How It Was Made: The Amsterdam DJ (and Gaussian Curve member) Young Marco, aka Marco Sterk, has a serious rep as a crate digger not for nothing did he helm the second edition of Dekmantel’s Selectors series, a set of compilations dedicated to oddball disco and hard-to-find dance music. It’s a sound as wispy as dandelion tufts scattering across the stereo field.
Brunn compensates by programming quick-moving arpeggios and bright, jazzy chords that bristle with harmonics. What It Sounds Like: With all its parameters hidden beneath a mind-numbingly difficult menu system, the Poly-800 is notoriously difficult to operate in real time. For Pieces From a Small Corner of Paradise, he used only the Korg Poly-800 mkII, an eight-voice, hybrid digital/analog synth released in the mid 1980s, availing himself of its onboard sequencer and digital delay (but no overdubbing and no computer-based arrangement) to achieve a more complex sound. How It Was Made: Germany’s Benjamin Brunn has been honing his synth chops for over 20 years, first using a Korg X3 workstation-no additional hardware, no computer, just a tape recorder-and later the Clavia Nord Modular, the machine that gave his contributions to a long-running collaboration with Move D their distinctive, silky glisten. And Aphex Twin recently made news with a track recorded principally with a late-model monophonic analog synth the result, “korg funk 5,” has racked up more than a quarter-million views in a little over three months, quickly distinguishing itself as what surely must be the world’s most popular hardware demo. The Italian artist Modula has a new album for Edinburgh’s Firecracker label that was made almost entirely on the Yamaha PSS 780 only the drums were recorded using other machines. Nathan Fake says “like 99.9 percent” of the synth parts on his last album, Providence, came from the Korg Prophecy, an “ awkward” mid-’90s relic with an unlovely plastic shell but a thick, gorgeous sound. Though they also availed themselves of instruments like drums and electric bass, Mount Kimbie made their last album, Love What Survives, principally using just two synthesizers, the vintage Korg MS-20 and Korg Delta. But lately, many electronic musicians have been adopting a less-is-more approach, the better to highlight the strengths-and quirks-of their favorite pieces of gear.
Things have gotten more streamlined in the digital era, but the packrat behavior prevails virtual studios like Ableton and Logic, with their endless arrays of synths and plug-ins, encourage it even more. Your average electronic-music studio is a hodgepodge of hardware: Rack upon rack of synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, effects, and all manner of inscrutable-to-outsiders black boxes-a warren of tangled cables and blinking lights.
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