Through the maze

Making live IDM sometimes feels like walking through a maze: you have to accept getting lost, but also learn how to find your way back. This patch is built around a soft, grainy Ciat Lombarde Tetrax sample recorded into the Sebsongs Sampler. The sampler is reset every bar and sequenced by a looped one-bar random CV from Pam’s Pro Workout. I manually reseed that loop from Steppy from time to time, so the sampler keeps shifting while staying rhythmically coherent. The Sebsongs Sampler runs into Mutable Instruments Beads, with modulation from the Doepfer Quad VC Random. Battering Ram’s inverted envelope ducks the sampler voice, creating sudden cuts, reverb gaps and little pockets of space. The beat comes from a combination of Battering Ram and Erica Synths Perkons Voice, both sequenced by Metropolix with some probabilistic movement. I also control the global probability manually during the performance. Battering Ram is modulated by Gliss, while Perkons Voice is shaped by Planar 2 and Metropolix. Harlequin’s Context modulates 2hp Slice, through which Perkons Voice is processed. There is a lot of modulation going on here — honestly too much for me to remember every single routing — but the result is an ambient glitch IDM patch full of small accidents, sudden cuts and shifting textures. This take felt like an interesting path through the maze: somewhere between confusion and fluidity. Recorded live. Hope you enjoy the trip 🪐