X1L3 - Underwurlde and Shard - Harsh noise and power electronix

Published on Mar 16, 2019 X1L3

"Trial run of underwurlde (beta) - esoteric delay, looper and texture generator in a power electronics session. The set is dominated heavily by shard, but as it progresses and underwurlde finds it's place the lead is gradually handed over. So if you're curious then it's worth lettig the video run, or at least skipping to a third to mid ay through to get to where underwurlde starts to take the lead roll. Shard is continuously fed through underwurlde. For something fucked up to grap in a looper it does a great job. To then pitch and further abuse that psychosis is awesome. Wreckage provides the backing drone that leads in and out and keeps a drone through much of the set. Soundmachines LP1 lightplanes are used through the whole thing for cv manipulation. I love these things for live work and can't recommend them enough :)

The module was orginally designed to serve as a companion to shard, specifically for those with a desire for unhinged, violent and extreme textures and sounds. It serves the original purpose admirably but can be used with just about anything to add a quite unique slant on things. A past of indulging in circuit bending and a taste for abstract electronica being pivotal to the final outcome of the module.

At the core of underwurlde is a delay with an impressive maximum time and a solid method of manipulating the audio passing through it. Almost as if the ram contents were concrete. It can do the nice 'analogue' delay thing and time wise is capable of three to four seconds before you start to touch on a drop in quality, five to six with the low pass filter closed to mask the start of aliasing and noise. Beyond that it can drop to incredibly long looping with a gradual deterioration into bizarre and unique abuse through to noise similar to a pt2399, but much much better. It can lock the contents of the ram and switch to the function of looper. While in both delay and looper mode a 'ramglitch' array can be activated to mutilate the audio passing through the system. At faster rates you get the kinds o feffects often found in circuit bent digital machines. A circuit bent TR505 would be a good reference point for an example of this. As the rate decreases it gets more and more unhinged. The whitehouse track 'a cunt like you' being a prime example of what it starts to do once the echo/loop rate is slowed down. In a power electronix/noise rig it fits perfectly next to shard as it can provide the rhythmical texture favoured in PE such as NTT and theologian while shard is left to generate more organic artefacts and textures.

Gating is single press on/off on all features. Delay on/off, ramlock, delay/loop fast/slow, ramglitch1, 2 and 3. A gate or trigger will set any feature high or low depending on state. A second gate will revert back.

Ramglitch has a 3x array available to it. On the back of the module are three jumpers. Each of which can be set to configure the ramglitch array according to taste. An expansion module is planned for this which will add another eight gates over an 8 point matrix to the module. Each addressing one of the data lines in the ram/processor interface. Each data line being able to intefere with every other as desired. This will give countless ramglitch combinations which in turn give the module the capability to generate true circuit bent sounds, eliminating the necessity of a circuit bent instrument for those who might be interested in experimenting with such things."