. For this piece, I used a take of a mockingbird beginning its sunset concert. Using Cubase, I pitched the field recording down an octave to add an otherworldly quality. Later, I recorded an improvised Buchla Easel performance to accompany the bird’s, who sounded like it was telling a story of love and loss as it crossed over to the spirit world. I tried to mimic that with the Easel and reverb pedal in one continuous take.
06. Mattias Petersson – Misalignment (10:08)
Mattias Petersson is a composer and performer based in Stockholm. He works with electronic music in different forms, but has also written chamber music, several operas and music for dance. His music moves seamlessly between electroacoustic, drone and noise, often with a rhythmically driven ground. In parallel with his freelancing he works as a senior lecturer in electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
Petersson has been working with modular systems since 1999 and takes particular interest in combining the tactile aspects of the instruments with custom-made software and live coding.
Misalignment was composed for a Buchla 200e system and piano. I recently moved and had to rebuild my studio, and this piece started out as a function test, were I just recorded some piano chords. The piano is an upright “Futura” built by the Swedish company Nordiska Piano, probably in the 1960’s, and it sounds lovely. While listening to the recordings, I started to patch up my Buchla 200e system with a vague idea of making something contrasting. It ended up as both a rhythmic patch and a three-part polyphonic pad sound that blends with the piano chords. To me, the delicate blending of the acoustic sound with the electronics like this is not just a mix of two sounds, but functions more like a preparation of the piano, aiming for the hyperreal. In a similar vein, I also used some of the physical piano models in Pianoteq, a no-input mixer and various filters and distortion units to further extend the acoustic qualities. During the composition and mixing process I struggled quite a bit to combine the two, quite misaligned, musical layers. Staying with and accepting the friction seemed to be the solution.
07. Ed Herrmann – Incidental Garden 6 Flaccid by Moonlight (08:06)
Piano: Sheldon Atovsky / Dance: Bob Beswick
This music was originally composed for “Incidental Garden”: a performance with dancer Bob Beswick at Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago.
Equally at home with free improvisation, analog electronics, and invented instruments, Ed Herrmann has composed music for dance, theater, and broadcast; created site specific sound installations; produced and hosted radio, podcasts, and audio tours.
After studying music composition and learning analog synthesis on an Emu modular and EMS Synthi, a three panel Serge system became the primary instrument; decades later adding eurorack, Moog, and acoustic instruments.
Living in San Francisco, later Chicago, now Missouri, splitting time between studio and garden.
Bob and I have performed together since the 1980s. His spontaneous approach to dance and movement aligns with my own improvisational use of the Serge modular.
For this show at ESS, I decided every piece would have a different instrumentation. Except for the pre-recorded piano (played by Sheldon Atovsky) “Flaccid by Moonlight” is all live. It begins with bamboo mallet rolls punctuated by gongs. An out of tune piano, sweetened by a touch of ring modulation, brings on the moonlight. A Serge solo completes the picture.
08. Roel Meelkop – des sons pas inparticuliers (18:09)
Roel Meelkop has been pioneering experimental music and sound art since the 1990’s, although he studied visual arts and art theory at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. During a post-graduate course at the same academy he decided to dedicate his work to sound and music. His musical activities date back to the early eighties when he started THU20, a Dutch sound collective that has performed regularly in Europe and released ground breaking musical works.This period was crucial in forming Meelkop’s ideas and concepts about sound and how to organise it.
My fascination with sound goes a long way back, I remember certain periods in my childhood by sound more than anything else. A keen interest in music and a strong dislike of studying instruments led me to experiment with those, rather than playing them as instructed. Combined with an education in visual arts this resulted in me becoming a sound artist, treating my sound sources more as a painter or a sculptor than a musician. I treat all sound sources basically as equals, I do not prioritize one in favor of another. Therefore it has never been an issue for me to combine field recordings with electronic sounds and acoustic or electronic instruments. For me it is natural.
In this case I used field recordings of a construction site with modular an digital synthesizers and there is a big part for granular synthesis as well, with quite a lot of sampled acoustic sounds.
As mentioned, one source has no priority over the other, but once I have started a work, it evolves and in some way dictates its own progress. My role as a composer is important, but should not be overrated; ultimately it is the sound that decides.
09. Giuseppe de Benedittis – Etude du fer (10:17)
Giuseppe de Benedittis is a composer and performer.
He studied jazz guitar and electronic music at the Venice conservatory.
Giuseppe took part in many masterclasses to achieve a deep knowledge of live electronics and composition (Moog, Ircam, Ina-GRM, Accademia Chigiana,…).
His music has been played in Italy, Estonia, Germany, Japan, Spain and Switzerland.
Recently he won the prize “Premio Luigi Nono” for the electroacoustic opera “Trovato per errore”. His composition “sottosuolo” was highly commented at the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis ’24.
I have always been fascinated by the vast spectrum of sonic possibilities offered by metal and how, in its small facets, it can resemble a sound produced electronically. Over the years, using various techniques, I have recorded hundreds of metallic sounds that I used as inspiration for my electronic pieces: the study of its spectral behaviors provided me with a framework on which to develop my compositions.
When Philippe asked me for a composition that “emphasizes the alliance of acoustic and electronic,” it seemed a good opportunity to pay homage to this material.
For the development of the piece, I took inspiration from a key figure in my training: Pierre Schaeffer (the title of the piece is also a tribute), as the composition originates from a collage of concrete sounds.
The instruments used for the composition are metal plates (stimulated both manually and electroacoustically through the use of exciters) and classical instruments that have a metallic surface, such as the bass trombone and saxophone.
The sound of these latter instruments was captured using two different methods, which were then combined during mixing: a contact microphone to preserve those bright and crispy sounds of the metal and a dynamic microphone to maintain the inherent sound quality of the instrument.
This allowed me to have a wide range of sounds to work with.
Through the analysis of the sonic qualities of these recordings, I then decided how to intervene electronically on them.
I tried to emphasize what turned out to be the main characteristics of each sound, such as a complex timbre or its temporal envelope.
The sounds were then digitally processed first through techniques like filtering, convolution, distortion… In some cases, the already processed sounds were further manipulated using the Serge Modular to create sound textures that would form a precise soundscape.
10. Thomas Bey William Bailey – Live at Zasatsu Audio Lounge – Kyoto (06:42)
Thomas Bailey is an author, electronic composer, audio documentarian and occasional educator who has been active with independent music since the mid 1990s being a “multi-role” participant in the experimentally-oriented sonic subcultures of Osaka, Tokyo, Central Europe, Austin Texas and elsewhere. In addition to recording and performance duties, he has acted as a concert organizer, DJ, and radio programmer.
His personal sound work is characterized by intense, cinematic pieces that interrogate notions of utopia, social conditioning, anthropocentrism, and media saturation. Increasingly, his focus has been on re-imagining the “therapeutic” uses of sound, particularly its potential to increase a sense of agency and integration within a passive, fragmented, visuo-centric culture.
Thomas has collaborated with an array of international artists on record, live, and in other capacities (e.g. as a publisher of recorded material via his new “Fifteen Minutes of Anonymity” label). These include, but are not limited to: Francisco López, Zbigniew Karkowski, Kazuya Ishigami, Roel Meelkop, Susana López, Reverse Image, Maurizio Bianchi, Ralf Wehowsky, Alan Courtis, Leif Elggren, Rick Reed, Marc Behrens, Barbara Ellison, David Lee Myers / Arcane Device, and more…
“Live at Zasatsu Lounge” is one composition from a new song suite of mine entitled “Liminalia”. During the process of preliminary recording sessions, I leafed through some dream journals and realized I have an unusually large number of dream scenarios in which I am performing music at strange “hybrid” spaces, i.e. ones in which the experiences of my waking life are supplemented by encounters with people / places / things of a totally alien nature.
As the title maybe suggests [“Zasatsu” is a Zen term literally translating to “sitting to kill”, i.e. performing rigorous meditation] this is music aimed at generating an intense contemplation on the merging of two supposedly separate faces of “reality”. To facilitate that conversation, these pieces themselves present a dialogue between sharply contrasting values of proximity and distance, ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ tone colors, harshness and gentleness.
I began with unprocessed recordings of human voice, environmental phenomena, and mundane objects, as well as electromagnetic interference recordings using a handheld SOMA Ether “anti-radio”. The raw elements were fed into my modular system where an ALM / Busy Circuits Squid sampler and MakeNoise Morphagene, themselves connected to random CV generators, were used to form an evolving patchwork of micro-sonic events. Further drones and textures were provided by other complex oscillators. After *this* was done, I went into a third phase of manipulating the material with virtual “physical modeling” instruments (e.g. Physical Audio’s Preparation 2 and Modus), as well as Neutone’s Morpho A.I. plugin set at about 50% “wet” signal, which produced some genuinely strange timbral results.
My hope with compositions like this is to encourage a constructive meditation on what philosopher of consciousness Antti Revonsuo has posited:
“that all consciousness is “virtual reality” and that “not only are dreams experiences, but, in a way, all experiences are dreams”.
11. Drift of Signifieds – Affirmation Repetition (06:16)
Richard Fontenoy writes, edits and otherwise wrangles words, sounds and images for the amusement of himself and others, mostly at FREQ magazine, or – while making electronic music since the early ’90s – as Drift of Signifieds and more recently Interference Radio.
Playing in bands such as Graan and the Stëllä Märïs Drönë Örchësträ, and collaborating occasionally with the likes of Philippe Petit, Faust, Kev Nickells and This Too Shall Pass.
Richard has also been a DJ for the Kosmische Club for most of this century and organises the Live and Indirect Sessions on Repeater Radio.
For “Affirmation Repetition”, I used the main modular setup that I turn to when making more complex patches, though in this instance I focussed on the Forest Caver variant of Rob Hordijk’s Benjolin module as it is always a source of inspiration and discovery.
The acoustic elements consist of processed birdsong, frogs, thunderstorms and rainfall recorded in various locations around the south of France and edited into the modular session in Reaper, with some post-processing (mostly spatialisation and filtering) involved.
12. Mark Dalton Griffiths – Four Birds (05:24)
UK based synthesist / electronic composer musically active since the late 70s.
Having been interested in nature since he was young, the natural landscapes around hm have had a profound influence.
Much of his music now fuses acoustic with electronic instruments.
Since I was a child in the 1960s, I’ve had an interest in nature. By the time I was nine or ten, I realised something was wrong, many of the apparently common birds and insects in my nature books were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t understand then how ecologically impoverished the English countryside was compared to the previous decades when the books were written.
What I had experienced was an outcome of Shifting Baseline Syndrome. The concept is that without memory, knowledge, or experience of past environmental conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has changed because they are comparing it to their own ‘normal’ baseline and not to historical baselines.
In psychology it is referred to as ‘environmental generational amnesia’.
What we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’. The result is our tolerance for environmental degradation increases and our expectations for the natural world are lowered.
“Four birds” explores that environmental loss through sound, taking recordings of birds, then manipulating and synthesising them as an analogy for our increasingly inaccurate memories.
Soon these natural sounds will only exist as distorted and mis-remembered fragments as our memories fade over time. At some time, we will forget their songs and finally we will forget what we forgot.
I chose four familiar birds for their contrasting songs. The Yellowhammer (50% decline since the late 1980s) for its simple song characterised as “a little bit of bread and no cheese”. The purring and booming of the Turtle Dove (99% decline since the late 1960s) provided a bass element. The glissandos of the Skylark (63% decline since the late 1960s) added a melodic element. Finally, the almost electronic chattering of the House Martins (44% decline since 1995) that I used to hear from the nests a few feet from my study window (but now gone) completes the quartet.
I used recordings from the British Library archive for the four birds (Creative Commons Attribution 4 international licence) together with some of my own field recordings (including one I made in over forty years ago) and manipulated them via tape, ring modulation and digital processing. I then attempted to use a Modular Synthesiser to replicate or create an impression of those songs picking out essential elements from the complexity of natural sounds.
Somewhere in the middle of the piece it becomes hard to tell what is “natural” and what is electronic. As the work progresses the real birdsong starts to disappear, until at the end we are left with vague electronic impressions only.
13. (la) Fabrik Electric – Conservatorio (05:08)
At the helm of (la) Fabrik Electric, Didier Bruchon produces and experiments with the world of sound. Fascinated by avant-garde music, he produces musical pieces and collaborates with visual artists, filmmakers and musicians to create music and soundscapes.
Born in Geneva, Switzerland, in the mid-60s, his work is imbued with a philosophy rooted in punk and DIY culture, advocating “do-it-yourself, self-management and a free spirit of creative choice”.
He is also programmer of the Nano festival and label Vendrebruit 13.
The story takes place on the street in front of a music conservatory in Andalusia. Through the open windows, you can hear the students practicing their scales. Passers-by on their telephones accompany them in animated conversation.
The instant sound recording is rich in naturally superimposed elements. We hear two distinct layers: the conservatory musicians in the distance and the passers-by in the foreground. I reworked the sound of the recording with a sampler and effects to make it more blurred. Then, like a conservatory student in the experimental section, I made a random “scale” played on an FM synth to add dissonance. A kind of contrast between the application of the classical clarinetist and his scales and that of a very experimental and twisted approach.
I work in stages. For this piece 3 layers. I always keep the source clean, then layer it (like photo filters) to tint the sound. Finally, the instruments (modular synthesizers in this case) are played without blending too much into the mix to provide contrast.
14. Sonny Downs Qt. – Salty Sea Snake (06:09)
The Sonny Downs Quartet makes microtonal and electroacoustic music using the Buchla 200e modular synthesizer, on the lush green coast of Eastern Australia surrounded by subtropical rainforest.
In «Salty Sea Snake», I push the Buchla 200e to its electroacoustic limits.
Eight sequencers are all triggered by a single acoustic instrument: the Persian tanbour. A single contact microphone is patched three times into the 230e, with different sensitivities, advancing the sequencers with either light, moderate or heavy touch of the instrument.
The 200e and the Tanbour are the only instruments I play, so combining them was a simple decision. I picked up Tanbour about six years ago when looking for an acoustic instrument to play. I met a luthier and instrumentalist from Isfahan at a rock climbing gym and asked her to teach me.