In the winter of 2007 I got the opportunity to be an ‘artist in residence’ for a short while and work in the CEM studio embedded in Worm, Rotterdam. There, near the very pittoresque (when snow-covered) Delfshaven, I got to fool around with a rare and antic ARP 2500 modular synthesizer (from the early 70’s !) and also some other impressive 19″ rack with a mixture of analog synth modules. Basically just a whole lot of buttons, matrix systems and patch cables for me to get lost in.
After a few days of investigating and experimenting I had figured out the basic capabilities of the machines and got to appreciate not only the warm ’round’ sound of the oscillators and filters, but also the notably instability of the old analog set and figured out the logic of a ten step sequencer.
In the end, I edited my recordings into twelve nice-sounding miniatures and compiled an album of it. Each track is given the name of exotic fruit to accentuate each specific flavor. Mind you, it’s without doing any mastering. So it might not win the loudness war. But his is a chance for listeners to come close to experiencing the dynamic quality of analog synthesizers.