It’s pretty much my main philosophy for my 0F stuff; I could talk for hours about it! It kinda half came from chipmusic and the desire to push every piece of gear to its limits, but also a somewhat lazy mentality of not wanting to bring too much extra gear into the picture, due to setup times, having to synchronise patches, etc.
Having said that though, I’ve recently been experimenting with dividing my studio into pairs (currently, MnM+OT, DN+OP-Z, Nord G1+Lead with zaquencer), which will probably be mixed up again at some point, but paired machines seem like a nice middle ground. And it means I can still just turn on one of those machines at a time easily without affecting my entire setup. I don’t know how people can handle setups containing more than say, two Elektron boxes; if I tried that it’d be a cacophony!
Yeah, this is part of it for me as well. Ever since I heard Confield, I’ve been obsessed with creating “organisms” of sound, where even though there are distinct elements such as melody, chords, drums etc, everything sounds glued together, like the same sound generator being stretched and morphed, each element influencing the others in some way. Nanoloop 2, Monomachine, Nord G1, and OP-Z all seem to draw me into this kind of “ecosystem” approach where you can stretch things to the point where the separation between parts isn’t entirely clear. Recently I’ve been discovering it on the Digitone as well (using the master overdrive!) and it’s basically flipped my sound design philosophy on its head, which is also why I’ve taken so long to put out a sound pack
Wow, I didn’t know that was FS1R! Now I want one even more
It’s one of my favourite minimalist electronic albums, mostly out of admiration for the discipline/dedication to a very specific kind of sound design. That admiration extends to Mark Fell’s solo work, which, while I agree with someone from WATMM who said a lot of it sounds like Sonic the Hedgehog repeatedly smashing a pinball bumper, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it! Perhaps that’s the chiptune influence coming through again.
Definitely. I think having experience in chipmusic develops this mindset, for sure. For me, it’s always been about trying to push things into making sounds that nobody else has thought of making, or that nobody else is interested in making (lol probably more likely). It’s a real challenge, and I’ve only ever succeeded a handful of times, but when it works it’s amazing!
I have to include a link to this bryface track because it’s just so great. LSDJ wave channel only: