Beneath the Bush of Ghosts: Quad Lofi Sampler based on an answering machine chip

Beneath the Bush of Ghosts sounds a bit dodgy, but it revels in its clickiness and degenerative effect on audio. And there are four of them.

Beneath the Bush of Ghosts

Great name for a module, and after a lot of disintegrating loops I’m sure it’s going to sound like it. This is a ridiculously wide module from DE (Djupviks Elektronik) who I haven’t come across before. It features four channels of sampling with a bit of normalisation between them. It’s based on the ISD1820 IC chip that was found in old answering machines. As you can imagine, it’s going to sound pretty funky.

Each channel has its own output, and there’s a mix output as well. The channels also modulate each other, which probably gets weird and complex very quickly. You can also sample directly from one channel to the next, giving you increased degradation as you bounce your recording.

There’s a high and low pass filter on every channel, and a pitch control along with the recording functions, triggering, momentary play and loop option. I think you get about 20 seconds of sampling on each chip.

It clicks and glitches a lot which you have to regard as a bit of a feature. This is not for people wanting an Akai S-series in their rack, this is for audio disintegration via looping and the exploration of noise floors. Not sure it’s for me but it is rather fascinating.

It’s only available as a panel and PCB DIY kit, although you do get the 4 ISD1820 chips. As far as I can tell it comes with all the SMD already soldered so you only need to source the headers, LEDs, knobs, switches and sockets.

Djupviks Elektronik have a load of other strangely named modules and say that they’ve been creating ghost signals and distress call generators since 2020. An interesting discovery; I will watch with interest.