Same. My fascination with this period went into overdrive late last year when I became obsessed with the music of Oval / Markus Popp, in particular his work after 95 Diskont up to the So album. During this period, Popp was primarily using SoundMaker with the SoundMagic FX plugin suite to process audio (sourced variously from CDs and a Waldorf Microwave XT). You can hear these fx, which include granular and spectral processes as well as waveset distortion, on every single Oval release between 1996-2003, including the Microstoria records and So.
Apparently the Mego patch programmed by Andi was called “Paris”. I’m fairly certain that this is what Fennesz used for “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)” (his first laptop production) as lloopp didn’t surface until 1998. Fennesz’ second album, Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56’ 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51’ 08", seems to be mostly lloopp, you can hear in particular the granular synthesis acts all over that record. But I understand he was also attempting to make his own rudimentary patches. By Endless Summer I’d guess that it was a mix of lloopp, Pluggo and possibly some Supercollider stuff. But who really knows.
Some other stuff to check out:
MSP Granular Synthesis patch v2.5 (2000) by Nobuyasu Sakonda
Thonk by Audio Ease
Argeïphontes Lyre by Akira Rabelais
Hopefully soon I’ll be able to get an old Powerbook of my own. Especially excited to try the SoundMagic FX plugins, afaik the waveset distortion processes have yet to be implemented anywhere else outside of the CDP (which isn’t much fun to use).
