It’s the shortest day of the year and first astronomical day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Don’t fight it. Embrace all that darkness – with this transcendent album full of drones, made in the free VCV Rack modular platform.
And really, what better way to celebrate modular than with expansive drones? Leave the on-the-grid “mad beats” and EDM wavetable presets to commercial tools. Enjoy as each modular patch achingly, slowly shifts, like a frost across a snowbank. Or something like that.
These aren’t just any drones. The compilation, for its part, is absolutely gorgeous, start to finish. It’s the work of ablaut, a Dutch-born, Suzhou-based artist living in China, with a winter wonderland worth of lush sonic shapes to send a chill up your spine. And everything came from the active VCV Rack community, where users of the open source modular platform have been avidly sharing patches and music alongside.
There’s terrific attention to detail. The group were inspired by the work of composers like La Monte Young, and … this is no lazy “pad through some reverb” work here. It’s utterly otherworldly:
We’ll hopefully take a look at some of these patches soon. If you’ve got ambient Rack creations of your own and missed out on the collaboration, we’d love to hear those, too.
The album is pay-what-you-will.
https://ablaut.bandcamp.com/album/winter-solstice-drone
VCV Rack Official Facebook group