What if you had a spaceship console installed in a sunlit corner of your living room? And what if, with the twist of a few knobs, you could navigate to the outer reaches of consciousness, all without disturbing the potted plant on your desk? That is the rough premise of a new micro-genre of YouTube video that has sprung up within the modular synthesizer community. Modular synths, sometimes likened to the craft beers of electronic music, are bespoke, infinitely recombinant electronic devices whose mysterious workings and DIY ethos inspire near-obsessive devotion. The artfully unpretentious demonstrations on YouTube occupy a strange, sui-generis niche: Featuring balmy sounds, blinking LEDs, and low-key set-dressing, they are part performance, part tech tutorial, and part audio-visual wallpaper. Once you have submitted to these videos, it can be hard to pull yourself away.
Consider the Los Angeles musician Emily Sprague’s “New Modular Landscape,” in which a light blue case bristling with knobs and colored wires sits on a kilim in what is presumably the artist’s bedroom, near a mattress on the floor, a cactus, and a Forbidden Planet poster. It’s a cozy room, with good light; I could live here, you might think. The music, ambient and unassuming, burbles pleasantly along, an echo of steel drum tugging at the edges of its pinging repetitions. The sound and image are so hypnotic, you might not even notice Sprague’s hand enter the frame, some three minutes in. She tweaks some knobs, pushes some buttons, and disappears once again; it feels less like she’s performing than maintaining some complicated piece of machinery with extreme discretion. The musician is relegated to a walk-on role—the synthesizer is the real star here. That’s a key trope in these videos. Often, there are no people at all, just brushed stainless-steel surfaces, muted colors, and whatever stunning backdrop is there to catch the eye. The visual presentation is as soothing as the music.
For the uninitiated, modular synthesizers are among electronic music’s most arcane devices. They are cobbled together out of interchangeable gizmos that, when connected via a tangle of cables, are capable of generating infinitely evolving, complex soundscapes. Each little box generally does just one thing—one might generate waveforms, another might create moving patterns of notes, and another might morph the sum total of those sounds into wild, unpredictable shapes. Put together, they resemble Rube Goldberg contraptions for the express creation of making sounds that surprise even their creators. And while modular synths are capable of making virtually any sound imaginable, they are particularly well suited to ambient music, where a certain formlessness is not just acceptable, but desired.
Sprague, who is a music producer and a member of the indie-folk band Florist, has made over a dozen of these videos, and her channel is just one among many that show off modular synthesizers in all their mercurial glory. Portland, Oregon’s Ann Annie fashions homey scenarios like those of his “Rainy Day Modular” series, where a cluster of modules housed in a leather briefcase is set against rain-streaked windows looking out over a wooded backyard. Elinch’s Modular Shades series betrays a designer’s touch: Full of soft-focus close-ups of his tabletop Eurorack rig in a minimally furnished apartment, it pairs pulsing improvisations with colors on the Pantone scale. California’s r beny, whose videos have garnered nearly a million plays since he founded his channel in May 2015, tends to put more of the focus on the machine itself, but there’s a low-key domestic subtext here, too. Many of his videos afford a teasing glimpse of the wooden fence around his yard; other videos frame his instrument in picture postcards of mountains and forests.
There’s something almost voyeuristic about many of these scenes—not creepily so, but in the way that we have become accustomed to catching glimpses of strangers’ worlds, as Instagram and blogs like Freunde von Freunden have turned private spaces public. Plants on window sills are common in these videos; so are cups of coffee, wooden furniture, and warm, natural light. The aesthetic verges on hygge, a Danish concept encompassing wood-cabin coziness that has recently become a global craze. Hygge has been lampooned for veering into cliché but, even at its most precious, modular YouTube’s homespun aesthetic is refreshing because it is the opposite of the dark, ominous, self-consciously edgy imagery that so often accompanies electronic music.
Bryan Noll, aka Lightbath, has a particularly playful sensibility, emphasizing the bright colors and fluid lines of his cables, the soft light of the full moon, and the occasional cat. (This is the internet, after all; there will be cats.) Noll might be the genre’s most personable character: His tech tutorials include feathers and crystals, and he extends the new age conceit to videos like his “Local Nature Spirits Earth Mandala” series, where he lays his Teenage Engineering OP-1 in the dirt and surrounds it with geometrical patterns fashioned out of berries and leaves. (Points if you can spot the ladybug in this one.)
There’s something extra satisfying about encountering these sleek, futuristic machines in a natural setting. Among the best examples are Japan’s Nanodomain, who has set up in a sun-bathed greenhouse and a shaded forest at the base of Mount Fuji, and Lightbath’s “Arcology,” which captures the sunset over Arcosanti, Arizona, the experimental architectural site that’s home to the FORM Arcosanti festival. Meanwhile, Ann Annie’s “Modular Field Trip” series has soaked up the ambience of the Columbia River Gorge, the Oregon coast, and Goblin Valley, Utah. Annie’s remote performances, like many others’, are powered by car battery; on forums dedicated to modular synthesis, there are entire threads dedicated to building battery packs, modding cars, and even harnessing solar power for off-the-grid performance.
While plenty of professional musicians use modular synths (Deadmau5, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore), the modular scene is largely a hobbyist community. Perhaps that’s because working with these instruments rewards process over product, returning “experimental music” to its lab-coat connotations. To make music on a modular is to ask questions like, What does this knob do? What happens when I plug these two units together? And how do I get sound out of this thing, anyway? YouTube turns out to be the perfect platform for these experiments: It offers an alternate path that’s neither formal performance nor finished recording, instead more akin to a page torn from the tinkerer’s sketchbook. The best part about this particular YouTube rabbit hole is that the den it leads to feels as warm and inviting as any community on the internet. These days, that’s a rare thing.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story misgendered Ann Annie. He is male.
