tom moody

A criticism two posts back of the repetitiveness or sameness of recent modular synth music inspired the putdown of modular as "sounding like a demo of gear I can't afford."
It's affordable if you want it -- most of the "racks" wigglers are playing with weren't bought at one go but in increments over several years. The beauty of it, in a way, is that you can assemble the sounds you want, at the pace you want, over time, as opposed to plunking down a single large investment for an instrument someone else "hard-wired."

The instrument above, an 8-bit sampler/wavetable synth with filter that acts as a second oscillator, is hypothetical: assembled in a virtual synth rack planner. If it existed it would cost just under $1000, as compared to, say, the Waldorf Blofeld tabletop synth, for half that price. But you'd be putting this together in installments. The sampler module alone is $220.

That same module, the Doepfer A-112, is the subject of an excellent Soundcloud demo that (contrary to that earlier post) transcends demo-dom to become intriguing music in its own right. It also inspired software to control it from outside, in an analog-digital hybrid scenario.

A single computer with a decent sound card can make plenty of bodacious music inexpensively. The move to modular music was (among other things) a reaction to the limitations of laptop music: wanting to get physical movement, the hum of wires, and artisanal, "distributed" engineering into -- or back into -- the process. If you have this urge, it's affordable.

I am guest-blogging for a couple of days at SCREENFULL, a site that net artistes jimpunk and Abe Linkoln ran, with hyperactive exuberance, in the mid-'00s. It's come alive again for a one-weekend, ten-years-later tribute bash.
After a few years of dump.fm I am having to adjust to the measured pace of what was once browser-demolishingly frenetic. My Quicktime plugin is regularly crashing, just like the old days, however.
jimpunk and Abe invited me and some others who weren't active SCREENFULL-ers back in the day to join the party. Please note I said it was by invitation-only, so recent SAIC graduates can make full-throated complaints about net art elitism and talk about how liberating Tumblr is by comparison.

The move by electronic musicians back to the modular hardware of the 1970s, as a reaction to the laptop music of the '00s, and the gradual reintroduction of digital-based sound-making into this hardware, is a fascinating development. Most of the music is terrible, however.
This demo by Richard Devine isn't terrible, but it's boring. You can skip over his typically over-detailed description of all the gear and patches he's using. Mostly he is trying out one module, the MakeNoise Mysteron, which generates a plucked string sound that can be modulated and overdriven to resemble a funky electric guitar. Devine lays down a mainly unvarying beat, plays the Mysteron to show various ways notes can be bent, and then fades in ethereal pad sounds about midway through. The textures are rich (they had better be with all that gear in the pipeline) but the Mysteron seems like an extremely limited instrument, not worth buying, unless you really like hearing that one sound and think you might use it in more than one tune.
The problem with modular demos, which are largely undistinguishable from modular music proper, is it's all texture. One repetitive sequence is laid down at the beginning and clung to like a security blanket while the tweaker makes subtle or dramatic timbral changes. A true hell on earth is all the YouTubes and Vimeos showing the tweaker's hands turning knobs. This is fine for educational purposes but not so entertaining to watch.
The Devine piece would benefit from some change about a minute in -- a key change, a tempo change, a mood change. Am not necessarily arguing that every piece of music has to have a verse-chorus-bridge-drum-solo structure but some cognizable structure is a real benefit.