For this assignment, I highlighted the Tocante Bistab, a handheld, touch-sensitive 24-voice analog synthesizer designed by Peter Blasser. Although it can be played straight, somewhat like a xenharmonic electronic melodica (that you don’t have to blow into), it also has a set of touch points that allow all sorts of chaos to erupt forth. When cross-modulated this way, the square wave oscillators start evolving new timbres and it can unexpectedly begin to sound like an electric guitar, an angry saxophone, a flute, a human voice, hellish machinery, or who knows what…
I didn’t immediately warm to it, setting it aside for a time after it arrived in the mail. For me, it took an intuitive approach and a temporary loss of inhibitions for it to finally click. (I still have a long, long way to go to ever master it.) I don’t understand how Peter Blasser was able to design a circuit that produces steerable, slowly-evolving chaos. It seems alive at times. Sometimes it seems like it’s playing me.
Besides using it play drones in the dark late at night, I’ve found that it can also be used to generate usable polyphonic MIDI material when fed through an audio-to-midi plugin and rhythmically quantized. I’m very curious about the other Tocante models – do they have the same fierce spirit as the Bistab? I hope to have chance to try some of them out before making another purchase.
For this piece, I created a rhythm track using an Ellitone Ultrarollz Farm Detective, which I believe is based on Peter Blasser’s Rollz-5 paper circuits. I used an instance of AAS Objeq Delay to make this sound more like acoustic drums. Then I played the Tocante Bistab on top of this, using another instance of Objeq Delay to provide an echo effect.
