I used to call what I do ‘experimental’ in the sense that Michael Nyman defines it in ‘Experimental Music, Cage and Beyond’.  Nyman quotes Cage,

” Where… attention moves toward the observation and audition of many things at once… no sense of making, in the sense of forming understandable structures, can arise (one  is a tourist), and here the word ‘experimental’ is apt….”

What I do is to create a patch that results in sounds that could be considered musical.  When I compose a patch, itself an understandable structure, it is for the purpose of getting sounds whose structure is not so understandable.  Rather than hoping to get a particular sound, I’m hoping to discover something rather unexpected.

I’ve abandoned the term ‘experimental’, because it has too much historical baggage.  I’ve called my compositions ‘automatic music’, because it is definitely automatic, in the sense of being generated rather than played.  But it’s frequent abandonment of regular rhythm and scales separates it from what Brian Eno called ‘generative music’.

History

Pictured above is my MOTM-style synthesizer, started in August of 2002 after happening across the Synthesis Technology site of Paul Schreiber.  In the 1970’s I had become interested in modular synths. I met a composer who was using a large studio Moog at SUNY Binghamton. He let me play with it. The concept of voltage control hit home and I’ve been fascinated ever since. Later that decade I wound up building several modular synths for other people. A video artist, Walter Wright, gave me a collection of Electronotes and that got me planning my own synth, which was completed in 1980, based mostly on Bernie Hutchins’ ideas in Electronotes. It was assembled entirely on fiberglass perfboard, using a technique I learned from David Jones at the Experimental TV Center, where we worked. We used plain boards without any etched traces. All connections were made by simply soldering together on the backside the leads of components inserted from the front side. That can still be done today, but I prefer to use available PC boards for almost all of the modules in this new modular synthesizer.

DIY Modular Synthesis

I chose the MOTM panel style for several reasons, including that I wanted MOTM modules.  I like to build as much as possible myself and in 2002 MOTM offered kits. (These days, MOTM DIY is supported by Synthcube.) Another reason is the wonderful support in the synth DIY community on the Internet. Stooge Industries — and especially the late Larry Hendry — made this whole project much easier than it might have been.

I have a few modules of my own design, or that I adapted from information on the Internet. I made custom modifications to many modules. My intent here is to document as much of these projects as I can without revealing proprietary information. You will find construction photos, schematics, parts lists, MP3 files and more.

Expansion to Ciat-Lonbarde

After I discovered the instruments designed and built by Peter Blasser called Ciat-Lonbarde, especially the Cocoquantus, I came to see the possibilities for more non-traditional approaches to music created by electronics.

Acquisition of BugBrand

I got into the BugBrand modular camp in 2012 by purchasing a used rack of modules.  It was filled out before long and then became integrated with a larger box that added a lot of Serge modules, based on PC boards from Ken Stone.

This evolved into the big blue system, with the following added.

The Quantisise

Much of 2013 was devoted to the design and build of a set of modules which I called the ‘Quantisise’.  It is an emulation in modular form of the central concept of the oscillator cluster in the Cocoquantus.

Down the Eurorack Modular Rabbit Hole

By 2015 I could no longer hold out against the tidal wave of Eurorack modular offerings.  This became a frenzied activity, with plenty of trials of different cases and modules.  The thrash continues to this day.  I have a number of different cases that have been used to create ‘instruments’ for different purposes.