Beautiful black cat Luna strikes a “noir” pose atop one keyboard and next to another. Submitted by Matthew Vasquez via our Facebook page. I really like the way the stripes of light play against the keyboards, which in turn heighten the black cat’s figure.
This is Luna is not our Luna, but looks so much like her! You can read our more recent tribute to the late great Luna of CatSynth here.
Identification of the synths/keyboards left as an exercise to the reader.
Meet Shadow and Brodie, two new synth-cat friends. Here we see them singing along to a tune played on an M-Audio Axiom keyboard controlling an off-screen synth or software instrument.
Submitted by Anne Corwin via our Facebook page.
Looking south on Orizaba Avenue in southwestern San Francisco from Lakeview and Ashton Mini Park. You can read more about our visit to this spot in this article.
Handsome tabby Eli poses with a Yamaha Reface DX synthesizer. Submitted by Elias Laughton via our Facebook page.
Like Sam Sam and Luna, Eli was a shelter cat. We always love hearing about shelter cats finding their forever homes. If you are looking for a new feline addition to the family, please do consider adopting a rescue!
The Yamaha Reface DX is a reissue of the DX line from the 1980s, specifically, the 4-operator models like the DX27 or TX81Z. It lacks some of the TX81Z’s features like alternate operator waveforms but adds some new elements like continuing feedback and each operator. You can read more about it at Yamaha’s official page.
Many years ago, I noticed a small rock that appeared to be in the middle of the street at the top of a hill in the Ingleside neighborhood of San Francisco. I also noticed it a few times while traveling on BART. Turns out it is, in fact, an official San Francisco Park, the Lakeview and Ashton Mini Park.
[Click to enlarge]
It really is just a speck of undeveloped land on the crest of a hill in the middle of Ingleside, a largely residential neighborhood wedged between I-280 and CA 1 (19th Avenue).
From the official San Francisco Parks guide:
This rocky outcrop is part of a ridge of sandstone in the Merced and Ingleside Heights neighborhoods. While the park is very small, its grassy and rocky slopes are home to a variety of native plant species, including buckwheat, dudleya, farewell-to-spring, coast onion, and soap plant. This diversity of plants means there are flowers in bloom at Lakeview/Ashton Mini Park through most of the spring and summer. This wide window of flower availability provides a crucial long-term food source for many local butterflies and other insects. In 2003, a locally rare arboreal salamander was found hiding amongst the rocks. This relatively large brown salamander, four inches long when mature, has a whitish belly that in juveniles is darker and covered with light-blue spots. Arboreal salamanders have tails that are well adapted for grasping branches to help climb trees.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go check finally it out up close. I made my way up the steep incline of Orizaba Avenue to the park, which also marks the ends of Shields and Lakeview Streets.
As I had recalled from when I first noticed it, the park is dominated by a large mound of rock surrounded by tall scrub grass. But there is a path through the grass to the top of the rock.
And from the top of this rock is a fantastic and perhaps underappreciated view of the southwestern section of San Francisco. Looking north along Orizaba, we see a wide swath of western San Francisco, including Forest Hill, Golden Gate Heights, and Mount Davidson (the highest natural point in the city). We also see the iconic Sutro Tower peeking out from behind.
Looking south, we see the Ingleside and Sunnyside neighborhoods, bisected by I-280 and BART. Beyond are the hills of Daly City and San Bruno mountain.
The Pacific Ocean is visible in the distance to the west. Closer by within Ingleside is another, larger park, with a copse of trees on top.
I did not visit the other park on this day.
This was a lovely spot, and I lingered there for quite a while despite the chill in the air. It was, however, not entirely immune from the current problems of San Francisco, with a few signs of recent homeless and drug-use activity. But overall, it was clean and quiet. I will come back when I find myself in the vicinity again.
The western neighborhoods of the city still have a lot of secrets to offer, and I am eager to discover them.
It’s been a stressful few weeks for us at CatSynth. Not bad per se, just stressful. During times like this, I often lie down to reduce psychic entropy and practice disintegration of thought. And Sam Sam is often lying down next to me.
Like most cats, Sam Sam is quite good at napping. One might even say she is an “expert sleeper”, but that might cause confusion with one of the modular-synth manufacturers we sometimes feature. She does have her own unique way of curling up, though, pull her tail close to her head and sometimes even grabbing it with her paw. It’s adorable, and it never fails to make me smile.
She enjoys the soft blankets, either the burgundy or gray. But she almost always chooses the same corner of the bed. This is not surprising, as all of us at CatSynth are creatures of habit.
We hope you all have a relaxing and enjoyable weekend. For us, it will be a bit stressful once again, but with very focused study and practice on both the technological and musical fronts. But I will do my best to keep Sam Sam’s example in mind as I work through it. We can learn much from our cats!
Zelda the Grey returns, with an Ableton Push controller and Arturia Keystep. From skaterdays on Instagram.
@zelda_the_grey is sleeping on the job again in the music studio.
It’s been a little while since we last attended Church of Thee Super Serge at Robotspeak in San Francisco, but we made a point of going this past weekend. For those who have not been there or read our past reviews, it’s an almost-ever-month show on a Saturday afternoon with live hardware-synthesizer performances. As the name suggests, some acts do include Serge synthesizers, but it is not required, and a wide variety of instruments are used. All three sets are featured in our most recent CatSynth TV episode.
The first set featured Lx Rudis performing on an Oberheim Xpander, a somewhat underappreciated instrument from the 1980s.
At its heart, the Xpander is a 6 voice analog synthesizer, but with a complex array of digital controls that can be programmed and applied independently to each voice. Lx Rudis took full advantage of these, especially the LFOs and lag generators, to create subtle and minimal metric patterns. He constantly moved voices in and out, configuring them on the fly, in a way that was very expressive and musical. I particularly liked the sections which had staccato rhythmic textures against slowly moving timbres deliberately out of sync with one another.
Next up was Franck Martin, who performed a solo set on a modular synthesizer with several standalone instruments.
Martin’s setup included a Moog Subharmonicon, which he built while attending Moogfest this year (we at CatSynth are a bit envious), as well as a DFAM (Drummer From Another Mother). There were also additional voices provided by Braids and Plaits modules from Mutable Instruments that he could bring in and out using a touch-plate interface. The result was a slowly changing beat pattern with an eerie inharmonic voicing and gentle undulation.
The final set featured our friends Gino Robair and Tom Djll teaming up as the brilliantly named Unpopular Electronics.
They had a wide variety of gear, including Serge panels in addition to Eurorack modules and standalone instruments from Bugbrand and others. In addition, Gino had an interesting small case that included touchpads.
The music was frenetic and intense, an avalanche of pops and hits and loud cloudlike tone clusters. And there were trumpet sounds entering into the mix at various points. But there was an exquisite detail to the madness with changes among the different instruments and sounds, and musical pauses and rests before the pair dived back into the frenzy. There were also many moments of humor and not just Djll’s book about why there aren’t any Zeppelin-style airships in the United States.
In between sets, it’s fun to browse around Robotspeak and see what’s for sale, or on display in the big glass case.
It’s also quite dangerous, as I am often tempted to leave with another module or instrument. On this occasion, I exercised restraint, but probably not next time…
Dave (we’re pretty sure it’s Dave), sitting on top of a microKORG synthesizer. Actually, two microKORGs! That expression is priceless 😸
From Karl Lee Avery via Facebook.
We also espy a familiar red Korg Mini Kaoss Pad. We have one of those around here somewhere.
Cat rings a service bell to that is fed into an audio signal chain as part of this ambient electronic composition.
By Andor Polgar on YouTube, via matrixsynth.
The signal path: Poes rings the service Bell for food, the microphone picks up the sound, which then goes through a stereo volume pedal (it’s for attenuating the chewing sounds). Make Noise Maths is used as an envelope follower, which controls the sound of the Erica Synth Black Wavetable Oscillator.
https://instagram.com/_andormade
http://andor.cool
We at CatSynth absolutely adore this video and feline performance. And we are thinking about ways to get Sam Sam into a live synthesizer performance 😸