modular

Farewell to 2024: Beautiful Dissonance

2024 has come to a close, so it is time for our traditional end-of-year collage and post. You might notice another kitty in the corner this year – that’s Golda, one of the wonderful cats I stayed with in Berlin. She is representing our European adventure this summer, along with Plac Grunwaldzki in Wroclaw, Poland.

It was a banner year musically. I am especially proud of the album, the best musical work I have done to date! If you haven’t heard it yet, you should. Opening the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival was a special experience. And we had numerous other musical adventures both live and recorded, and an ever growing community of musicians scattered across the country and beyond that are not just colleagues, but friends.

It was a banner year for CatSynth TV, our best to date in terms of viewership, subscriptions, and audience interaction. 50% year-over-year growth ain’t bad. January of 2024, with NAMM, was our best month on record. We even saw an uptick in blog readership, including a new cohort of loyal followers for our cat+synth posts and Wordless Wednesday.

Indeed, with CatSynth TV, I look not only at what we accomplished this year, but what was left undone. So many videos partially complete or in the ideation phase, waiting to be finished in 2025. We are particularly looking to jumpstart our interview series that was big in 2023 but took a bit of a back seat this year because of various circumstances.

The dissonance between things at a personal and CatSynth level, and at a national and world level, is deafening. The election here in the U.S. this year was tragic and heartbreaking, and this coming year is going to be difficult. This time, it wasn’t a fluke, it was a choice, and we chose…unwisely. In my usual cynical way, the best I hope for is sheer incompetence by the new regime, but even so, a lot of people will be hurt, including people who are a lot like me.

So we go into 2025 in a very strange place. The personal successes and hopes for the New Year, set against the fear and coming disasters in the world. All we have is forward motion, each other, and defiance.

Sam Sam, MiniBrute 2, Modular, Octave CAT

Black and white cat standing on a covered synthesizer and keenly inspecting the patch bay on an Arturia MiniBrute 2 analog synthesizer. Next to her head is a small modular setup with modules from several manufacturers.

It’s rare that Sam Sam ever gets up on one of the synth desks, so when she did I rushed to snap some photos. This was the best one, with her standing on our vintage Octave CAT (safely covered) and inspecting the Arturia MiniBrute and RackBrute modular setup.

A full account of synth brands in this photo can be found in the tags.

Rimuru, ASM Hydrasynth, Korg Minilogue XD, Prophet 08

Tabby cat with tiger stripes sitting on a synthesizer. Above him are an ASM Hydrasynth, Korg Minilogue XD, Prophet 08, and more.

Rimuru has grown quite a bit since he last appeared on CatSynth as a tiny kitten. Here he is as a handsome fellow posing confidently with the same ASM Hydrasynth and Prophet 08, now joined by a Korg Minilogue XD. I also think that’s the same Roland Fantom that he posed on last time. We also see a cool-looking Eurorack system to the left, but we’ll leave identification of the modules as an exercise to the reader.