Tuesday 30 December 2014

Sustained Tone Branch




Here is a new Benge album. From the liner notes:

This series of work explores the threshold between dissonant tone and harmonic structure. With each piece this liminal point is drawn out over time (x-axis). The various sound layers can be described in the vertical plane (y-axis). The resultant sound images can be drawn in the mind's eye whilst listening to the pieces

Friday 26 December 2014

Wednesday 24 December 2014

Good Arpenoon


Thanks Larry ;-)

Sunday 21 December 2014

Thursday 4 December 2014

Video Peace


Check out this amazing / scary video to our xmas single Find Peace:

Wednesday 3 December 2014

Console Myself


Messing about with the scalpel again...

Tuesday 2 December 2014

Tone Test


Some nice vintage Serge and Buchla 100 tones:

Six Feet East


Had a superb night on Saturday at our gig in East London. Lone Taxidermist were as sensational as ever, and DJ Doran ruled on the 1's & 2's. Heres us trying to break the tiny sound system, and below that some nice shoes

Monday 1 December 2014

Top Spot


Its been a really amazing year here at Meme-Central. I've been involved in the writing and production of some really exciting album projects - as always! But this year has been especially awesome for lots of reasons - and its super-gratifying to get some critical acclaim once in a while: this years Quietus top 100 list has just been published and I have two albums in it - the first is Wrangler's LA Spark, at No.76 and also Gazelle Twin's debut album Unflesh at No.1 - NUMBER ONE!!!! Congratulations Elizabeth -- WOOOOO!!!!

Monday 24 November 2014

Gig Alert


Come down on Saturday to our little London gig while tix are still avail...

Friday 21 November 2014

1978 Delay


I just got a crazy new FX unit - it's from 1978 making it one of the very first digital units available. Its really neat because it is a combination of strange lo-fi reverb and three delay lines and all the parameters are voltage controllable. So you can switch on and off the delays, select which delay is active and stuff like that. In this video I am controlling it from the Roland 100M. The sequencer is triggering a modified DR55 drum machine which is going into the DRS78, and the last stage of the sequencer is switching between reverb and delay and also switching the delays over. Pretty cool!

Peace On Earth


New colab between me and Hannah Peel. Pre-order here!

A video posted by @hannahpeelmusic on

Word of the Week #65


Sunday 16 November 2014

Films (Layers) Film


I made a video for Forms Series Two:

Tuesday 11 November 2014

Kunst Klang




Sound is art is sound...

Kunst Klang, Mix One by Zagoba on Mixcloud

Feral Mix


My friend Hugo is making a film! Here is his blog. Hugo lives in NY and the film is a dark and moody love story set on the NY mean streets. I'm really excited because I'm going to be working on the soundtrack - WOOO! Here is taster - doesn't it look beautiful?

Tuesday 4 November 2014

Eden Projection




I had a fabbo time last week with Paul at the Eden Project, where they were showing my second favourite Sci-Fi film ever - Silent Running. It was the most amazing place to see this film - in a geodesic-bio-dome environment for heavens sake! What was even better was there was a live set before the screening by some synth-boffs (Adrian Utley and Will Gregory) a talk about the film by Mark Kermode. Silent running itself was amazing - its actually the first time I've seen it on a very big screen. Theres so much I love about the design and feel of the film, the 1970s pastoral music, the electronic sound effects (made on an ARP 2600), the ideas in it - and Bruce Dern losing at poker to a droid with no face. Here is a clip of the performance in the bio-dome before the film:

Arp Waves


See the new update in this post

Monday 3 November 2014

Exorcised


A real video, made on video:

Sunday 2 November 2014

Interior Motifs 2


Fast-forward seven years from Captain Scarlet and you have Gerry Anderson's Space 1999, which still looks futuristic to me although it was in fact meant to be going back in time from 2068 to 1999. So thats 2068 - 1999 + 7 = 76, the year it actually debuted, if you add 1

Interior Motifs


Paul sent me a link to some screen shots from Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet series. Check out these beautiful set designs. I want to build a studio like that!

Friday 31 October 2014

Demo for Jono


Here is a demo of the ARP2500 for Jono who just bought an ARP2500. I'm using the 1050 Mix Sequencer to create a drum pattern:

UPDATE: And here's one straight back at me from Jono in Australia!



UPDATE 2: Ok, so here is another patch I made in return. Its quite a complicated one which involves some other synthesiser modules so here goes: The Arp sequencer is sending 3 CVs out to the Arp mix sequencer which is being clocked by step 1 of the sequencer. This provides a pitch array of 32 notes which controls an Arp VCO. The VCO is going into the Filtamp module which is being controlled by an Arp envelope. Now here is the complicated part: the triggers from the Arp sequencer are not firing the envelope on every step but are being subdivided into shorter patterns and bursts by the Serge Modular clock divider and bi-directional router. So each step of the sequencer is first sent to the clock divider and the 1/3rd output is going to ch-1 of the router, and 1/5ths is going to ch-2. Then the 1/7th output is being used to switch the router and the result is pseudo-random triggering of the envelope, but always rhythmically related to the sequence clock. The Serge sequencer is then being triggered slowly from step 1 of the Arp sequencer and this also controls the frequency of the VCO to add to the complexity of the melody. The audio signal is then being split in two, half going to the Buchla 100 reverb and the other going to a Bel BD80 digital delay for stereo tastiness

Sunday 26 October 2014

Friday 24 October 2014

Benge - Loop Series Two


Here is a brand new album. Hope you like it



Loop Series2 Booklet by Zack Dagoba

Thursday 23 October 2014

Red Gallery Gig


Here is our recent gig at the Red Gallery in Old Street, London:

UPDATE:

And hot off the press here is The Quietus review of our first festival! and here from The Electricity Club

Word of the Week #64


Monday 13 October 2014

Divisions


Big Al came down this weekend and we ended up playing on the Serge Modular because it was looking at us in a weird way. He showed me how you could use the clock divider module to split an oscillator into 7 harmonically related tones and this got me thinking. I put the 7 outputs into 7 VCAs and used 7 LFOs to modulate them and 3 steps of the sequencer to slowly change the pitch of the master oscillator. Then I put it through an Ibanez digital delay and layered up 3 passes - here is the result:

Wednesday 8 October 2014

Sensoreal




And here is us performing Sensoria at the Sensoria Festival in Sheffield the other night:

Phantom Power


Heres an interview with Mal that he did just before we went on stage in Birmingham:

Phantom Circuit #148 (6th Oct. 2014) by Phantom Circuit on Mixcloud

Sonic Static


Just got back from our whistle-stop tour of UK which was great fun. We met lots of friends on the way - thanks everyone for making the effort to see us! Heres a pic by Gary Sonic of me in action:

Tuesday 30 September 2014

Technologically Speaking No.3


Cabaret Voltaire as featured in E&EM mag from 1984! Scanned by Dave Noyze

cv int by Zack Dagoba

Technologically Speaking No.2


John Foxx, on his new collaboration with Steve D'Agostino called Evidence of Time Travel (which I love BTW)

jf int by Zack Dagoba

Technologically Speaking No.1


Here are some recent interviews:

Gazelle Twin, on the making of Unflesh (I took that picture BTW)

gt int by Zack Dagoba

Sunday 28 September 2014

Strange Drum Machine


In this post I showed you my modded DR55 drum machine. Well Kieth added another input to trigger the hi-hat which for some reason we had forgotten about so now all 4 sounds have trigger ins (bass drum, snare, hh and a nice 'dock!' sound). Here it is in action, this time with the mighty Serge:



The four drum machine sounds are being triggered by the Serge sequencer except for the bass drum which is getting a divided pulse from the main clock. Therefore when I am playing with the sequencer outputs the main clock is still triggering the bass drum. The output is split into two streams, one going to some phasers in series, the other to the Wilson Analog Delay module, which is being modulated by one of the sequencer outputs. By the way, the sequencer is outputting voltages to trigger the DR55 inputs, and these have varying effects on each drum sound depending on the voltage level as set by the sequencer knobs. What a strange drum machine this creates! Here is a patch diagram:

Misfits


I saw this over on Matrixsynth and thought it was worth making into a PDF and posting here for posterity

Originally the article was scanned by Dave Noyze here

Misfits by Zack Dagoba

Word of the Week #63


Saturday 20 September 2014

Moors Music



When we were filming the Zombies 85 film Maf shot some footage of me driving up on the moors. So I have set a bit of it to music, all composed on the Roland 100M modular. The sounds were set up using a miraculous set of books called The Synthesizer made by Roland to accompany the System 100M - see below

CLAP
SNARE
BASS DRUM
TOM TOM
CYMBAL

Wrangler News


Here is some Wrangler News. We have a new online shop! Here you can buy CDs, Vinyl, T-Shirts, and we will be adding some more cool stuff soon - like signed artwork and stuff! Also, here is a flyer Dancon did for our upcoming UK shows:

Serge Flows


The Serge Modular is a very curious device - not least because it's modules are not really 'modular'. Each panel contains a different array of pre-chosen modules which are specified when purchasing a system. Therefore when buying second hand panels it is always the case that someone else has planned which modules are put together, and they have invariably been smoking pot. I have been looking for the highly elusive "Wilson Analog Delay" module for many years but they are extremely rare and the only ones I have seen have been in panels with other modules I have not wanted for one reason or another. Or they have been too overpriced for me to consider. Well luckily I managed to find a UK seller on ebay with a panel at the right price, and what is more the module combination on this panel is fantastic - I now have the remaining modules that I have been looking for to complete my Serge system - including a Wave Multiplier, Envelope Detector, Pulse Divider, N-Comp, Wilson Delay, and two mixers. Yahoo!

Cat Twin


Me and Phil saw this on a poster in Zurich Airport last week - looks like a Gazelle Twin cat! That reminds me - the new Gazelle Twin album is out tomorrow - YAY!

Tuesday 2 September 2014

Taxing


Fun in the studio with Nat and Phil...



Monday 1 September 2014

Quadrasonics


Sefa and Ben sent me a magazine through the post - its called Electronics Today from 1972. Its really interesting reading through it - imagining a world where digital watches were an exciting development on the horizon, and the likes of Sansui would fill our homes with amazing Quadrasonic Sound. That never caught on really...