Endorphin.es Life is a trip: DATACHROME interview

Published on Jun 26, 2018 TheEndorphines

"Isn't it interesting to know how various people use same instrument? That's why we asked all our participants some simple questions and got different answers.

Check the interview with our last, 5th participant - Johatan from DATACHROME: https://www.youtube.com/user/leChatAutomatique

- How did you come to use synthesis in your music?
Well, I have some kind of a strange relationship with music and more particularly sound. When I was around 20 years old I used to go to a lot of gigs. At that time I was very much into circuit bending and DIY as I could not afford a synth and loved industrial and post punk music. One night I came back from a concert with ringing ears. The next morning I woke up and could not hear any sound not even talk with someone without feeling huge pain in my ears. I was soon diagnosed with severe hyperacusis, a condition that lowers the tolerance to usual environmental sound. With experimentation I soon discovered that some frequencies where more harmful than others and I integrated multiples crude analog filters to some of my builds and bent machines. More than sculpting sounds it was making it more bearable. Building filters made me aware of some classic analog synths and designs and soon enough I craved for one. Checking adds every day for a while, I got lucky. One night, around midnight, I saw an ad for a Korg MS-20 totally beaten up and untested for a very very cheap price. Problem, it was also on the other side of the country. Anyway, next morning a 5am I was in the train, and after 14H hours of travel I was back home with the precious MS-20. Still it was rusty and needed some fixing but it was here, my first proper analog synth.

- How did you use the SHUTTLE SYSTEM in your track for the "Life is a trip“ contest?
I’m a modular user and make bleeps and bloops in my living room for fun and experimentation. I rarely use computers to arrange tracks, I like to embrace the chaos and randomness offered by the modular approach. From loss of some control, sometimes emerge a pure and raw connection between your mind, your heart, and the machines you use to express yourself. I tried to integrate the Shuttle in this context because I think this is where it may shine and really show a bit of its hidden self. Also, it was an indispensable process dedicated to bond with the machine. The challenge was to create as much different voices and sounds as possible with the Shuttle, so self generative felt like the path to go.

In that track, all the self generated sounds and glitches are from the Furthrrrr Generator under modulation and then processed by a very fast delay for a Karplus-Strong effect. It resulted in various textures, from vocoder like, laser drum sounds, bleeps, bloops, insects scritches, crazy warp holes, bongos and hi-hats. Airplane A and B from the Grand Terminal are used as oscillators. One goes through the transistor ladder filter of the Grand Terminal and is playing the semi random and dueling melody you can hear in the beginning and end. The second was also fed through the Grand Terminal, filtered and processed afterwards with the shimmer reverb effect. It’s used to create pads on the second part of the track. I used the noise generator on the Furthrrrr for some additional hats you hear sometimes in the mix. Snare is also the white noise tweaked, sampled and sometimes bit crushed or pitch altered. The cockpit was used for some premix during the monitoring and creation of the patches and was very handy. In the end not much of the track is not from or processed by the Shuttle in a way.

- What part of working with the endorphin.es SHUTTLE SYSTEM did you like best?
I really love the Furthrrrr Generator and particularly the Thru Zero Core Oscillator. That thing can make sweet but also very angry and thick sounds. Add the waveshaper, sprinkle a bit of chaos from a sample and hold and you got a killer self generative patch!

- How do you think the SHUTTLE SYSTEM can improve your music making in the future?
The Shuttle System is a very compact and smartly featured system. It’s a modern take on a classic design with a lot of updates and tweaks. The use of digital modules make them updatable, meaning the Shuttle will evolve and pretty much always surprise. On top of that you have the Buchla inspired architecture that always sounds sweet, a very fun panel design and the fact that it’s fully modular. I think this cocktail makes it into something you wanna play with and wich is very inspiring, and from inspiration always comes new and better ideas ;)"