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.