ANTON+MATZKAIM

i’ve gone completely fucking insane from music.

18 machines between september 4 and september 30. 610 commits that month, 136 of them on the 19th alone. a quarter of my messages went out between two and seven in the morning. at one point i was telling a kick generator that we would save everyone whose kicks got hurt.

so i’m taking a few weeks off. no tracks, no new machines.

the idea behind all the schizo stuff: take one kick and make every instrument of the track out of it, with almost no processing. you cut tiny pieces of the wave. stretch them, pitch them up, stretch again, chop, consolidate, bounce, chop again, until the waveform turns into something strange.

in ableton that’s slow. every round is one more bounce. so that night i asked for a tool where the waveform is the interface. you put a point on the wave and pull. fewer numbers, fewer knobs. layers you can see stacked, what sits over what. a sample you can stretch forever without baking it again each time. the original is never touched: the tool keeps your moves as a list and renders them from the source every time.

the ask was far from modest. the punchiest kicks on the planet, proven with math. one hit that already carries its body and its bass, so the monitors shake the room and it feels like that came from the strike itself.

so PUNCH·77 has a ban: no sub layered underneath. one wave. you pick a note and a search goes digging. it throws kicks and keeps a front of the best ones for punch, depth and loudness, and every candidate is ranked against a pack of 1092 real kicks.

i watched Anthony Marinelli program a kick on an ARP 2600. his point: if you can send an envelope to the pitch of an oscillator you get the swoop every kick has, and from there you can make any kick you can imagine.

first i turned the video into a lesson for myself. that afternoon i asked for the next thing: cross that patch with MATH·77 and build an instrument for analog-style kick monsters, where every kick already hits the moment it comes out. plan first, then build.

i had one of my own kicks measured: how much bass, how hard it hits. then i asked if code could make it wider and heavier without wrecking it.

what came out of that question was a harmonics generator. a waveform written as a list of partials. you build the tone that sits under the kick one partial at a time, and you hear something i’d never seen so plainly: phase eats headroom. same partials at the same levels, a different peak.