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The other day Serge Tcherepnin was telling me how surprised he was that very few composers be using Enveloppe Followers… A module which follows the loudness contour of a sound, and outputs a voltage that corresponds to how that loudness changes. As far as I am concerned, I send the sound of my Cymbalom or a piezo-amplified wooden tablet into my envelope follower, the output voltage jump to a level that corresponds to the loudness of the note and allow to play/control my Buchla 200 system. In the « Serge world » the best example of such use may be found listening to the wonderful « Santur Opera » from Ivan Tcherepnin. The Santur is a Persian hammered dulcimer whose timbres produced by hammers striking strings are innately orchestral. « Each scale degree of the Santur sounds on four free-vibrating strings and the resultant tone has a glowing, evolving quality which lends itself to electronic processing such as filtering, phasing, digital delay, gating and various types of modulation » explained Ivan Tcherepnin. Having conceived the Opera as a solo work, the composer had to figure out a way to simultaneously play the Santur and control the electronics. Serge worked on a module allowing the strike of the hammer to send the signal to the system…
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Sergeï Tcherepnin - Q3
01:21
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« These three short pieces come from a longer series I composed in 2013 called "In Search of Queer Sound." For this series I first ripped a selection of podcasts from Savage Love, made by American sex advice columnist Dan Savage. In this podcast, (mostly queer) people call in for advice about sex. I listened many times to the questions, then replaced Dan Savage's responses with my own musical compositions on the Serge synth. »
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Sergeï Tcherepnin - Q4
02:00
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Sergeï Tcherepnin - Q5
01:10
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« I grew up in a musical laboratory. My father, Ivan Tcherepnin, was a composer, musician, educator and electronic music pioneer. Some of my earliest memories involve strange and unidentifiable sounds emanating from my father’s home studio. As a child, I would often sit in his studio with the lights turned out, surrounded by blinking LED’s and electronic apparatuses producing layers upon layers of weird and extraordinary noises, and imagine that I was at the control panel of an interdimensional vessel. At the heart of this seemingly boundless console was a colossal serge modular system. Whenever I turned a knob on the serge, my ship would change course and end up in an entirely unknown sonic universe. »
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« Since the early 1980’s the main focus of my work was using sampled sounds and /or diskklavier, all the while, composing for voices, and acoustic instruments…the radio and natural sounds in situ… The Works is a solo composition for Piano, voice and Electronics (made entirely on the Serge in the 70s). A melody in infinite permutations and masses of regenerated Serge modular synth sequences become the foreground and the background of a musically which initially joins my voice in an impassioned dialogue »
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« I first met Serge at Cal Arts, the first year in Burbank California, 1970. He was building his prototype synthesizer in a. trailer. Nam June Paik and Allan Kaprow had invited me out for my work term from Bennington College. I was one of many artists in residence. I lived in a house in Hollywood with Alison Knowles, Peter Van Riper, Simone Forti, Shuya Abe and Serge.
I was 19, a sculpture student. I came with my capacitance field to voltage circuits and hoped to work them with an analog synthesizer there. That is when Serge and I began working together. He built many special circuits for my interactive sound work and we continued to work together well into the 1980’s. I bought many of Serge’s wonderful synthesizer modules to make open systems that each ran at an installation for months! This last one ran from 2018-2020 at the Queens Museum. It also used four seasons, hours of recordings on six cards into separate systems and two light sensors mounted on eye spectacles mounted on the wall. In this atrium the sun changed the voice, character and location of binaural recordings of bees and birds spinning thru the speakers located in the atrium. »
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« In college I became fascinated with the possibilities of analog modular synthesis. Chaos theory was popular at the time, and I thought of modular patches as chaotic systems, based on waves interacting with waves, in which the smallest change could produce large consequences. The Serge system, with nearly every module able to send and receive control voltages, is perfect for this approach. I don’t remember how I heard about Serge, but in 1983 I wrote to him on Haight Street in San Francisco. He sent me a catalog of modules and over the course of our correspondence we came up with a three panel system that became my main instrument for the next 30 years. The first piece I made was a sinister bass line that was the theme for a radio production of Orwell’s 1984.
I love the spontaneity and non-repeatability of the Serge in live performances. I sometimes recorded, but almost never took notes on patches, instead preferring to immerse myself in the moment, trying to understand everything that is happening in a patch and remembering it. Someone once asked why I never used delays or reverb or other signal processing. I said, “The Serge doesn’t need external signal processing. The Serge is signal processing." »
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https://rastko.bandcamp.com/
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www.mess.foundation.
https://robinfox.com.au/about/
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12. |
Michael White - Fanfare
04:51
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https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1821610/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
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13. |
Onyx Zones - Poly Serge
06:30
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« I’ve used many different synths throughout my career. When I got into modular I realised how much more there is to sound. Ive become especially obsessed with the sound of Serge,and hope to continue growing my system. The tone of the Serge System really hit me, I love it. This particular piece Ive written called ‘Poly Serge’, is the sound of four NTO’s. »
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14. |
Esqueleto - Nostromo
10:33
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« My interaction with this synth has always been exploratory, i've managed to quite mastered it and master its functions, but it still suprises me a lot, specially when we get to feedback patching territory. Quality is outstanding, as well as its headroom even with high output gains. It is my intention to further expand this synth, with more modules and functions, when possible. The use for the serge usually in my tracks is to provide sound fx, percussion and processing. For this track, i wanted to show a different perspective on the instrument and change the sound generation approach, with the Quadslope as a pad generator, by tuning each one of the USG in different notes, to create chords, and sequence them using the volt/oct input. I found out that the pads generated are a little buzzy and mellow, but completely warm, so i managed to create shifting sequences with them, and process them on the Res eq before going to the mixer and the Antelope Interface. On the DAW, i used some verbs and some eqs and created an evolving pad atmosphere along with some very subtle percussion, created on the Creature. »
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« "4 Voice Just Intonation Canon" was made in August 1978 at home with my homemade synthesizers Aardvarks IV, Aardvarks VII and my Serge System. This was one of the first outings of Aardvarks VII, which was a box of frequency dividers/counters, gates and unity gain mixers. These were patched in various sequences that would divide a very high oscillator, producing sequences of subharmonically related tones. If one sequence was used to drive a second sequence, then the results could be quite complex semi-repeating sequences of selected subharmonic tones down to the 81st subharmonic. If several sequences like this were set up, each in a slightly different tempo, the result would be a canon in just intonation. This was set in motion, and then mixed in real time, making this piece.
This idea was then later expanded upon to make the main patches in Aardvarks VII: Le Grand Ni." »
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« I started working on Serge (and Buchla) synthesizers while a student at the Electronic Music Center at Columbia University in 1993, and worked on restoring and integrating them into computer-controlled systems as the center transformed into a facility for computer music research in 1995. From 1996 - 2003 I recorded and toured regularly with the Columbia Serge synthesizers while performing in the Freight Elevator Quartet.
Two years ago, I began collaborating with Patch Point in Berlin to build a "something old, something new" analog studio at NYU Tandon, where I serve as research director of the IDM program. We have a lab which teaches engineering and design students about the beauty of working with sound - from the physical and acoustic to the electric and electronic to the digital and discrete. This past year I have been recording pretty regularly on the equipment there, and we are launching a residency program to support independent experimental artists to come and work with the Serge modular system we've built in the space.
One of the things I always loved about the Serge system was Tcherepnin's avoidance of boxed-in, normative musical vocabulary and his adherence in module design to the idea that the circuits should speak for themselves. This frees the composer / performer to choose from an infinite palette of possibilities for how to interconnect any set of modules. There is no "wrong answer" with Serge systems... if it lets you express your musical ideas with the sounds you want, you're using the system correctly.
One of the things that was always a high priority when I started contributing to creative software, whether RTcmix at Columbia, Max/MSP/Jitter when I worked for Cycling'74, or p5.js as a contributor at NYU, was to emphasize context neutrality - as a developer, it's none of my business what you want to run through the architecture I've put in place - the data you're working with could be video, sound, 3D vertices, text, numbers from a sensor, or something scraped from the Internet somehow, and the system should always empower you to process it however you like. That ethos and set of design principles was very influenced by how I saw the Serge system. »
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18. |
PRFRK - Among Us
04:11
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« I made this piece by layering several sources of my Euro Serge System : 2 x pinged VCFQ & 3 FMing NTO’s into Res EQ with a Buchla 100 Enveloppe and LPG addition, an analog Delay from Pittsburgh Modular and a bit of digital Reverb. These modular voices meeting up with some concrete prepaired piano material which I had played and recorded into a Make Noise Morphagene. Having in mind a lot of creatures and characters interacting and chatting with each other in a weird growling symphony, creeping into our human and concrete everyday life.
This was played and recorded live, layer by layer, DAWless and without any editing on BLACKBOX & BLUEBOX by 1010 Music. »
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19. |
Ze-Ka - Murmures
03:17
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« I met Serge in '75. I was working with Malcolm Cecil as part of TONTO's Expanding Headband. Rex Probe introduced Serge Tcherepnin to Malcolm who was looking for an oscillator that would track well and stay in tune. Those didn't really exist on Moog or ARP synths at the time. I prototyped it for Serge and continued to proto and build things for Serge after that. I built my first 3-panel Serge in '76, enough to get an idea of what I wanted to do. I built the "Mighty Serge" in 1977. I've used it on nearly all my recordings in some fashion. The things I innovated and modified on my instrument wound up being standard features on the newer systems after that. I've continued to hold the flame for Serge synthesizers over the years by restoring and modifying these systems. »
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Modulisme Marseille, France
Modulisme (translates Modularism) is a media supporting leftfield Electronic music (giving priority to Modular Synthesis but not only). Providing ressources/interviews, a radio program aired via 7 antennas, and above all label-like streaming music for you to listen to… ... more
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Each of these tracks are skeleton keys that open a portal into another dimension. As such, they are all wonderful in their own right. This release reaches back in time to an age of analog semi-generative ambient exploration. Very much worth a listen.
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I love swimming through these tunes!
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OBSKURA : Various Artists
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music for stolen moments
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From North Carolina, 6wx_o unveils an EP of dazzling analog synth music, with melodies alternately soothing & mysterious.
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Woah, what comp! Every track on here is deserving of attention. But this one track stood out to me the most. The Lying Children seem to have a unique sound, its very intriguing! It was also nice hearing vocals on a ambient track! Defiantly going to look more into these guys!
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