The intro music from the Thing (by the master Ennio Morricone) done with the 4-Pole Mission Shruthi-1. Everything in the music was made with the shruthi-1 (with the 4-Pole Mission Filterboard) except the hihats.
About the 4-Pole Mission filter board: This filter board is probably the most advanced 4-pole core for the Shruthi-system! It uses the same “Pole-mixing” technique introduced in the Oberheim Xpander to provide a cornucopia of filter responses. It also provides 4 different settings controlling the “flavour” of the resonance, clean and liquid, MS-20 style, wobbly/chaotic, and a combination of the MS20 and wobbly modes.
Kyrene prints a new programme twice a year and usually asks artists and illustrators to contribute their personal interpretation of their “totem animal”, a cow.
Along with the illustration for the programme I also created a promotional postcard for them.
My interpretation of the cow was clearly inspired by old movies where giant monsters destroy cities with their super-powers, like Godzilla.
It’s Friday the 13th, so I can finally talk about this, now that it has been officially released.
In the last weeks I’ve been working for (and with) Olivier Gillet from Mutable Instruments on the graphics for a new Shruthi-1 with a very special filter board. He calles it a Polymorphic filter, since it can be anything you want it to be (for the nerds out there it uses the so called“Pole-mixing” technique introduced in the Oberheim Xpander to provide a cornucopia of filter responses), hence the association with the movie The Thing (the John Carpenter remake) and hence the dog (you will see below).
I designed all the graphic elements for the PCBs and the case and a nice little postcard, that mimics the style of movie posters, just to get the link to the movie somehow.
The 4PM fake poster, with lots of references to the movie. My experiments with Dog Show turned quite useful for this one!
This is the filter board, notice the SMD led on the eye, it glows when the device is in use! (Olivier’s idea)
The best part is the little dog head on the front of the case, with Frank Daniels (the case guy who does all the laser cutting for Mutable Instruments) and Olivier we came up with the idea of putting two leds in the eyes of the creepy dog)
Since I have one of those beasts sitting right next to me on the desk, I think I’ll be doing a little review quite soon!
Killer Aloe – die Rache der Heilpflanzen (which means something like “the vengeance of the medical plants”) is a short super-8 movie by Daniel “Analoge Widerstandsfront” Mahlknecht and Silvana Zancolò. I was asked to create a soundtrack for it a long time ago (probably more than 2 years) but only now I find some time to work on it. I’m still sketching out the intro, which I’ve been using to define the overall style of the soundtrack, and I think I’m starting to get somewhere here, at least that’s my feeling with it.
And now some info for the technically inclined: The theremin style sound, comes from the Novation Bass Station, and there is a bit of C64, which I’ve added to the low end of the composition. A Gakken SX-150 was used to add some FX and weirdness here and there. I had added some Atari Punk Console sounds, but have removed them here, they will appear further on in the score.
(the picture above is an actual frame from the movie of course)
