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Just in time for Superbooth, Make Noise has announced their newest Eurorack module: Plexiphon. Described as a "stereo modeless spatial texturizer," Plexiphon is Make Noise's latest collaboration with Tom Erbe of soundhack—and it continues his long history of creative audio manipulation.
Plexiphon is a stereo processor that walks the line between multi-tap delay and reverb-like effects, designed to create morphing spaces and animated stereo fields. Make Noise claims that it is designed to "highlight and amplify" hidden characteristics of its source material. As with prior designs like Erbe-Verb, Mimeophon, Echophon, or others, we anticipate that it'll prove to be much more than a set-and-forget effect: instead, it promises to be a deeply playable and modulate-able device, stretching incoming sound into its own malleable, mutable entity.
One of the most critical parameters is Plexus: internally, this control determines the state of the module's internal feedback paths—altering their intensity and their connections into one another. The large Size parameter extends time delays in the feedback path. With Plexus at one extreme, the Size parameter essentially acts as a delay time, while at the other extreme, Size comes across as something more akin to a reverb-esque "room size" control. Naturally, each of these parameters is voltage-controllable, and with dynamic modulation, can take you from multitap echoes to evolving, resonant spaces in no time flat. Decay, naturally, serves to intensify the module's internal feedback, all the way up into continuous, self-oscillating textures.
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The Diffuse and Color parameters impact the sound much in the way one might expect: they offer means by which to alter the effect's softness/sharpness and its spectral trajectory (getting brighter or darker over time). The Mix and Send controls are similarly straightforward, offering helpful utility. Mix offers manual and voltage-controllable wet/dry blend. The Send jack is a gate input; normalled high by default, this allows you to use incoming gates to determine whether the dry audio is sent to the effect or not (useful for dub-like performance techniques).
The Couple parameter determines the module's stereo behavior: at one end of its response, Plexiphon acts as a strict dual-mono processor, while at the other, the left and right channels are considerably more intermingled with one another. Skew, similar to prior Make Noise designs, allows the user to apply inversely proportional changes to various aspects of the internal process for the left and right channels, respectively. On Plexiphon, this impacts the Plexus, Size, and Color parameters—enabling access to unusual stereo images and different flavors of spatial animation.
And again, as seen in some prior designs, Plexiphon features an envelope follower output, perfect for correlating other aspects of your system to Plexiphon's own instantaneous output.
Twisting Time (Again)
If I may editorialize for a moment: the Make Noise soundhack Erbe-Verb was originally released in 2014, and only recently discontinued. My own interest in modular synthesizers was quickly growing at this time; I did own my own system (complete with Echophon), and was studying at the California Institute of the Arts. We had recently acquired funds to build a small Eurorack system for one of the school studios, and focused strongly on modules developed by Erbe (a former CalArts faculty member). Erbe-Verb was the newest of these at the time, and it left a strong impression on me.
Generally speaking, I stubbornly disliked reverb as an effect, and often felt as if it took too much out of my hands as a performer. Once you sent a sound into your reverb pedal, there were, as we say, no take-backsies: you were stuck with a long, resonant reminder of your past—in a space that attempted (but failed) to reside within the real space you inhabited. Reverb typically felt unconvincing, ingenuine, and in a way, irresponsible. I wanted to guide my sounds through their existence from start to finish, rather than casting them into the future, free to intermingle with whatever unexpected things might come along in the meantime. Of course, these are my personal biases, and you need not adopt them as your own.
Erbe-Verb was the first reverb I ever encountered that I actually felt I could play. It turned the sounds and techniques of reverb into something responsive, surprising, and alive: something I valued deeply as a performer and improvisor. I never purchased one myself, but I remember spending hours in that studio at CalArts, listening carefully as it and I slowly changed one another.
As I write this, I haven't used a Plexiphon, and aside from a brief bit of information from Make Noise, haven't seen any deep explanations about its functionality and behavior. I'm sure that Make Noise doesn't exactly consider this to be "a new Erbe-Verb," but nonetheless, I'm quite aware of the public's general demand for a "stereo Erbe-Verb." And, at a glance, Plexiphon does bear something of a resemblance—the size and styling of the big front panel Size control feel like a not-so-subtle nod to that particular predecessor.
However, I'm pleased to see that Plexiphon doesn't seem to be a simple "sequel" to an existing idea. Erbe and the fine folks at Make Noise continue to trudge forward, refining their ideas and keeping their eyes to the future.
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