4) A few words with Mochipet, who performed at Raw Thought On January 11th at the DNA Lounge – A Tale Of Modular Synthesizers – Another Open Source Success Story – Mochipet is a modular synthesizer aficionado and he explains how the German company Doepfer’s decision to make their specs open has led to a flourishing of musical culture that would otherwise have been impossible.
To be clear: It’s two events in one – if you get there early enough (between 7-8:30pm) to learn about Police Surveillance and filing public records requests, great! If not, no biggie, just grab a drink and join the party.
Come to Raw Thought on March 8th (from 9pm-2am) & see Grumpy Green‘s super special Psychedelic Chill Room (an immersive space for both dancing & chilling).
Come to Raw Thought on March 8th (from 9pm-2am) & see Grumpy Green’s super special Psychedelic Chill Room (an immersive space for both dancing & chilling).
All pics below of Mochipet and kitties link to Mochipet songs :-)
Lisa Rein: So you mentioned that you’ve been feeling very experimental lately, and I saw on your instagram that you’ve been messing with a lot of new equipment.
Mochipet: I always do that.
LR: Well what are you playing with recently?
Mochipet: I’m doing a lot of modular synth stuff. I’ll probably be doing some modular synth stuff on Friday.
LR: Is that just a type of synthesizer? What’s “modular synth” exactly?
Mochipet: Modular synth is basically kind of like a synthesizer, with a bunch of parts. You can take separate parts and make a frankenstein thing of whatever you want.
It’s like if you had the ability to take the EQ off of one synthesizer, and then took the amp of another synthesizer, and then put them all together. All the pieces are modular. They’re separate. So you can put them all together and make a brand new thing.
LR: So it allows you to customize your sound?
Mochipet: Yes it’s very customized because everybody can put things together in a very different ways. It’s kind of like LEGOs I guess. That’s a great analogy: yes just like LEGOs. It’s just parts.
LR: Do the parts have to be a certain brand?
Made my first spaghetti 🍝 party last night. I need more cables. #mochipet #inthestudio #modularsynth #eurorack
Mochipet: No. There are many brands of modules. That’s the cool thing about it is that it’s a very decentralized system. So, basically, there’s a standard.
It’s kind of like the Internet: If people follow the standard their pages will work in a browser. This is kind of like that with modular synths. They all have a certain voltage. They all have a certain voltage range, for notes, and things like that.
There’s kind of a standard that this German company Doepfer made that other people just adopted. So there’s a lot of really small operations, individual people, making modules.
Doepfer made their specs open. There’s a lot of standards now where I think people realize if you make them open then you’re gonna get a lot more use out of it. If it was a closed system, nobody would use it. It would be useless. You need open systems in order for people to be able to participate,, and that really opens the door up for a lot of individuals to do really unique things. Because everybody thinks differently.
Rather than having a big bureaucratic company with standards and rules dictating whatever their idea of what the industry should be like. There’s none of that. Instead, it’s just random people making different things. But they all work together. So you can connect anything to anything and it will work, and you can make unique things out of it that nobody could ever make before.
LR: So that’s what those contraptions are that we see in your photographs?
Mochipet: Yeah yeah. It’s a really cool thing. It’s kind of new. Doepfer came out with it many years ago, but the whole modular synth “scene” kind of thing is pretty new. I mean like five or ten years old. People are doing it just because they love it. They are making really interesting instruments and they like coming up with ideas. Some of these modules, there are only like 50 of them. They’ll make 50. And they’ll sell em, and that’s it.
LR: So some of them are rare and hard to obtain?
Mochipet: Yes. Some of them become rare. Some of them are very hard to find. There’s a lot of them that are made all over the world. There’s this guy in China that makes really cool ones. There’s people in Italy that make really cool modules. There’s this company Make Noise, here in the states that’s very popular. It’s kinda nerdy. It’s kind of like open source programming, but with music. It’s like people can write little programs or functions or whatever and put it into the system. And then people can take it and ya know, do whatever they want with it. Do new things with it.
This one company, Mutable Instruments. They’re in France. All these companies are just like, one guy. There’s like a guy who designs the modules and he tells a guy how many knobs. But it’s just those guys. There’s no team. So he (the guy in France) started doing digital modules, which incorporate computer programming within them. All his stuff is open source too. So, you can take his code and make the module, or add more stuff to it, or change it. There’s an open source community spirit to it, which is really nice.
LR: Does he actually release it under an open source license?
Mochipet: Yes!
LR: (Lisa looks it up online.) Hey cool it’s a Creative Commons: cc-by-sa 3.0 license.
Yes, January 11th is the anniversary of Aaron’s death, but rather than to just say a few words and be sad, as is often the case on this blog every year, we are going to use the opportunity to raise awareness about his case and build out our community a bit, while everyone is paying attention. Our discussion will be from 7:30-9pm at the DNA Lounge – vegan pizza will be served. Email us at aaronswartzday@gmail.com or tweet/DM @AaronSwartzDay if you are interested in coming to our little info-filled dinner session from 7:30-9pm. RSVP required.
During our Aaron Swartz Day weekend in November (and around the world), many people came to meet others who care about helping the world and to learn from each other *even though they don’t know a lot about Aaron himself*.
Folks often learn more details about Aaron, what happened to him, and all of his various cool projects and causes *after they get there* – and I ended up wishing I had provided some introductory material to them before the conference.
So, this year, more than ever, it seemed important to bring his messages to a larger audience, with something positive to offer – even on this saddest of days coming up (January 11).
We hope no one is offended by our having a dance night on this day; and felt it best to explain our reasoning, just in case: We have a lot of work to do and it’s best to keep up our momentum from November’s event.
Thank you.
****original post below from December 12, 2018***
Raw Thought is a monthly dance event at the Above DNA Lounge – with a big room in front and a Psychedelic Chill Room in back, and DJs going, simultaneously, in both, from 10pm-2am.
Raw Thoughtwas the name of Aaron’s prolific blog, and one of the main goals of these events – besides providing a great place to meet people and dance – is to continue to spread Aaron’s knowledge and ideas to a larger audience.
In the fall of 2018, a group of Aaron Swartz-inspired DJs circling Noisebridge convinced us to have a dance night at the DNA Lounge in celebration of Aaron as an “Opening Night Party” to our Sixth Annual Aaron Swartz Day.
As a result, November 9, 2018 became the historic date of the very first “Raw Thought at the DNA Lounge.” (Here’s Tha Spyryt’s set from that night!) It was so awesome we all decided to keep doing it, once a month, in 2019.
Each Raw Thought features the sounds of the “Raw Thought Crew” – Six DJs with varying styles and flavors; all very experimental and progressive in nature. Some of them have more than one persona :)
3) “Property of the People” Lawsuit Proves Aaron Was Scooped Up In An FBI Investigation Back In 2007 – Aaron had been erroneously swept up in a 2007 terrorist investigation that, most likely, caused law enforcement agencies (FBI, DOJ) to treat him with rougher hands during its subsequent encounters with him afterwards.
4) A few words with Mochipet, who performed at Raw Thought On January 11th at the DNA Lounge – A Tale Of Modular Synthesizers – Another Open Source Success Story – Mochipet is a modular synthesizer aficionado and he explains how the German company Doepfer’s decision to make their specs open has led to a flourishing of musical culture that would otherwise have been impossible.
