How to Play Swing-Style Modular Synthesizer

Serge Modular Music System and homemade blues piano get jammed into a phonebooth together.

The Eb Serge TKB Bluenesses

What if Erik Satie wrote variations on Monk's Bemsha Swing?

Une Bemsha En Forme De Poire

Heglin & Djll, long a presence on the Bay Area experimental+other scene, have been making music together since 1986. Their brass trio Brassiosaurus, with late trombonist Toyoji Tomita, performed improvised and commissioned works from Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Wendy Reid and other adventurous composers 1996-2009 and appeared at numerous West Coast festivals during that time. A trombonist and tubaist by training, Heglin in recent years has concentrated on creating an imaginary language somewhere in the region between monastic chant, automatic writing, and scat-singing, employing phoneme constructions and syntactical strategies from the languages of his Scandinavian background. Djll accompanies on electronics from the Dutch instrument designer Rob Hordijk (1958-2022)and Meng Qi (inspired by Hordijk) which employ sonic and data feedback to create humanlike sounds and crude AI-driven events in real time. Their duo together can be in turns haunting, trancelike, or abruptly surprising whilst traversing wide/deep sonic territories that skirt the cities of meaning and humanness. (Photo ©2023 by Michael Zelner under the Creative Commons License.)

Live at 2023 Skronkathon: Ron Heglin & Tom Djll

A first-time meeting of improvisers: Dominic Lash, double-bassist from Bristol, England, with Bay Area locals Kyle Bruckmann, double reeds; Jacob Felix Heule, percussion, John McCowen, clarinets, and Tom Djll, modular analog synthesizer.
Recorded live at VAMP Music & Arts, Oakland, California. December 19, 2014

Quintet With Dominic Lash, Oakland CA 19 Dec 2014

It turns out that there is a 'poetics of chaos.' A chaotic system, far from the popular conception of the inside of a tornado — violent, uncontrollable, never-ending disaster — is constantly seeking stability. It's just like you and me! It wants peace and stability. It will settle into stasis and never get up from the easy chair again, if there are no new conditions introduced into it. A chaotic system starts from a discrete set of variables that determine where it will end up. Thing is, it doesn't reach the same outcome with each iteration. Launch it, and it may head not for Mars but straight into the sun, or into the nearest 7-11. Even with the same initial conditions, the trajectory cannot be predicted with certainty. 

Each day, most of us wake up with more or less the same initial conditions as the day before. But the day never ends up in the same place. It's chaos. 

Unlike the time-honored Eurologic practice of erecting a musical structure whose integrity and realness is then proved or disproved under analysis, chaotic instrument practice allows both performer and listener to come together in the activity of observing behavior as it unfolds. 

Instruments on this track: Hordijk Blippoo Box, Meng Qi Wing Pinger, EMS VCS-3, Bastl THYME

Chaos at CNMAT, June 2024

Who doesn't love a little plunderphonics now and then?

This was a test of the Reflex Liveloop, using control voltages derived from an envelope follower listening to the source material and using that information to constantly vary parameters on the RLL which was in 'PlayFX' mode "G-Move." -- Which is a kind of granularizing process. Also run through the Mannequins 3 Sisters filter and further mangled by some other Eurorack modules like the Xaoc Devices Batumi and Make Noise Erbe-Verb.

Demolitioned Song

Ian Fritz 4U Timbre Tantrum panel driven by Eurorack; also Eurorack sounds from DPO, Synchrodyne, Hertz Donut, Maths, etc.

Improvisation Over Post-Stockhausen Territory

Trumpunkte

Totally. Stable. Genius.
Recorded July 22, 2019 at the Makeout Room, San Francisco, by Jacob.

Tom Djll - trumpet, electronics
Jacob Felix Heule - percussion
Matt Chandler - electric bass

Beauty School plays the Makeout Room

No instrumental samples; all modular synthesis using:
Harvestman Hertz Donut Mk 1 > Xaoc Belgrad + WMD Synchrodyne/Expander> 2 QMMG channels = prepared piano sounds, triggered/enveloped; a 2HP TM Turing machine chose the notes.
Make Noise Morphagene > Mimeophon, triggered/VC'ed by two Soundmachines Lightstrips = prepared cello sounds.

In this piece John Cage and Charlotte Moorman mend fences and come out swinging!

Modular Synthesizer Music For Prepared Piano And Cello

Two takes slammed together. Electronic sounds are put into a Feldmanesque nearly looping sequence by a Turing Machine. I decided to join in the jam on piano — and vibraphone (part 2)

Feldman music simulacrum for analog dinks and piano and a bit of vibraphone

Going for an African Head Charge vibe here. Bass meter of 9 beats (3+2+4) against non-synched 4-beat and a whole lot of wizzy sounds.

Chana Oum Chano Mana Challa

Mostly Macumbista-issue Benjolin with clock VCO at audio rates and primary VCO used for frequency shifts, fattened with Bugbrand PT Delay. With some Blippoo, Serge, and Bugbrand Chirper sounds too, and Lexicon reverb.

Tom Djll

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