Molten Music Monthly May 2025

Molten Music Monthly May 2025

Molten Music Monthly
robinv

The dust has settled on another Superbooth filled with fabulous objects of electronic grooviness and now we can step back and take a few moments to share some thoughts on the ones I thought were most interesting. I was there for a day, didn’t get to see very much, but i did talk to some fabulous people which was nice and spend a lot of time on airplanes with my daughter. Next year I’m resolved to doing it properly – possibly.

This months Molten Music Monthly is sponsored by MH Eurorack who build a bunch of useful and remarkably priced utility and mixer modules. I’d like in particular to point out the SMIX 8-channel mixer with switchable routing that they are sending in for me to review. Do go and check them out, the link is below or you’ll find them on ModularGrid.  

If you’d like to sponsor a future edition of Molten Music Monthly, just get in touch.

Moog Messenger

I’ll start with the Messenger because it’s the one thing I did get to play on. I know when it was revealed it looked every bit like a Korg synth and with the recent discontinuation of the Sub 35 it felt like this is the start of Moog transitioning into being a bit of a generic synth company. Now, being “like Korg” is absolutely no insult in my book but we do expect something more from Moog. In reality, once you play it, feel it, hear it, it is oozing Moogness – sure it doesnt have the quaint quirky vintage vibes of the Mother-32, or Grandmother synths but it feels solid, intentional, and carefully constructed. The resonance compensation is excellent and gives it another texture to the usual mellow sound we’re used to. It’s a proper instrument, analogue, fun, that is a lot less plastic than other things they’ve produced. If anything it’s more similar to the OB-1 mixed with the Bass Station II. And considering the price is not much more than the Minotaur or M-32 and so much less than the Sub is a really positive things for people wanting a genuine Moog synthesizer that isn’t asking you to be a synth nerd or hipster.

RYK Time Slice

Something suitably odd from RYK. Jake designs amazing looking modules full of great ideas and bags of creativity. Time Slice is a four channel audio recorder and looper with up to around 3 minutes per channel. The audio is represented in these fabulous pinprick LED circles that you can loop and scan through. It has the ability to pitch shift without changing the timing making it potentially playable like a sampler. Lots of modulation possibilities, you can turn it into a delay feedback line. I feel there’s much to be uncovered here for creative uses of capturing and messing about with things and  we probably won’t see it until the autumn.

Instruo Seashell

An interesting arrival from Instruo. It looks like one of their wonderfully organic modules when in fact it’s a whole semi-modular desktop instrument. It’s a complex analogue dual oscillator with wavefolding and resonant filter and is packed full of digital control making it very MIDI-able while still being completely on the knobs. It has it’s own VST plugin – a bit like the Minifreak – where you can explore and program it from your DAW if you so wish and it’s also an audio and midi interface. It’s interesting how they’ve brought together this analogue and digital workflow and I’m fascinated to see how that works and whether it pulls it all together. Will it be inviting and engaging like a Dreadbox synth or Cre8audio synth or will it be complex and alienating like the 0-Coast?

FrapTools Magnolia

This has generated quite a bit of buzz and it appears that Fraptools have crafted a gorgeous looking synthesizer with some interesting ideas. It leans heavily into analog thru-zero FM and then talks about being an FM synth…. Which never seems to makes sense to me because of how confused it all becomes through the impact of a certain japanese synth in the 1980s. FM is simply the modulation of frequency, from vibrato through to high pitch clashing of oscillations. What Yamaha did was force it through a number of algorithms to extract reasonably musical content. Here we have two oscillators. One is acting as a regular waveform generator with pulse width modulation and fine tuning, while the other has a wavefolder and thru-zero FM. Essentially it brings the east coast and west coast ideas of Frap Tools modular work together in one 8-voice synthesizer that has a phenomenally versatile modulation system to push the sound in all directions. It gives it a complex and unusual sound but with a familiar modular structure of oscillators, complexity, filters, modulation but captured and restrained in a keyboard instrument. It’s very interface driven while loads of knobs and controls without falling into the minutia of digital FM synthesis. It’s a really interesting machine.

Intellijel Jelly Mix, case and Swells

Right after Cre8audio aces the compact desktop mixer with the Assembler Intellijel come along to make it more premium. It has 5 stereo tracks with two aux sends, tilt EQ, mute switches, highpass filters and a master EQ/filter. It’s in a metal box with more room than the Assembler but for a lot more money – I think the arrival of cool little desktop mixers for synths rather than for everything is a really good thing.

The update to the very popular 7U performance case appears to be taking all the good ideas from the Befaco case – so the 1U row is now movable, it has VESA connections on the back for mounting and better I/O jacks. Nice lid system though.

Swells is a stereo reverb with a number of algorithms that follows the envelope input and modulates itself. A ridiculous amount of controls for a reverb but Intellijel do depth very well indeed. Not seen much of a demo on this.

Morphor Echon 6

Six voice analog synth based on BBD resonators. These are what are called bucket brigade chips commonly found in analog delay pedals – known for their cool deteriating sound and more importantly their ability to generate string like tones at very short delay times – also known as Karplus Strong. So each resonator in the Echon 6 is a BBD circuit with a very short delay and high feedback. It has to be fed something and this synth comes with noise that you usually find with karplus-strong but they’ve added a variable shape oscillator and an external input. It looks a bit mad but sounds pretty interesting. These guys made the Plectrum module some time ago and that’s where this idea came from.

Neuzeit Instruments Drop

In the photos it looks like a fancy MIDI controller but in person it’s nicer and more interesting. The idea is that all the encoders have halos to show value and a large button pad of snapshots that instantly switches between settings. It has a built in clock system that will sync to your gear and you can line up and morph between snapshots. So it’s more like a massive MIDI programmer for live performance. 20 banks of 20 snapshots – it also sends out program changes. Four lots of MIDI in and out and CV in/out, two USB ports – this is pretty epic.

OXI Instruments ONE MKII

I’ve never had a go on one but I’ve always liked the look of the OXI ONE – Gaz swears by it. Superbooth saw OXI Instruments introduce the MKII which is apparently the most spectacular sequencer ever invented – which is nice. It has 8 tracks that can run as monophonic, polyphonic, chord, stochastic or as another 8 tracks within the track giving it up to 64 possible tracks. A performance overview gives you access to mutes, transposition, step shifting and so on. You can import grooves, templates and patterns from the app. There’s a bigger focus on rhythm as well as melody, stacks of generative tools, scales and evolutions. Looks pretty groovy – must have a go sometime.

1010music Bento

I’m not particularly taken with 1010music, although I know plenty of people are. They seem a bit fiddly, menu-heavy, awkwardly touch-screen boxes of digital things. However, the Bento looks like a decent design departure that somehow references Polyend and Launchpads in one device. It’s a sampling production lab, which is probably a fancy name for a groovebox. You’ve got a much larger touchscreen, 8 encoders and 16 pads. You can create on 8 tracks of either samples, loops, granular, slicer, multisample or simply MIDI. It’s pattern and scene based where you can jam stuff in or tap notes onto a piano roll. It has effects, modulation, resampling and three stereo inputs and outputs. The idea is that you sample into it and make music – pretty much like any sampling groovebox ever. The screen looks fabulous, it just feels like yet another Digitakt, Circuit, Tracker, MPC One, Smpltrek etc etc

Make Noise Polimaths

I kind of thought we’d got over Maths by now. Useful, if underused module of things you can never remember, but that pair of rise/fall envelopes were handy. Polimaths gives us 8 channels of something largely similar. They keep talking about a Universal Synthesizer System like everyone is supposed to know what they are talking about – the problem with Make Noise is that they are so cool that no one wants to look stupid in front of them and so we all just go along with it. As far as I can ascertain Make Noise say it’s about many things happening from the one thing in a new analog approach to electronic synthesis – have Make Noise just invented the MULT? Anyway Polimaths is an 8-channel function generator that gets activated (triggered) and produces a bunch of envelopes and modulations.

Vermona drumDING

This is an odd looking mashup between sampling drum machine and analog percussion synth. The idea is that you create a percussion sound in the top section and then sample it into the drum machine as a sound source. Then make another one and so on for up to 16 sounds across 6 tracks. It has all sorts of sequencing features, things you can do to the samples and DSP effects with per-step automation. It’s a novel idea.

Bela Trails

The Bela platform of human interaction brought us the Bela Gliss some time back. A simple strip of a module with far too many functions that required a new level of finger gymnastics to operate. If you could master it it was brilliant but if you stepped away for a moment you’d forget how to operate it. Well, they’ve taken that idea and pumped it out into the Trails which is looking awesome. It’s essentially an XY pad for capturing movement and gestures over four channels and visualising them beautifully.

Dinsync NC-V8 Acoustic Lathe

Finally we get to make our own records. The NC-V8 is a desktop (almost) vinyl cutter that carves your music into soft plastic discs that are a whisker away from vinyl quality. Around €1600 euros and you’ll need a high-torque turntable, heat lamp to keep the temperature up – better sound, turtle wax and vacuum cleaner to remove the cuts.

Black Noise Eclipse

This is a stereo analog oscillator designed to combine vintage sound with complex wave shaping. It has a waveshaper inspired by the EMS VCS3 and lots of interesting modulation making it along the lines of a complex oscillator. It starts with different colours of square waves and then applies filtering to find other waveforms and then scatter them across the stereo field.

DPW SW3 Splice Wave Splicer

Combining elements from a couple of Dan’s modules that focuses on signal switching to splice two waveforms together at high speed without clicks – the result is pulling new shapes from existing shapes. You can switch between either source or you take a spliced output that essentially blends the two together giving interesting tones and possibilities. Bringing the speed down creates other effects that feels like sample stretching and amplitude modulation. You can also conjure up some weird stereo effects by messing with two channels.

Shakmat Lancer’s Lash and Ballista Blast

Lancer’s Lash is a ridiculously over-featured snare drum module that can do analog emulation, physical modelling, FM, granular and blend forms of synthesis. You can control the decay, pitch, timbre and harmonic content then squash it and distort it while feeding it humanization through randomisation. It has 256 presets so you’ll never be able to decide on a sound, but with CV control – you won’t have to!

The Ballista Blast is a compact hybrid synth voice with classic analog waves, wavetable and FM running into an analog filter, VCA and distortion. You have assignable knobs for choosing what to modulate. It’s a very adaptable interface of digital control.

I’m just starting to work with Shakmat which I’m finding very interesting and takes me out of my analog comfort zone and I should have videos coming on a couple of their modules soon.

Patching Panda Patterns

Four channel trigger sequencer with a 4×4 grid for pattern programming. There’s swing and probability and other tools for generating rhythms. You can store up to 60 patterns which you can launch to the clock or scan through with CV. They were also showing a massive complex analog oscillator which has parameter sequencing over 8 steps for each oscillator – perhaps a bit like the Etna filter. It has wave shaping, wave folding, fm and all sorts you can mess with.

Ferry Island Modular Four Seas

Complicated looked four dimensional wavetable oscillator that hopes to give you a tactile intuitive experience while navigating through the XY and Z of sonic space. Your wavetables are kind of in a 3D cube that you rummage about in. You end up with four related outputs that could be harmonic ratios, complex microtonal things, textures, chords and all sorts of stuff. There’s then a ton of modulation but I have no idea what’s going on.

Tremodular Liminal Space

Not actually at Superbooth but this cool little delay module just dropped from Tremodular. It’s using using two parallel cores feeding the same delay line but with different circuitry to create some unique interactions. It also has built in modulation to give it the weirdness of fluttering tape. I hope to get one in for review.

Dylan Mixer Chordless

Something else not at Superbooth but someone called Dylan Mixer got in touch to tell about their Omnichord sample library for Kontakt. Not the sort of thing I usually cover the demo sounds really cool so I though it was worth a shout out.

And Finally – SchreibMaschine Cases

The best thing I came away with from Superbooth this year were three beautiful Eurorack cases made by Lavendel of SchreibMaschine. These are 3D printed in wonderful colours and have a single 1u and 3u row. These are like prototypes that she offered to make me for a particular project I hope to get into as soon as I can find the time. The idea is that I will turn them into specific modular instruments drawn from my modular collection and inspired by their name’s sake Wendy, Delia and Morton. The completely instruments will eventually be available to hire. I’m very excited about trying to put this together.

Coming up

My current list of intended reviews includes

  • Knobula Monumatic
  • Omnitone Rhythmi and Beatsi
  • Patching Panda Etna
  • Mzourack Diktaat
  • Shakmat Griffins Claws
  • Jakes Custom Shop Quad ADSR
  • RYK Envy Machine
  • Amiteque AR-110
  • Redshift 6 – as soon as they release the multi-timbral update
  • Cre8audio Boom Chick
  • And DIY kits including
  • A news Axis Modular Delay
  • Befaco Oneiroi
  • BioPower joystick
  • Plinky

And much more!!

Join me on Sunday for a live stream where we’ll get stuck into some of these modules and talk about our favourite things including my forthcoming radio show that I keep forgetting to get on with.