In its most basic sense Dark Machine takes a single-oscillator monosynth and turns it into a 3-oscillator poly – but that’s really only one sixth of the story, since each of those three oscillators can in fact access 6 waveforms all at the same time. You can almost smell the hot circuitboards…! The constant background interference and crackle makes even the simplest patches sound aged and sepia-toned, while stacking up all the sawtooth flavours simultaneously and tweaking the Detune control yields an instant headrush of thick analogue power. Layered one on top of the other, the result is eerie and beautiful one moment, coarse and raging the next. Played polyphonically, the uncertainty of those uneven oscillators translates into a strange, unpredictable lushness.
While in other (saner) hands this might have become a fun restoration project, we were far more interested in capturing the soul of the synth in all its crackling, buzzing, humming goodness. The waveforms are grainy with interference and noise, occasionally fading in and out, crackling as the key contacts sputter, or slewing in pitch. Capacitors have leaked solder nodes have dried and cracked the keyboard contact points have corroded and become intermittent tuning is now unstable across the entire machine. Time, though, has not been kind to this little Cold War soldier. With crude components and basic point-to-point wiring, our source instrument was once a fairly simple monophonic keyboard – though with a quite ambitious range of waveform options, including various filtered sawtooths, a squarewave and a triangle. The heart of Dark Machine comes from a damaged, abandoned ex-Soviet transistor synthesiser which was clearly handbuilt at some point in the early 1970s.
Stackable, detunable waveforms for insane levels of thickness – up to 19 oscillators at once!.Powerful, comprehensive controls including LFO Sync, Overload and multiple Filters.Broken, erratic waveforms and randomised start-points ensure that every note is unique.Contact corrosion, capacitor failure and stability issues throughout.Ex-soviet handbuilt synthesiser with 3 flavours of sawtooth and considerable damage
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