Tracklist

1. Heart: Beats 04:20
2. Hyper: Active 06:08
3. Hyena: Calls 05:56
4. Hyena: Laughs 08:01
5. Hyena: Chants 04:25
6. Hyper: Still Active 04:07
7. Heart: Races 03:30

Free download: phaneronaut.bandcamp.com/album/somatic-system

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Electro-So-nic explorations via (mainly) the LYRA-8 organismic synthesizer by Vlad Kreiner’s SOMA laboratory.
credits

Released January 17, 2019

Credits

Composed and performed by Udo Gerhards on

• Soma LYRA-8 Organismic Synthesizer (Tracks 1-7)
• Arturia DrumBrute Impact (Tracks 1, 4, 7)
• IK Multimedia Uno Synth (Track 4)
• Arturia MiniBrute 2S (Track 4)
• Arturia MatrixBrute (Track 4)
• VCV Rack (Track 5)
• Make Noise 0-Coast (Track 7)
• Arturia KeyStep (Track 7)

Hyena samples courtesy of Audiojungle, Pond5 & soundbible.com (Daniel Simion)

Liner Notes

First: A request

Please listen to the album before reading the following liner notes.

Then (if you’re still interested) return to the liner notes — and maybe listen to the album again afterwards, preferably on headphones.

Note: Mixing and mastering

I’ll freely admit that I don’t have the slightest clue about recording, mixing and mastering music professionally. Thus, if you think the sound of “Somatic System” sucks: you’re probably right. This has always been a do-it-yourself, learning-as-I-went project following the maxime “Done is better than perfect”.

Note: Sequencing and sounds

No MIDI sequencing was needed in the making of this record; only MIDI Clock was used to sync sequencers. All tracks were performed and recorded live and/or prepared and recorded using hardware sequencers. My goal was to work fast and spontaneously. All synthesizer and drum sounds on “Somatic System” were created with analog oscillators. Almost all sound design, sequencing and patching was done by me: I used no factory presets on this record — with maybe one exception, namely the arpeggio line in “Hyena: Laughs”. I honestly don’t remember which MatrixBrute patch I used there; it might not have been one of mine.

LYRA-8: The White Angel

At some point in early January 2019, a surprisingly small and unassuming white package arrived at my office, just a few days after I ordered it from Schneiders Laden in Berlin: the LYRA-8 Organismic Synthesizer by Vlad Kreimer’s SOMA laboratory. I had ordered the LYRA-8 more or less on a whim. I had watched a few YouTube demos, read an online review or three, and the machine sounded absolutely fascinating, as a concept as well as in sound. But admittedly, I wasn‘t completely sure what to expect.

I brought the package home, did a quick unboxing, plugged the contents in — and thirty minutes later I was madly, deeply in love. In love and inspired (or so I hope) — which resulted in the album you‘re now reading about.

I had seldom played an instrument that got my creative juices flowing almost immediately.The LYRA-8’s combination of seemingly random, uncontrollable weirdness with beautiful, wistful, singing sounds — facilitated by a surprisingly intuitive interface with immense playability — had me creating music (not just sounds) within minutes of turning the unit on.

What I was experiencing was — to me — so fascinating that I decided to start recording right away. On the first evening of playing the LYRA-8 (although sometimes it felt as if the LYRA-8 was playing me), I had two and a half songs recorded. The next evening, a total of four songs were completed: recorded, mixed and mastered. Just two weeks later, the whole album was finished. Without a doubt, the LYRA-8 is an instrument made for performing.

This is not to say that the LYRA-8 (and “Somatic System”) is for everyone: its sounds oscillate between primordial beasts battling an invasive force of alien cyborgs, a whale cow mourning her calf’s death in an oil tanker’s propeller and a clan of semi-sentient hyenas roaming about in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Tracks

Heart: Beats

This idea started with the sound of the LYRA-8: the throbbing low noise in the background felt to me like the sound of blood pulsing through veins.

Well, pulsing blood needs a beating heart. This is where the idea for a heart-beat-like bass drum beat came in. As the LYRA-8 can also process external sounds and effectively — pun intended — function as an effects machine, I plugged the DrumBrute Impact’s output into the LYRA-8’s input und treated the drum track to the same delay and distortion settings as the LYRA-8 oscillators.

Hyper: Active

I knew even before I got the LYRA-8 that it would be capable of buzzing drones and noisy chaotic weirdness.

What surprised me was that it‘s also possible to create pleasantly harmonic and rhythmic patterns (using the word “pleasently” more loosely than I probably should), thanks to the LYRA-8’s “Hyper LFO”, a pair of Square Wave Low Frequency Oscillators that modulate each other.

This was one of my very first discoveries, which resulted in this track and its name. But to avoid being too tamely tonal, “Hyper: Active” also contains some total FM and feedback madness, breaking down completely in between and picking up again. This is the fourth recording I made with the LYRA-8, and the first to coalesce into a completed track. For what happened to the first three recordings, see the notes for “ Hyper: Still Active ”.

Hyena: Calls

My friend Peter had an original Roland Space Echo that was still working fine. I love the warm, slightly wobbly, otherworldly sound of this tape-based delay.

When I was looking for samples of laughing hyenas (see notes to “ Hyena: Laughs ” below), I also found a lot of recordings of quite haunting and somewhat musical hyena moans and calls, which I thought would be a perfect fit to be treated by the Space echo. Sadly, I don’t own one of those myself, so I used IK Multimedia’s “Tape Echo” VST plugin instead. The LYRA-8 is also quite capable of sounding “haunting” and “moaning”, so here’s three of a perfect pair for you: echo, hyenas, LYRA-8.

Hyena: Laughs

This song is the nucleus of the “Hyena trilogy” (“Calls”, “Laughs”, “Chants”) and based on the oldest musical idea that came to fruition on “Somatic System”.

One evening in the Winter of 2018, I was fiddling around with the UNO Synth, which resulted in a patch and sequence that sounded like laughing hyenas to me — only that I didn’t really have a clear idea what laughing hyenas actually sound like.

So I hunted around for a laughing hyena — samples of a laughing hyena, that is. I found some files under a Creative Commons license, which I overlayed over my sequence, and lo and behold: the similarity was there. But not only that: the resulting sonic mayhem had me laugh out loudly while listening to it.

Hyenas laughing made me laugh made me create this track. And as soon as the LYRA-8 came into my life, it was clear that it was a perfect complement to these crazy sounds.

“Hyena: Laughs” is designed to provide for lots of variation over seemingly static patterns. For this, I used several different techniques:

1. All of the synthesizer and drum patterns are in different time signatures, mostly in irregular ones. This means the patterns shift their relative positions continuously.
2. In the MiniBrute 2S bass line, the two LFOs are synced to the sequencer, but set to emit random voltages which modulate the filter cutoff frequency and the Metalizer wave-folding functionality of one of the oscillators.
3. The UNO Synth “hyena” sounds’ filter settings were more or less randomly manipulated during recording.
4. Some of the tracks semi-randomly change their position in the stereo spectrum.
5. The “random” knob of the DrumBrute Impact was turned up a bit to provide for some random variation in the drum patterns, augmented by a generous helping of poorly executed manual roller action for strange break-like bursts.
6. The output of the LYRA-8, especially when some of the FM is turned on, can be rather unpredictably anyway.
7. There’s a good old-fashioned synth lead solo in there somewhere, which also employs a liberal amount of crazy modulation via the MatrixBrute’s programmable Macro knobs and patch matrix.

Hyena: Chants

This is a strange one, if I may say so, combining the digital and the analog world in a weird way.

I wanted to find out what a hyena sounds through a vocoder (sometimes I want to know stuff like this). As I didn’t yet have a hardware vocoder available, I decided to play around with VCV rack (an open source modular synth software) and try to route a hyena sample as a modifier and a LYRA-8 track as a carrier through a VCV Rack patch, using the “Mr. Blue Sky” vocoder VCV rack plugin. By the way: yes, I do love ELO, and I think, “Out of the Blue” is fantastic if you’re in the mood for an overdose of syrupy, over-blown seventies bombast pop. It took a bit of time and messing around, but with the help of Omri Cohens video tutorials (for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brF9L_TmS6Q ) I managed to make Reaper and VCV Rack play together nicely. I also put the Hyena track through VCV rack’s port of Mutable Instruments’ Clouds for some additional sonic flavour. And as I was patching in VCV Rack already, I had two LFOs set up to modulate panning and some Clouds parameters. In the gear section below you can find a screenshot of the complete patch.

And — of course — there’s a moody LYRA-8 backdrop to all of this. Oh, and the LYRA-8 carrier track for the vocoder is actually the same track used in “ Hyena: Calls ”.

Hyper: Still Active

This LYRA-8 improvisation employs the same Hyper LFO settings as its sister-track “ Hyper: Active ”, hence the name and the sonic similarity. Still, the other settings are somewhat different, as is the performance itself.

This was actually the very first recording I did with the LYRA-8. I originally thought this session would be unusable due to a faulty audio interface configuration (as was the casewith two subsequent recordings). But listening back, I found it mostly OK apart from some glitches at the very end. So I shortened it a bit in the mix, which, regarding its intentionally noisy and abrasive sound, is probably a good thing. 😉

Heart: Races

The Make Noise 0-Coast synthesizer is the newest toy in my collection, even newer than the LYRA-8. So far, I haven’t had nearly enough time to explore the 0-Coast thoroughly, but this track at least features some transformations that a complex oscillator in the East Coast tradition allows for.

Also, the tempo is intentionally break-neck and hectic to wake up the listener for the home stretch of the album.