CascaMesa

Passive (Euro/Tabletop) Drum and Drama Device

Hallo! So dig this - we made a Euro passive thing!

Well sort of. Electricity isn't magic like that. Let me rephrase - we made a thing that can take in various gates and other errant signals from a whole myriad of energy sources such as solar panels, microbial fuel cells, as well as the usual sequencers, gates and control voltages to make strange sounds that could be construed as drones. Or beats. Or chirps. Or whatever. Even better, is has three channels that are normalized to each other so you can be all massive drone or three channel beat monster all in the same unit, hence the whole drum and drama classification. Also, for those looking for additional space or looking to head to the hills for one of those "I'm gonna go drone in some park with these folks who are all dressed like wizards" experience, you can also decouple this thing from the panel and use it as a tabletop box - hey now, a convertible!

Here's how it came about. Sometime in the early part of the last decade I designed a synth called TicoTron while I was still living in Costa Rica that was presented as the first of what would eventually be a whole bunch of workshops that've been presented across the planet over the course of the past 15-ish years or so. And part of said thingy was a sequencer which worked by replacing the power supply of each module with the fluctuating voltage of the sequencer, effectively turning that module into a passive module of sorts when the sequencer was engaged. As time went on, the oscillator section of said instrument evolved into the VF Eyecillator instrument and later the EyeTron and the sequencer section was kind of left by the wayside - and in some ways, it kind of also still is - BUT - as my own interests in sound and electronics shift towards exploring sustainability in electronic music, I decided to revisit the concept behind this circuit, but with a bring-your-own sequencer and/or power source type vibe.

So here's how this works. There's three channels on this beast - they're all normalized together so if you only have one source it'll transfer to all three. If you have more than one it'll interrupt and then you have two channels or potentially three if you so desire. To make this thing do stuff, it's a matter of patching some sort of signal and voltage into this thing - ideally DC and probably between +2 and +9 volts, or roughly thereabouts. If it's more of a stable source, you'll probably get some sort of chirping drone. If you send it some sort of percussive or gate signal, you'll get something more drum-machiney. Run a sequence into it, you'll most likely end up with some sort of wacky acid. Or one can hope. Can't say I've done that yet. Ala controls, the three top pots control the base frequency of each voice while the bottom three control the volume. All said, it's kid of fun - and will hopefully be the basis of a couple fun projects over the next couple months.

As is tradition, I should also probably explain a bit behind the name. When dreaming up this thing, I was also dreaming up the concept of organizing some sort of experimental new music festival in and around my homestead in Ithaca, NY - and, as my gooftroop town has a whole bundle of waterfalls, otherwise known as cascadas in spanish, the thought was to name to festival something along the lines of "Cascamor" or something pretentious-sounding like that. And to fund the whole "pay artists actual money and cover operating expenses" thing, the plan was to have these things out and into the world as a fundraiser of sorts. Which is still kind of the plan - but as it turns out, the logistics behind organizing one of those things if pretty heavy, especially when there's a finite amount of time between inventing fundraising material, booking acts, confirming guarantees, advertising and promoting, etcetcetc. Not to say that it won't happen, there's just a little more legwork that I should probably take care of to not have this be all Fyre Fest in the Finger Lakes here.

So in the meantime, the plan is to scale things back a bit - instead of trying to fund a big-ticket fest, what about using this to develop a fund for touring acts to pay a decent guarantee when time allows, ideally building awareness of the Ithaca scene, incentivizing musicians to come through and paying it forward in some sort of cyclical musical economy type dealy. Or one can hope - I'm prone to fits of utopian idealism from time to time.

https://vauxflores.com/electronics/cascamesa/