Viktor's Modular Synth Diary

Deep dive into Clicks & Cuts — a movement in experimental electronic music where artists deliberately embraced digital errors, glitches, and sonic artifacts as primary creative material. Named after the Mille Plateaux compilation series (2000).

Key Artists

• Oval (Markus Popp) — physically damaged CDs to create glitch loops
• Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) — sine waves, granular synthesis, co-founded Raster-Noton
• Ryoji Ikeda — ultra-minimalist, converts data into sound and barcode visuals
• Pole (Stefan Betke) — dub meets glitch via a broken Waldorf 4-Pole filter
• Pan Sonic — raw analog minimalism, self-built electronics
• Fennesz — guitar processed through laptops into lush glitch textures
• Richard Devine — all-modular records, essential reference for Eurorack C&C

Sonic Palette

Microscopic clicks & pops, digital buffer glitches, extreme frequency exploration, pointillist textures, dub-influenced bass and space, granular clouds, and silence as a compositional element.

Modular Synth Artists

The original C&C movement was largely laptop/software-based — the modular world inherited and evolved the aesthetic as Eurorack exploded. These artists bridge the two worlds:

• Richard Devine — the most direct overlap. Last three records made entirely out-of-the-box on his massive Eurorack system. Rapid clicks, metallic thrums, scattering beats — clicks & cuts realized in hardware
• Keith Fullerton Whitman — moved from laptop glitch (Playthroughs) into hybrid digital-analog modular. His album Occlusions is subtitled “Real Time Music for Hybrid Digital-Analogue Modular Synthesizer”
• Pan Sonic (Mika Vainio) — self-built electronics and raw analog circuits. Not Eurorack, but fully in the spirit of DIY hardware minimalism
• Marcus Fischer — Eurorack, tape loops, and field recordings in a quiet microsound aesthetic. More restrained than Devine but very much in the genre
• Mouse on Mars — Jan St. Werner collaborated with Peter Blasser (Ciat-Lonbarde) to create the Clicker, a synth for “microsecond orchestras” — clicks & cuts philosophy made physical
• Hainbach — Ciat-Lonbarde synths, test equipment, and Eurorack for glitchy ambient textures

Notable hardware: Møffenzeef Mødular built Eurorack modules specifically for clicks & cuts style glitch percussion.

Modular Synth Takeaways

• Sound sources: Granular modules (Morphagene, Arbhar), ultrashort envelopes (<1ms = click), FM at extreme ratios, self-oscillating filters
• Processing: Extreme bandpass filtering, sample & hold for bit-crush, wavefolder distortion, feedback through delay lines
• Sequencing: Chaotic clock sources, probabilistic triggers (Marbles, Branches), Bernoulli gates, sub-audio LFOs modulating everything slowly

See the full Clicks & Cuts mood board for the complete timeline, discography, labels, and visual language reference.

Session with Matthew covering polyrhythm and polymeter — two ways of layering conflicting rhythmic patterns.

Definitions

• Polyrhythm: Two or more rhythms with different subdivisions played simultaneously over the same time span. Example: 3 against 2 (triplets over eighth notes) — both patterns resolve at the same downbeat.
• Polymeter: Two or more meters running simultaneously with the same subdivision but different groupings. Example: 3/4 against 4/4 — same tempo, but the downbeats drift apart and only realign after a full cycle (12 beats in this case).

Creating them in Tempera and Renoise

• Tempera: Use multiple lanes with different time signatures or loop lengths. Set one lane to a 3-step pattern and another to a 4-step pattern at the same BPM — the offset between them creates polymeter naturally.
• Renoise: Use the delay column (Dx) to shift note positions for polyrhythmic feel. For polymeter, set different pattern lengths per track using the phrase editor — a 12-row phrase on one track against a 16-row phrase on another gives you 3 vs 4.