Smelling Pretty Colours

Remember COVID? Remember how it was a joke, and then it wasn't a joke, and then it faded away, and then it came back worse? And then it ground on and continued and is still with us, but we've learned to accept that the world has changed, so it no longer has power over our minds. It can kill us, but it can't break us any more. Remember that?

During the early part of 2021 I built a modular synthesiser, and I still haven't grown tired of it. It was one of those if-not-now-then-when projects, but I hate waste, and some of the modules - Plaits in particular - are endlessly fascinating. My love is still strong.

After a lot of tinkering here's what it looks like now:

What's the point of a modular synthesiser? Partially the wealth of modulation options, and partially the fact that all of the controls are right there, in front of me. I don't have to assign controllers or remember that unlabelled knob X controls pulse width, I have the controls right there in front of me.

The tune at the top of this post is built entirely on a bassline made with Mutable Instruments's Plaits. It uses the two-operator FM model, and for twelve minutes I twiddled Plaits' knobs while an LFO also did some twiddling, as my little robot helper. The rest of the instruments are a mixture of simple synthesiser tones and an organ performed by my Korg Volca FM, plus Logic's Alchemy, and a bit of squelchy Behringer TD-3. The singing robot voice is also Plaits, but with one of the other models.

The main rhythmic idea was an accident. In the original demo, below, I set up the Volca FM's sequencer incorrectly, so that it cycled every seven notes instead of every eight notes:

The end result reminded me of Steve Reich's phasing experiments, so I replaced the original marimba sound with a buzzy electric organ, fed into the exciter section of the Joe Meek VC3 mentioned in the previous post. Because Steve Reich used electric organs. When I think of the New York minimalist avant-garde of the 1970s I think of electric organs. Buzzy electric organs, The result is a hypnotic groove that sounds as if it's rushing.

One day I will learn to program a second drumbeat. Not this day. And I think of Philip Glass driving a taxi, and Taxi Driver, and New York at night in the rain, and people living in warehouses, and you can never go back.

Ten Commands Made Entirely with Animal Names (Not Including Buffalo)

Fly, fly!

Flee, flea!

Badger, badger!

Be, bee!

Sting Ray, stingray!

Fish, fish!

Duck, duck!

Bat, bat!

Crab, crab!

See otter, sea otter!

Ram, ram!

Grouse, grouse!

Joe Meek VC3

Frumple. I like that word. Let's have a look at the Joe Meek VC3, a handy little bit of studio gear from the mid-1990s. It's a combination pre-amp, compressor, and exciter, intended to provide the functionality of a mixing desk's voice channel in a smaller package. I bought it mostly for the compressor, but it's a versatile box of tricks.

I'll give you an example of the simplest feature, the pre-amp. My old iPad has some good software synthesisers, but the headphone output is low; in the photo below I'm using the VC3's pre-amp to boost the iPad's volume before it goes into my audio interface, which isn't something the VC3's designers could have envisaged in 1996, but here we are:

At lower settings the VC3's pre-amp is essentially transparent. It synergises with the compressor, the idea being that you can use the pre-amp to boost a signal high enough to trigger the compressor, which fattens up the signal.

Incidentally this iM1, a recreation of the late-80s/early-90s Korg M1 in software form. The M1 has aged in an interesting way. Back in 1989 musicians loved the excellent presets and the combination of a 16-bit stereo sound engine, built-in multi-effects, and an eight-track sequencer. The sequencer could drive external gear via MIDI, so in theory you could use an M1 as the heart of a studio, instead of an Atari ST running Cubase or whatever. On the downside the M1 was weak as a means of creating new sounds. The synthesis engine was restricted to layering pre-recorded samples on top of each other. As with the Yamaha DX7 a few years earlier it sold to professional musicians who needed a ready source of good sounds, and there's nothing wrong with that, but more adventurous musicians were turned off by its homogenous sound.

The M1's chunk-a-chunk house piano and bloopity-bloop organ bassline were plastered all over early-90s dance-pop, such as e.g. "Show me Love" by Robin S, or "Push the Feeling On" by the Nightcrawlers. That kind of organ sound was the in thing circa 1992. If you had a sampler with a bunch of Roland TR909 samples and some outboard effects you could conceivably make an entire pop track with a Korg M1, or at least a solid demo.

The M1's most famous sounds quickly became linked to a certain era, but some of the presets are genuinely timeless, despite being constructed from just 4mb of sample memory. People remember the organ and piano but there are solid, anonymous sounds that still sound good. Furthermore there's nothing wrong with early-90s dance-pop, so as of 2022 the M1 is both a retro throwback to the SNES era and also a genuinely usable, playable instrument. Nowadays seems to hang around in recording studios as the archetypal synthesiser-for-bands-that-don't-have-their-own-synthesiser.

But what about Joe Meek? He was a British record producer of the late 1950s, early 1960s, most famous for writing and recording "Telstar" by The Tornados. He worked independently of EMI and Decca, recording music in his bedroom studio with a stack of custom-made equipment, something that was extremely rare in the 1960s. Between 1959 and 1964 he produced or co-produced four number one singles, including the Tornados' "Telstar", the Honeycombs' "Have I The Right", John Leyton's "Johnny Remember Me", plus a clutch of songs that charted in the top forty.

With drums, especially a Behringer RD8 TR-808 clone. Mid-way through the video I use the pre-amp as a distortion effect, which makes the drum loop sound like something from Warp Records.

I have to admit I'm not familiar with Meek's work. He coexisted with The Beatles for a while, but his music has largely been thrown onto the great big scrapheap of pre-Beatles British pop, from back when the charts were dominated by light entertainers who could sing and dance and tell jokes. The modern stereotype of the pre-Beatles period is that the performers were miserable people who hated their job, hated being stuck in England, hated being pale imitations of the Americans, hated having to do shows in tiny little towns for pennies, hated their singing partners, hated themselves.

Pumping - and distorting - a bassline.

Flicking through some of Meek's productions on YouTube I'm struck by their aggressive, jangly, beaty quality, and also their trebliness - possibly an artefact of YouTube - but at the same time even his later recordings seem stuck in the pre-Beatles era, or at least "Please Please Me"-era Beatles. On a sonic level he had a yen for Pink Floyd-style experimentation, but his musical tastes seem stuck in the past.

The VC3 has balanced inputs and outputs. If you're plugging a guitar into the line input you might want to run it through a DI box first. The first units were apparently assembled by hand; as far as I can tell the V2 version had some internal tweaks to facilitate mass-production but was otherwise the same as the original VC3.

About twenty years ago I picked up a reissue of I Hear a New World, a collection of psychedelic instrumentals written and produced by Meek in the very early 1960s. Meek is an odd figure. The sci-fi space stylings of his music should have fit in with the burgeoning psychedelic scene, and in some respects New World feels like a prototype of Syd Barrett-era Floyd, but there was something 1950s, pre-psychedelic about his vision of outer space.

Unfortunately he become convinced that the major record labels were trying to destroy him, and in the end he spiralled into drug-fuelled paranoia, driven partially by a fear that gangsters and/or the police would use his homosexuality to blackmail him. In a fit of anger in early 1967 he shot his landlady to death and then turned the gun on himself. His latter-day cult fame is tempered by the fact that he killed an innocent woman, so it's hard to warm to the man, but there remains a great big what-if about him. What if he'd tried dope instead? What if he didn't have to live in fear of the police? Would he have just ended up producing Top of the Pops covers records, or something more?

It strikes me that he would have been happier as an audio engineer. He wanted to be a music mogul along the lines of Phil Spector or Simon Cowell, but in interviews he doesn't come across as steely-nerved enough to manage pop acts. Unfortunately the idea of engineer-as-studio-star didn't exist back then - Alan Parsons and Bob Clearmountain were not yet household names - and I imagine you couldn't just rock up to Abbey Road studios and ask for a job, besides which it would in theory have been a step down for him. I'm waffling at this point. I'll move on.

Thirty years later, and seemingly apropos of nothing, Meek's former studio assistant Ted Fletcher updated some of his studio designs and re-released them. They sported fetching green paint, apparently a shade of British Leyland green that happened to be available. Judging by Sound on Sound's reviews from the period the equipment sold well. The market for boutique compressors was just taking off in the mid-1990s, and by all accounts the new Joe Meek equipment was well-made and keenly-priced. Their range included were a couple of compressors and a bunch of equalisers, as detailed by Fletcher's son in this handy blog post here. The VC3's instrument manual mentions hard disk recording, at the time a new technology; Fletcher seems to have envisaged the VC3 as a means of making digital recordings sound more analogue.

In 2003 Fletcher sold the Joe Meek business to a US company that still sells Joe Meek gear. The modern heir of the VC3 is the Joe Meek ThreeQ, which was launched back in the mid-2000s. Fletcher himself makes a small range of compressors and signal processors under the TFPro name although he doesn't sell anything that precisely duplicates the VC3.

What's the VC3 like? I'll post some videos, but subjectively the pre-amp is transparent. I tried recording some guitar with a DI box, and it was no more or less noisy than the same setup fed through my audio interface with the gain turned up. With a line-level signal the pre-amp can be made to distort, although it's not an especially attractive distortion. The compressor is strong enough to clamp down on the pre-amp, even when it's turned all the way up, but you have to be careful - if you play a run of notes and then leave a pause, the next note after that will be extra-loud.

As a volume limiter therefore the compressor can work even with really loud signals, although at high levels the first split-second of the attack is distorted. At the most compressed setting there's a definite pop-pop-pop aggression to the sound. At mild settings it's more or less transparent, and can be left turned on at about the 75% position with a slow release, slow attack all the time. With the pre-amp turned up and the compressor active the sound gets thick and bassy.

The exciter adds distortion to the high frequencies. To my ears it makes the signal sound fizzy, but it also amplifies the noise. With all the controls turned up the end result sounds a lot like a noisy tape cassette with some kind of treble boost, which is the effect I was going for with this tune:

Setting it up is easy, although you have to use the right power supply. At first I tried a generic 12v PSU, but it didn't have enough juice, and although the box turned on it didn't compress. After getting hold of the right supply it worked fine. The VC3 has a pair of outputs, but it's not stereo. The two outputs are the same, the idea being that you can use one for monitoring.

For the following track I arranged everything with Logic, then fed the channels into the VC3, with the compressor on full and the exciter about half-way:

I then fed everything through one of Logic's compressors, which had the cumulative effect of boosting the bass and making the whole thing sound slightly fuzzy and warbly, again as if it was played from an old cassette tape.

And that's the VC3. At mild settings the pre-amp and compressor are transparent. When pushed the compressor enhances the bass and makes the mix sound more "full", but it's not as precise or "thwacky" as modern VCA-style compressors. It doesn't have a side chain input, so it's not much use for French disco. If you leave the compressor on all the time, with a mildly hot signal from the pre-amp, the result is a subtle warming effect.

The exciter makes everything sound like an old tape cassette tape, which is not necessarily a bad thing if you want a grainy, gritty effect. A few years later the VC3 was replaced by the VC3Q, which had a three-band equaliser - Ted Fletcher called it a Meequaliser - instead of the exciter. At that time the VC3Q would have been a better option, but you probably have EQ already, in which case the exciter is more fun.

NB the VC3 was specifically aimed at vocal recording, which has a much wider dynamic range than the mostly fixed-velocity synth lines I used. Vocalists and guitarists and flautists etc or people using microphones in general might have a different impression of it.

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Morliny Hamburger Patties

It's not often I write about meat. But we live in interesting times, so let's have a look at some meat. Morliny Hamburger Patties. From Poland, land of meat.

If this blog had any long-term readers they would probably wonder why I started writing about MREs a few years ago. MREs are ready-to-eat military meals from the United States. They were developed as a compact replacement for canned rations. The first MREs were fielded in the early 1980s, but I've always associated them with the 1991 Gulf War. Plastic food for a plastic war.

The various different members of NATO have their own analogue of US MREs. Italian and French MREs get high marks on the internet for the quality of the food. Some Italian MREs even have a little packet of alcoholic cordial. I haven't tried them. I have however tried some Polish MREs, and they stand out for the quality and quantity of their meat.

But why did I write about MREs? Earlier this year I popped over to Greenland to have a bash at some hiking on the arctic circle trail, but my original plan was to go in 2020. Back then I did some research, assembled some equipment, booked my trip, and thought about the type of food I would eat. And then I put everything in a cupboard because COVID put the brakes on international travel for two years. Greenland came through COVID better than most, with around 12,000 cases and 21 deaths, but I imagine the country's tenuous economy was hit hard.

The trail takes about ten days to navigate. It's not technically hard - you don't need crampons - but there is no chance of resupply. Between Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut there are a few hiking huts, but no roads, no shops, very little trace of human life. You have to carry ten days' worth of food in your backpack. That's around 20-30,000 calories, or alternatively four kilograms of butter or, more rationally, about eight kilograms of cheese, nuts, beef, and chocolate.

I quickly decided that MREs were a bad idea. They're good for weekend hiking, but for ten days they're far too bulky. Each MRE is a single meal, so over ten days I would need to carry at least twenty of them, which would take up all of the space in my backpack even after stripping out the flameless heaters and spoons and so on. I would still be left with masses of plastic packaging that I'd have to carry with me until I found a rubbish bin. It just wouldn't work. MREs are still fascinating novelties, which is why I continued to write about them after I had rejected them, but they're not practical long-distant hiking food.

In the end I brought along a Trangia cooker and some rice, plus a pot cosy, and some powdered soup, stock cubes, olive oil, beef jerky. After a bit of experimentation I worked out a method of cooking rice that used as little fuel as possible. The tricky bit was "the meat". What to go with the rice? Spam? Cheese? Nuts? After scouring corner shops and pound shops I tried out a bunch of processed-and-probably-sterile meat, thus the subject of this blog post.

What is Morliny? It's a brand, or a sub-brand, of Animex Foods, which was founded in Warsaw during the days of the Soviet Bloc. Animex was bought up by Smithfield Foods of the United States in 1999, which in turn was bought by China's Shuanghui Group in 2013. Was the sale controversial? We were pally with China in 2013, but I imagine some people back then were worried that China was trying to adulterate people's precious bodily fluids. I'm not worried because I drink a lot of alcohol, which has the effect of sterilising my blood. Checkmate, China.

Animex's most famous brand is Krakus, which was aimed at the export market and has been around forever. Morliny itself was invented in 1992, presumably for the Polish domestic market, although by a quirk of fate Polish domestic food is now sold quite widely here in the UK. Judging by the packaging these burgers are made in Poland and shipped to the UK, or train-ed, whatever.

I picked some up from the Polish section of my local supermarket. They're pre-cooked. The instructions suggest microwaving them or putting them in the oven or frying them; I grilled mine, which made the exterior crispy but didn't change the appearance very much:

Here in the UK we have something called Westler's Tinned Hamburgers. They're infamously bad. They come four to a can, with gravy, and there are lots of blog posts about them. I tried one a long time ago. Imagine eating a blood clot that doesn't taste of anything. It's not so much that the taste was revolting, it's that it had no taste but was slippery and greasy and insubstantial.

Morliny's burgers are a couple of levels better. Not good, but at least edible, which might be why no-one on the internet seems to have written about them. Have you ever tasted grilled Spam? The Morliny burger tastes of grilled Spam, but without the salt, so in other words it doesn't taste of much at all. It has a very vague and inoffensive savoury taste, but otherwise nothing.

On the positive side it isn't covered in slippery gravy, and it has a mouthfeel; not a great mouthfeel, but at least it has one.

NB I shot the photos with natural light as the sun was setting, which is why the colour keeps changing. The image second-from-the-top is most indicative of the actual colour. The shot above is unnaturally purple.

Morliny Hamburger Patties are essentially a hot filler for the inside of a hamburger bun rather than something you might eat by itself. The suggested burger on the packet - with bacon and a slice of egg - would be palatable, but you'd only taste the bacon. But on the other hand they're vastly superior to Westler's hamburgers and are at the least inoffensive. Furthermore they're only about £1 for a packet, but they're quite small, so you might want to double up.

How long do they keep without refrigeration? I have no idea. My hunch is that reheating them with a Trangia would be trivially easy, and if you bought along some onion and tomato ketchup you would have a decent camping meal, the end.