The Roll
Recent posts
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Bought this beauty just before New Year, and now rabidly stack new patches for it. While it can read (with limitations) patches and soundbanks from Access Virus TI, it goes way further: aside from VA oscillators there are Multisaw, Wavetable, Grain and Formant oscillators, and you are not limited to Virus’ hardwired selection of waveforms,
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Just relaunched and heavily updated the website, changing theme/design, removing the redundant section (‘Soundware’ is linked directly to Gumroad now), and making it more suitable for mobile users. So – welcome again!
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MATRICES is a preset pack for Native Instruments FM8 software synthesizer, one of the absolute pinnacles of 6-operator FM-synthesis. The synth is old: next year it hits 20, but the only thing obsolete about it is its unscalable interface. Otherwise it’s still a hell of a synth with a very broad sonic palette, and immense
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Actualized quite a few pages here, including ‘bands’, ‘solo works’, and ‘soundware’ sections. Added all recent releases – it appears I had as many as four full-lengths this year, and the new items at blacksidedsun.gumroad.com. This was a very productive year, and more is in the works.
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Finally managed to revive Absynth 5 in my system. Native Instruments dropped it from their active roster, and even those who have purchased it earlier may have hard times installing it on Windows 10. In my case it was kinda outrage: Native Access (a controlling/licensing/updating software) would download an .ISO file, then report installing it…
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‘The Day of Life Forgotten,’ the experimental electronics net-label, have released black-sided sun’s latest album ‘Summa Timorum’ (The Sum of Fears). As per label’s message: ‘Dark ambient, post-industrial, experimental electronics. New album by black-sided sun delivers exceptionally dark and precisely detailed sound scape. An epic, and hopeless, sound canvas, both startling and attracting at the
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I’ve blogged recently about the AI muzak from YouTube that I have to hear every time as our band’s scrambling for live performing. It looks like there’s kind of a development. Expectedly unexpected – or vice versa: the AI ‘reimaginings’ of classic rock music – or any other. I’ve bumped into a flick of Scorpions’
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I’ve been pretty silent recently simply out of fatigue. A lot of things is happening, some good, some bad, some neutral. We had a hellish gig last Wednesday, when my keyboard’s LCD display nearly died (I’ve kind of fixed this later), a loudspeaker standing on a subwoofer literally fell off it almost right on my
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A quartet of expats from Russia and Belarus. Seen a thing or two in our lives, some even more than they ever wanted to. Nowadays we’re playing music that is in high demand, and surprisingly those are rock’n’rolls above all things. Frankly I’m no big fan of the old rock’n’roll when it comes to listening,
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Static Apparitions has hit 202 collections on Bandcamp now. The highest score, however, still holds 2023: The Longest Road, part I – 312 collections: Its followup landed in 274 Bandcamp accounts: The long-in-the-work Aurtengwl is in 280 collections so far: Other than that there was Detritus, the album released by Russian net-label ‘The Day of
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First place in Drone category on Bandcamp, and fifth place in Ambient category right now. Also dropped the special version, as promised:
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Static Apparitions – a new release of my project ‘black-sided sun’. Genre – dark ambient. Released by Neotantra label (a lot of gratitude goes to Lee Norris). Released as free download. Tomorrow I’ll launch a special version of this album on my own page.
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Dropped the first track from the next album last night. The track is called ‘Sleep’, and the album – ‘Summa Timorum’ (Lat. ‘The Sum of Fears’). Genre: Noise, Dark Ambient, Industrial.Release: TBA The track has been created using Surge XT and Vital, custom-made patches only.
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The onslaught of AI upon the music field is staggering and terrifying. Over the last few days I’ve stumbled upon an incredible amount of the low-effort content on Youtube, covering some unexpected areas: there are AI-generated extreme metal ‘records’, AI-generated krautrock, and, of course, tons of AI-spawned ambient. These genres tend to be less formulaic,
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I have a mini-amp for Behringers near-field monitors, but a month ago or so its (lousy) power adaptor went South. A new one just arrived so I have the stuff back in business.
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A short but fierce hurricane cut our yesternight performance short as we started our third set. Played just one song – during which summer restaurants chairs started flying around. That’s how it was: ‘Titanic vibes’, some people commented afterwards. Well, indeed. Especially when you’re on the stage that has been already crushed down by snow
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Cyanea is the bank for Vital I’ve been working on over the last few weeks. Vital is a mighty thing, although I’d love it to have some features of Surge XT. Just a wishful thinking, anyway. The full version of Cyanea pack consists of 56 presets, with half of them being pads. There are also
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Have my hands full with rehearsals and gigs – we’ve got some kind of a residentship with a local venue, which is an Irish Pub. The only problem for me is that it’s located on the other end of the city from our appartment, heh. On the other hand, walking just under 3 miles one
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Finalized a track yesternight, did some rough mixing-up earlier today. The electric guitar parts are real: awfully recorded four layers. I’m getting somewhat better with guitar tremolo, but it’s way too far from ideal. Well, it’s a demo, anyway.
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The weekend is going to be busy: Quite unfortunately I’ve been hit with nasty flu, so I’ll have to perform wearing a medical mask this time. Not an enjoyable experience. Elsewhere, it is utterly enjoyable to see how many people come to download Luminophore pack. And it looks like it’s not only about being free
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Recently looked into my – quite multiple – bandcamp accounts and discovered that the very first album by my first band had been released around this time back in 2007. 18 years ago. I was 18 years old myself when this project – Lacklustre Mirror – started out. Had zero comprehension how things are done
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Earlier today have uploaded a free pack for Surge XT synth to Gumroad (as freeware). And within hours got 5 downloads, with sixth extra – someone picked another freeware pack I’ve made for WhispAir previously. Looks like at least some interest is there. I guess, I know which synth I’ll be making patches for next.
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Uploaded my bank for Full Bucket Music‘s ‘Code Zero-One’ to Gumroad as a freebie. Code Zero-One is the free bank, which also contains custom wavetables created with AUDIOTERM software. They can be used separately. The winner of the KVR Audio Developer Challenge 2021, WHISPAIR is a 3-osc wavetable synthesizer with significant modulation capabilities, written in
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Messed up miserably yesterday uploading wrong files to Gumroad. Fortunately, fixed the issue before anyone purchased the libs. Aside from this converting the source DX7-compatible patches to FM8’s own format adding bells-n-whistles like filters and effects.
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The months-long work is done: Phi Mu Labs, vol. II – the FM-synthesis based sound library for Korg WAVESTATE synthesizer has been completed and published at Gumroad along with the first one. And here goes the video demo of several performances created with those multisamples I’ve been rendering and looping over all that time: Please
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In 1983 YAMAHA Corp. released DX7, the first successful digital synthesizer and is one of the best-selling electronic instruments in history, selling more than 200,000 units. DX7 and its derivative models utilized the Frequency Modulation sound generation technology developed by John Chowning at Stanford University and previously deployed, although with little commercial success, by Don Buchla.
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Second cinematic library for KORG WAVESTATE NATIVE plugin and hardware WAVESTATE synthesizer is coming – with a bonus.
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The latest gig was kinda alright, although the venue left a very unpleasant impression due to an abundancy of trashed barflies who appeared to be dying to put on some cheap-sounding muzak right after our performance. One of them – a particularly drunk and probably stoned – slammed us loudly for the refusal of playing
mirrorhe[art] 