Arwen

Let's make some ambient music, while the UK is pummelled by a storm that most other nations would laugh at. The dominant sound here is Valhalla Software's Supermassive VST reverb, which has a melancholic quality because it's so good. It makes everything sound wonderful, but it also reveals that a lot of dark ambient music from the 1990s - by the likes of Total, Lull, Thomas Köner et al - was just a lot of samples fed through a contemporary high-quality reverb unit with the mix control at 100%. There was no magic, no special studio wizardry. Just samples put through a Lexicon something-or-other and cut into CD-length sections.

Beyond the reverb this track has three instruments. The Korg Volca Modular is generating the low bassline, with a patch that constantly modulates, which gives the resulting reverb-laden wash some texture. I'm sending the Volca Modular's sync pulse to one input of Doepfer A-166 Logic Module. An LFO is plugged into the second input of the A-166, and the resulting mixture of pulses is driving a Korg Volca Sample, which is fed through a delay. I used the Logic Module so that the Volca Sample's trigger wasn't in lock-step with the Volca.

On top of all this a trusty Arturia BeatStep is plugged into Dexed, a VST FM synthesiser. The BeatStep is generating a slow random sequence that is playing a bright tone with Dexed. This is being fed into my miniature modular synth, because I wanted to add some grit. A bit of noise. The Doepfer A-199 spring reverb is good at that.

The Volca Modular is frustrating. The combination of modules and particularly a sequencer make it punch above its weight class, but it has problems. Some little ones. The low-pass gate has a narrow usable range. The second low-pass gate is difficult to bring into a patch without running out of physical space. It would have been nice to have a simple dedicated LFO. There's no way to output note values from the sequencer to anything else.

The biggest problem is the sound engine. Korg tried to kill two birds with one stone by combining a modular synth with an unusual FM/phase distortion/wavefolding synthesis engine, instead of an ordinary subtractive model. The synth engine is good at a narrow range of harsh keraanng-braap noises, but not much else. And there's no way to feed external audio into the signal path, so you're stuck with the internal synth engine.

It feels wrong to criticise it because whoever at Korg championed the idea was a brave soul and I wish them well. And there must have been tight financial constraints. As a sound effects generator it's terrific, and perhaps I'm being unreasonable by expecting it to churn out mysterious pads. And it's around a quarter the price of a MakeNoise 0-Coast. Etc. Nonetheless I find it hard to love.

In the end the snow didn't settle. It's still too warm.

Poseidon: The Laptop Cafe

More music, this time an electro jam. One of my favourite albums from when I was young was Lifestyles of the Laptop Cafe, by The Other People Place, which was one of many side-projects of Drexciya's James Stinson.

What drew me to Lifestyles? I'd like to say that Richard Dorfmeister of Kruder and Dorfmeister fame (he was Dorfmeister) pressed a white label promo copy into my hands while I was dancing at Click in Hamburg, but in fact I bought it because I liked the cover. It has a picture of a PowerBook G3 sitting in a forest. A couple of years ago I copied the basic idea, but with a PowerBook G4, although in my defence I did so subliminally, as it has been many years since I last listened to Cafe.

Drexciya had a varied sound - their earliest releases were full-on banging techno - but I've always liked their slicker, electro side. Particularly the fizzy, hypnotic 808 snare sound. The band had a complex mythology involving a genetically-modified subaquatic society. I've always wondered if they were inspired by XCOM: Terror from the Deep, but their first records came out slightly before that game so it must have been coincidence.

Laptop Cafe is smoother, more laid-back than Drexciya. To use a cliché, it's perfect Sunday morning music. I wanted to be a bit more frantic however. How did I make "Poseidon"? It's all sequenced with the Arturia BeatStep Pro pictured above, with multiple patterns layered on top of each other with an ancient copy of Logic Express 9. The basslines are performed with a mixture of a Behringer Model D MiniMoog clone and a Behringer 112 dual-VCO, running through a Doepfer A-103 TB-303-style filter. The drums are Logic's default 808 sample kit - my original plan was to replace them with something else, but in the end they had the right amount of fizz, so I kept them.

Throughout the track there's a gated pad sound. This is, off the top of my head, one of the Yamaha DX7's default strings or organs, played with Dexed. It's being run through my modular synth's filter, which is gated by the BeatStep. Throughout the track I sweep the filter of each of the parts so that it doesn't become aurally monotonous. The computer? A 2009 Mac Mini.

Laptop Cafe was released at a time when it was just becoming practical to make music live with a laptop computer, although I've always associated the first wave of laptop musicians with titanium G4s instead. I have no idea if James Stinson recorded the album with the G3 on the cover. It would have been underpowered for multiple VSTs and effects but as a live mixing desk, plugged into a FireWire audio interface, it might have worked.

The idea of turning up to a gig with a bunch of tiny boxes and a laptop, and playing a whole set with them, has always been powerfully appealing - I suspect that James Stinson would have loved the compact Korg Volcas and Moog Mother-32s that are available today. Sadly we will never know because he died a few months after Laptop Cafe was released, at the shockingly early age of 33, apparently of a heart condition, although details are sketchy because Drexciya only had a cult following at the time. It's a shame he's no longer with us.

Kiev 4 / 4a (again)

Way back in 2018 I had a look at the Kiev 4, a rangefinder camera from the Soviet Union. From the 1930s onwards the Soviet Union made a series of copies of German rangefinder cameras, most commonly Leicas - the Fed and Zorki - but they also made a copy of the Contax II, a completely different model designed by Carl Zeiss AG.

The Contax II was a contemporary of the mid-1930s Leica III, made in the Zeiss factory in Dresden. In theory it was the better camera. It had a wider rangefinder base, a higher top shutter speed, a clever double-bayonet mount that supported internal focusing with standard lenses, and a supposedly tougher metal shutter. Some photojournalists used it - Robert Capa ran up the beach on D-Day with one - but on the whole it didn't capture the public's imagination in the same way as the cute little Leicas.

Despite being based in Dresden the Zeiss factory survived the Second World War mostly intact, although Zeiss was split into two separate companies, one eastern, one western. It was taken over by the Soviets, who restarted production of the pre-war Contax II in order to give people something to do. In the years that followed the Soviets moved the tooling to Kiev in Ukraine and renamed the camera, because the western Zeiss objected to their use of the Contax trademark.

The Kiev 4 remained in production more or less unchanged right up until the end of the Soviet Union. My two Kievs were made in 1975 and 1982, by which time they were an anachronism. I've walked past the factory in which they were made - it's just outside the Arsenal tube station in Kiev. In the 2000s it was run by a company called Arax, who refurbished Soviet-era medium format cameras. Arax still seems to be in business but they apparently no longer own the factory.

When I was young Russian cameras were hip. This was the 1990s. Kids today might not remember, but just before digital photography became a thing there was a hipster fad for low-fidelity analogue photography with the likes of the Chinese Holga and Russian Zenits and disposable cameras etc. It was a reaction to the super-saturated perfection of Fuji Velvia, and the eye-controlled focus and motor-everything technical flash of the Canon EOS 5 and Nikon F80.

The F80 and EOS 5 were excellent cameras, but they were expensive and bulky. The alternative was an APS compact, but they tended to have super-slow zoom lenses. Furthermore there was something plastic and unsatisfying about them. Russian cameras on the other hand were a cheap way of getting hold of fast lenses, or experimenting with medium format, or trying out an actual old-fashioned rangefinder. Rangefinder cameras died off in the 1960s and 1970s as a mainstream concern, displaced by SLRs and autofocus compacts, but there's something appealing about making a little square split-image come into focus.

On a pragmatic level I was wary of Russian rangefinders. They were bigger than an Olympus XA or Mju/Stylus, and the interchangeable lens mount didn't make a lot of sense if you only had one lens. In the 1930s Leicas and Contaxes were small, handy cameras with fast lenses, but there were smaller and more practical options in the 1990s. Thus I was twenty years late to the Russian rangefinder party.

Sadly the days when you could buy a Zenit or Zorki for £15 are long-gone, and as of 2021 old Russian rangefinders are in the odd position of being too expensive to buy on a whim, not functional enough to actually use, and all the people my age who used to fetishise them are dead and gone. I have no idea if hipster kids today recognise them - but even if they did, I don't particular want to wow hipster kids any more because I'm old enough to be their dad. I would be a sad old man, hanging out with younger people, trying to be young again, just like Mark E Smith or Dennis Skinner.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I take many more photos than I post, and after going through my stash of Kiev 4 photos I decided to compile a bunch that I haven't published. They were all taken with two lenses - the standard Jupiter-8 50mm f/2, and the 35mm f/2.8 Jupiter 12, which is surprisingly good. Which is one of the reasons why I rarely use my Kiev 4. It's just too good.

I mean, there are other reasons. You have to cut off part of the film leader in order for it to fit on the take-up spool, and when you change rolls you have to remove the whole camera back. And I can't trust the accuracy of the rangefinder, although with the 35mm lens stopped down to f/5.6 it doesn't really matter as long as everything is more than fifteen feet away.

But the best hipster cameras became fashionable because there was something optically interesting about them. Heavy vignetting, light leaks, distortion etc. The Kiev 4 on the other hand isn't like that. Neither of my Kievs leak light, and the lenses are optically sound, so ultimately it's much too good to be a weird old curiosity, but because the underlying design is ninety years old it's no longer state-of-the-art.

Which is frustrating because, as mentioned up the page, the 35mm f/2.8 is pretty good. As a result I often pull out my Kiev 4, look at it, dust it off, then ask myself if I want to take it with me or not, and I feel guilty when I don't, because what did it do to me, except bring me fleeting joy? What more is there in this world?