I finally decided to pair the Monomachine and Octatrack together, and over the past week or so, built up a live set with the intention of making something even more avantgarde than what I usually do. Took them to a bar on Friday night and recorded this… I think it went well!
Here’s the recording, no external effects or editing, apart from a light master.
Nice stuff… Good pairing & I really like the sound design. I don’t know why I don’t hear more glitch-y stuff done with the MM, it’s so well suited to it.
That’s really good. Were you tempted to use any of sounds from Autechre sysex dump ?
Thanks for listening guys!
Ha, the thought did cross my mind… I was pretty inspired though, their kits helped me to get a bit more weird with my sound design.
Yeah! Especially paired with the OT; they work even better together than I expected.
The LFO-d VO machine on the third track is something I’ve been experimenting with a bit recently, you nailed it though. Is the reverb on that sound from the OT?
Yeah! HOLD LFO on vowels and consonants, with crazy arp settings. Sent out the C/D outputs and in via the C/D inputs on the OT through dark reverb. It’s such mental stuff, I love using it like that!
Any plans to release your live set as sysex dumps ? 
Haha! Maybe one day 
Daft question I’m sure but what are HOLD LFOs ?
When an LFO is set to HOLD it means that it’s basically free running all the time in the background, but whenever the LFO is trigged (usually on a note trig but the LFO can be trigged independently) it samples the current value and applies it to the parameter it’s assigned to. Next trig, it samples the value again and re-applies it to the parameter.
It means you can get a pseudo-random variation in a parameter (a random LFO set to ONE can have a similar effect).
But it means you can also e.g. have a ramping up LFO over a series of trigs but the parameter value only increases on each LFO trig, and is held until the next trig, rather than a smooth constant increasing value.
Cool. Thanks for the explanation. I’ll give that a try.
How great is track two. It’s out there and funked up but blissful. Fab stuff
You did this over a week? Damn. I’ve got a show coming up in early January and have nothing close to this for a similar setup. I think I may be trying too hard for beats and melody when I’m a noisy guy at heart. I need to re embrace this sound.
Thanks guys!
Yeah @jshell, I was getting a bit anxious as I was asked to play the gig while I was away on holiday, so had around two weeks to prepare something once I got back—I like to have new material for each gig, as I don’t play very often—and then my Digitone died! I nearly fell back to my good trusty nanoloop2 cart with tons of material… but I’m glad I pushed through and got things going on the Elektrons. It was a good push to get back into the Monomachine, especially after the Autechre sysex files were released.
The majority of it was written in a couple of afternoons. I think I’m best when I’m under a bit of pressure, haha!
edit: and yeah, I definitely embraced the fact that it was a seated/more casual environment (an indie videogames bar) than the usual gigs I play among lineups of people who make danceable music.
listening now, really enjoying it … like @jshell i’m astonished you came up with such complex music in a week! i can hear why it might have gone over well with a bunch of gamers 
i always enjoy listening even more when i know a bit about what’s going on … anything else you can say about your setup and the tunes? which bits are OT and which are MnM, how you interlocked the sequencers, resampling you might have done, etc.?
I’ll put the sysex (+OT project? not sure how to package that) up at some point, but I’ll say a few things now.
Octatrack was taking care of all percussion sounds, plus some longer chord+bass sequences, mostly in track 2, where I wanted a longer progression but didn’t want to chain Monomachine patterns. Most of the drum sounds were sampled from my Nord Lead or Nanoloop 2, and other sounds were cut from pop songs from various eras, mostly 80s… but most were mangled beyond recognition and used as texture. And of course, there’s a recording of someone playing Doom 2 that I grabbed from Youtube 
Monomachine was the remaining melodic content; only between two and four tracks were actually synths, the rest effects (mostly chorus and reverb). Lots of the super warpy stuff is just one-shot ramp LFOs on pitch. I really learned how to embrace atonality/polytonality for this stuff! I also used a lot of arpeggiators, particularly in random mode on the slowest speed, so notes could be semi-aleatoric within the constraints of the rhythm.
As for the interplay between them, apart from some OT reverb on one or two of the Monomachine tracks, everything was pretty much straight as it sounded out of each machine. I did plan to do some resampling and mangling, but in the end I didn’t really need to, it was weird enough already
Monomachine was sending clock into OT, with the boxes not sequencing each other at all. Program changes were manual. Patterns were set up so I didn’t have to worry about remembering mutes/unmutes—each track consisted of 4 patterns on each machine, and each group of patterns started with the most minimal version. Of course I did still use mutes though. I also did some pretty extensive pattern manipulation, especially towards the end of track 3 where it spontaneously evolved into a footwork style pattern and then into real triplets. It’s the first time I’ve really done that at a gig, and it was fun!
Also thanks!
Thanks for all the detail man, looking forward to listening and enjoying all over again with this in mind.
BTW the first few minutes of track 3 were especially gorgeous!