Collide 4 | Quadrature Spectral Computer | by Joranalogue and Hainbach

video upload by Cinematic Laboratory

"A few months ago, Hainbach recycled the full circle of 1950's being pioneered by people like Mort Subotnick and then miniaturized by people like Don Buchla in the 1960's, then rediscovered by people like Hainbach (and many others I am not familiar with) in the 2020's and then miniaturized into 20 HP by Joran from Jorananalogue in 2024. Hello COLLIDE 4, what took you so long?

I've been intrigued with Hainbach's journey into the vintage and classic scrapheaps of sound but the risk of shock, the smell, weight and size of all this gear made it easy to resist or even explore. I absolutely loved his Totem project making the best drones I ever heard. But this particular rabbit hole was easy to resist. 20 HP is not.

The COLLIDE 4 brings a lot of unfamiliar concepts to the table of sound design, like a Lock-in Amp, a Hilbert Transform Network and a Quadrature VCO. Just when you thought you were getting the hang of eurorack, again you realize you know nothing. It also features a filter, an envelope follower and a phase/frequency shifter. It's all originally designed to detect and possibly isolate little sounds in a soup of very faint noise, so the first thing people do is to crank it up and wonder if it can make normal music. Yes it can, and it saturates like nothing else. Just don't buy it BECAUSE you want to make normal music.

My favorite use case is to explore very faint sounds, like the raw output from a Piezo, an electric guitar or a sensitive electromagnetic sniffer. Theres a whole new world out there for you to discover."