My latest musical project, a 4-track EP made entirely with the Arturia Microfreak (plus FX and sequencing in Renoise, obviously), is now complete and up on Bandcamp. Although my original intention to do an ambient record hasn't exactly worked out - it's maybe a bit dense and busy sounding for that - I have mostly resisted using any drums though, so that's pretty rare if not entirely novel for me. Thematically it's about memory and was kind of riffing on the recent blog post I wrote about nostalgia, though to be honest, I'm not sure if any of that comes through. Musically, I'm reasonably happy with it. I still feel like I'm just scratching the surface of what the Microfreak is capable of, but I like the slightly gritty and crunchy sound of it. It's clipping in places, but I like the feel of it. Trying to write entire tracks just using a single hardware synth is still an annoying workflow and I think part of why the ambient direction failed is because I just couldn't be arsed to commit to separating the writing and arranging process from the production and performance. Developing the arrangement means rendering individual tracks, as obviously the synth can only play back one patch at a time, and that meant that I quickly found myself working with loops, and building the songs by twisting and editing those loops like samples rather than going back to the MIDI tracks and really using the Microfreak to develop the arrangements. It's turned out canny though. I'm much happier with it than I was with the Korg NTS-1 EP.