What a strange and wonderful bird this is: the Forever Grouse from MONAD comes with its own loudspeaker, banana plugs for patching, and solar panels for power. But maybe you’d rather watch a film about a heron. Or music with some hot dogs. Or set fire to electronics under an interstate overpass. Come along.
Okay, first — the Forever Grouse from MONAD. This experimental synth comes from their Solar Sounder series, powered entirely from the sun. The Forever Grouse even powers its own internal loudspeaker from our nearest star and open-air nuclear fusion generator, Sol.
Stock is low, but it’s on sale. And there are different variants, too, depending on how much you want to DIY — bringing the entry cost to just $70 (with the usual warnings about how DIY can wind up being more expensive in the end if you’re not careful).
What a lovely feature set (designed evidently by Daniel Fishkin):
- Intermediate soldering (surface mount stuff already done for you)
- Two pitch and rhythm knobs for scaling
- One volume knob that doubles as “bentness” control (their wording)
- Optional wood-and-circuit board housing
Here’s their demo video and more details. (If this isn’t embedding correctly, I’m working on that — new security things that sometimes kick in.)
(From comments, “the cats ( 🐈 ) did not like this, but i’m in” could be the slogan of this site.)
“Well that’s fine and dandy,” you say. “But what is this, every single day some kind of new gear or the fourteenth reverb plug-in this week? It ain’t natural. Ain’t how humans are meant to live. We should be gazing at a heron,” says you.
Fine, but I can’t guarantee some technology won’t seep into that film.
“What? Well if you’re going to show a synth, you better at least be playing it with kosher franks!”
“No, no! You know, down with technology! Burn it all down! I mean literally like set fire to it while you play it! It’d be best if it were under I-95.”
Fine. I do not condone doing this for a whole number of reasons, but here you go:
Really, everything on the Molasses Industries account is genius.
These are my kind of people. The kind of people who digitize a full cassette tape about test driving the Macintosh.