Following the success of Time Machine, Olivia Artz has a new idea for playing with temporality in Eurorack modular. Patience is a “lowest” frequency oscillator, setting duration in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years … or decades. It’s just launched on Kickstarter.
Running a hardware business is, after all, an exercise in patience (and perhaps tolerance for pain). But it can pay off. The crowdfunding for Time Machine — a fluid, flexible take on multi-tap delay — was a hit. Livia tells us they’ve made modular a full-time job. They’ve been selling time machines by the hundreds, truly Galifreyan pacing, and added an expander, to boot.
Part of the appeal of Time Machine was that the taps, in an array of faders for easy hands-on control, could scale from ultra-short timing to several seconds. They could produce flanging and Karplus-Strong string sounds and spacious, spacey taps with equal aplomb.
Patience takes that expansive approach to range to a new extreme. Maybe best to just listen. Don’t crank your sound up; there’s nothing wrong with the audio. Give it a moment.
Set a time scale, from Hertz to Years, then dial in the amount you want, plus choose a shape. (Livia studied deep listening under Pauline Oliveros, in case you couldn’t tell.) You can set this LFO to outlive you. You can apply practical applications, like installations. Or you can even just use it in the studio to hear what a fraction of a 60-year cycle might sound like, if you listen closely over the course of this week.
There are more thoughts on the full campaign site that are worth diving into, though I have a feeling that the people who most want Patience in their lives will intuit this immediately.
I’m also thrilled about the special-edition faceplate acid-etched into nickel silver by artist and harshnoise synth demon Cassilda Desdemona. It drives home the notion that a Eurorack module can be a memento mori.
Maybe that’s what we need, really — an escape from the late-capitalist lie that bends us to accelerated extractive time and tells us we’ll live forever. We could use some slow-moving voltage; we need Patience.
Patience for Eurorack: Lowest frequency oscillator [Kickstarter]
OAM is a Northampton, Massachusetts-based collective of trans and gender-non-conforming folks who’ve been steadily coming up with lots of excellent ideas. Check their site: