You press a button to set it in motion, and from there, it’s anyone’s guess. The screen just makes glitchy patterns at you. The knobs and buttons do… something. Pressing the screen resets. But once it’s connected, the AW noise maker opens a wormhole to warped realms of sound.
If you’re deep enough into this world, you may know Audiowanderer from a bunch of musical and audiovisual projects over the years, leaving code, patches, Lemur templates, and other goodies in his wake. That includes AV work under the MALAVENTURA name; linkhole through his about page.
But the AW noise maker is a special “broken”-art handheld. And despite the admonition that this is “a non-idiomatic synth made not to be controlled or understood in any manner,” I did find it surprisingly playable. It’s at least a wave you can surf, and it’s louder and more expansive than it might first appear.
Open up its cute little handmade box, and you get something like instructions (and a warning):
The hardware is tiny, and you get to enjoy the OLED making patterns at you. Power is via USB-C. My MacBook’s USB-C port is very, very loud when everything is connected here, but I decided to leave the sound as, you know, more noise. (Running through a dongle and being careful where you connect can resolve this.) And you run minijack stereo output. I plugged that into a Focusrite audio interface and mostly the signal is manageable, with a few very hot spikes.
But the sound worlds in there are just wonderful. Listening it raw is fantastic, and I can already hear that it’s going to become a sample source and even has potential for live sets, especially routed into other configurations. It’s noisy in just the right way. It’s deliciously sonorous.
Just listen:
Warning – video contains flashing images / rapid glitches.
Thanks, AW! It’s such a pleasure when you get a device like this that feels like an album in electronics form and an instrument all at once.
Here’s his proper video. Greetings to southern Spain…
Project details and ordering (current run is in stock as I write this): https://audiowanderer.com/AW/bringing-the-noiseeee/