Modular Synthesisers
"I have been playing synthesisers since I was 18 when I somehow scraped together the money to buy a Korg MS20, the only mildly affordable semi-modular of its day. I loved it, but I also hated it. I can't say I ever really understood it what it was supposed to be for. As a non-keyboard player, the fact that it had a piano-style keyboard attached was confusing. As a potentially tempered instrument it seemed a bit lame, even as a synthesiser it was limited, but as an abstract-yet-visceral sound maker, it seemed to hold a lot of promise. Modular synthesisers take this idea several steps forward and they too seem to me to be refreshingly uncertain of their identity, and that makes me all the more curious to find out what they can do. The lifespan of the voltage-controlled synthesiser more or less exactly mirrors my own, we were born in the same year, and while I am not exactly sure why either of us is here, at this point I can say that we seem to be in it together. "
ichard Scott is recognised as one of the wave of composer-performers who helped set the scene for the recent resurgence of interest in analogue modular synthesis. After six years research with controllers, software and digital tools, such as WiGI/Buchla Lighting instrument he developed at STIEM, he met Rob Hordijk and became absorbed in the world of modular synthesis. He spent these years creating his meticulous landmark double LP, Several Circles on Cusp Records which records some of the many different compositional possibilities of the instruments, and completed a PhD mapping out some of the consequences of these tools for his own compositional practice and outlook. In 2011 he started a concert series with the modular legend Navs (and latterly with YouTube legend Hainbach) in Berlin, Basic Electricity, which was ahead of the game as one of the first regular modular synthesiser nights dedicated to international live performers, and he helped instigate two editions of the Sines and Square festival in Manchester and subsequently edited an edition of the online journal eContact! dedicated to analogue and modular synthesis. Since then, he has been performing regularly with his portable suitcase instrument, especially with his many collaborators on the Berlin improvised and experimental music scenes.
