It’s a modular week, yes, but here are things you can never have too much of: great food, open beaches, modular environments, and Giorgio Sancristoforo sound playgrounds. So here’s Homework, a 4-track cassette recorder, retro effects including granular processor and tape echo, and modular synths inspired by Buchla and ARP. It’s all you need to recreate some Éliane Radigue-inspired drones and float away on a sea of noise.
Giorgio’s recreations are not dry models, though. The tongue-in-cheek module labels made me smile — LORDS OF CHAOS, DUAL BORING SEQUENCER, TROPICAL OSCILLATOR, and so on. It serves a function: everything here is a riff on something else, with some unique voicing and tweaks. Playing Homework feels, well, unlike homework.
That’s important, as certain Large Music Tech Companies are keen to sell you Expansive Suites of Software Promising Commercial Success. Homework isn’t an academic exercise or a historical object so much as a license to make all the weird noises you want for as long as you damned well please.
Here’s a jam doing just that, showing the two synths with the effects:
And this really does give you the kinds of gear Radigue (and Laurie Spiegel) had at the Morton Subotnick-configured studio at NYU, or the ARP 2500 and tape. What you’ll find is quite beautiful. Giorgio’s ongoing commitment to alternate timeline studios, where historical gear won out instead of vanishing into obscurity, shines yet again.
Here’s his lovely Radigue-inspired set of drones:
What’s included:
- Four-track Portastudio-style cassette recorder
- Granular effect
- Tape echo
- Tube saturation
- Tape modeling: speed, noise, wow, flutter, age
- Reverb
- Mixer
- Eye of Horus (a Buchla-inspired synth)
- Sonda (a Buchla-inspired synth)
- External audio input (four-channel)
And as with his other creations, you bounce and record. You can also route into and out of the tape and create loops. It’s a wonderfully deep environment. And I think it also makes an excellent argument for
My only complaints are pretty simple: I wish there were some way to gang two knobs together so you could mix in stereo. (The granular processor, reverb, and tape echo all output stereo signals.) In general, the mixer is limited, but you should use the tape, in keeping with the paradigm. I guess my big complaint is that the transport controls on the tape are unclear, so you can’t quite see when you’re recording as you would on physical hardware. (The button doesn’t show when it’s depressed.)
This price, though, is a steal — like you managed to talk someone out of the keys to a vintage studio, except in a form you can use while lying in bed.
I think this just became my new favorite way to make strange sample loops and drones. But as I said at the start — there are never too many toys like this. Let your ears feast on sound.
https://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/
Previously: