M-VAVE FM-1 firmware for inhospitable soundscapes

Norilsk is not made for musical niceties. There are no pretty chords here, no polite arpeggios, no presets that flatter. It is made for ambient hellscapes and barren, grim atmospheres: drones that never resolve, textures that corrode as they hold, noise that does not apologise. Sound for places nobody should have to live in.

It is named after Norilsk, the nickel-smelting city above the Arctic Circle: built by prisoners of the Gulag, closed to outsiders, sunk in polar night for weeks each winter, its air thick with sulphur dioxide, its rivers turned red by the works upstream. Every sound here is drawn at random, wired at random into effects drawn at random, and torn apart at will: as fit for noise experiments as for slow, dark ambient.

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Field recordings

Three drawings of the machine, rendered from its code

  1. SmelterABRASIVE path · the first generator disintegrating 0:48
  2. Polar nightDARK path · two generators deep in the reverb 0:48
  3. Tailingsanything goes · one snapshot morphing into another over 12 s 0:48

How the machine is put together

Picture the city it is named after. Three furnaces burn day and night, each its own sound, and no sound ever burns the same way twice. They feed the pipes, where whatever passes is crushed, corroded and smeared on its way through. Out of the pipes the fumes pour over the city and hang in its air, slowly thinning out, never quite gone.

In plain terms: three generators make sound; three effect slots wreck it; a master delay and plate reverb close the chain. The white keys play the generator chosen last, in the scale chosen; four voices are shared between the three. Each generator runs through its own lane: generator 1 through effect slot 4, 2 through 5, 3 through 6, each lane a chain of two or three effects, with a small dry share of its own straight to the master. KNOB 2 sets how much of a lane's effects is heard, dry to wet. The first processor core renders the voices; the second runs the effects and the master, a block behind.

Every generator is a FURNACE, the engine: six-operator FM whose operators read band-limited waves as well as sines, bent by phase distortion; then, on many sounds, a body the sound is driven into -- a tube, a wire under a bow, the modes of a bar, a plate, a bell or a hull; then Russolo's grit, which drops its bits, crosses it with itself and makes it stutter; and last, grains, read back from a buffer the voice keeps writing, or from recordings of ice, the sea, the aurora's radio and a plant. An invisible hand keeps moving each voice, so a held note never holds still. Every sound swells in and keeps moving (except on the MACHINE path, where it is struck), and nothing sounds on once no note is held, latched or looped: released voices fade out within three seconds, and the effect slots close two seconds after the last, while the master delay's and reverb's tails ring out whole. How FURNACE is built.

Randomness, level by level

Almost nothing in Norilsk is set by hand at the start: it is drawn. What you do is choose, keep, throw again, and play. The draws are made at every scale, from the inside of a single note to the whole machine:

  1. The sound. FURNACE draws a sound from a family, a seed, a path and an engine generation, bit for bit the same every time it is asked: a sound is kept as its seed, and a session brings it back exactly. Forty-four families: METAL, DRONE, BRUIT, GLASS, CLOUD, SHATTER, FREEZE, HUM, STATIC, HOWL, SCRAPE, ASH, TUNNEL, WIRE, STEAM, CHIMNEY, GIRDER, HULL, DEPTHS, AURORA, PLANT, ORGAN, CHOIR, OXIDE and more; and, on the MACHINE path only, eight of industrial percussion: ANVIL, STAMP, RIVET, SHEET, GEARS, PISTON, RATCHET, FORGE.
  2. The note in motion. Inside every voice the invisible hand drifts the brightness, detune, grain and motion; the grit stage cuts bits and stutters from points of its own; the grains are taken from places that wander. The same key held twice never sounds the same twice.
  3. The generator (HOME on a generator): a scene, a family weighed by how harsh it may be, how many effects it is cabled into and where, its dry share. (One generator modulates another only when you link them by hand.)
  4. The effect slot (HOME on an effect slot): one of 38 recipes, each place filled from the recipe's choices that fit the slot's memory, every value drawn around its home, the outs. In a twin recipe one effect stands twice, the second's values drawn apart from the first's, and in some the second feeds back into the first.
  5. The paths. ABRASIVE (gnarly, textural, torn) and DARK (drones, depression, a little quieter) lean every draw above: the scenes, the families, the recipes, the effects' values. MACHINE draws only struck metal: presses, rivets, anvils struck again and again at random while a key is held, and machines -- gears, pistons, ratchets, a drop hammer -- running on their own, never in time. None on: anything goes, nothing struck.
  6. Partial throws. REWIRE draws only the cables; RAND PARAMS only an effect slot's values, or a generator's sound within its family; SHIFT + HOME keeps the family or the recipe, or takes the one picked from an alphabetical list (SHIFT + PRESETS); HOME held throws all six slots at once.
  7. Modulation. SHIFT + SEQ throws a slot's two LFOs (shape, rate, mode, fade) and two to six of its eight routes; the STEPS and DRIFT shapes and the RANDOM source keep drawing as it plays.
  8. Playing. The DISINTEGRATOR gates, stutters, crushes and throws each generator about the stereo image in pulses of random length; the looper's VARY redraws every note it plays, and RANDOM jumps through the loops.
  9. What chance does not touch. A snapshot is the whole machine, every value and every cable, the latched notes and the loops' playing: sixteen to a session, sixty-four sessions, recalled exactly or morphed into over up to thirty seconds.

Features

Three generators
Each a FURNACE, with its level, pan, sends, mute, looper and DISINTEGRATOR.
Twenty-five effects
FILTER, FOLD, MULAW, SHIFT, MODAL, STRING, VOWEL, TAPE, REVERSE, SPRING, GLITCH, CLOUD, SCREAM, RING, STARVE, CHEB, BANK, SMEAR, DIFFUSE, SLEW, XOR, DUST, WAVESET, XMOD, CHAOS — drawn into three lanes by 38 recipes, nine of them twins: one effect twice, some fed back into themselves.
FX MIX
KNOB 2: how much of a lane's effects is heard, from dry to wet.
DISINTEGRATOR
KNOB 1: an unstable gate on each generator — stutters, crushes, sudden throws across the image — more erratic the higher.
Draw paths
ABRASIVE, DARK and MACHINE, on three black keys, lean everything HOME draws.
Industrial percussion
On the MACHINE path: metal against metal, never a drum. ANVIL, STAMP, RIVET and SHEET strike at the key and again while it is held, on a clock that never settles; GEARS, PISTON, RATCHET and FORGE run like machines, early and late.
Presets
Sixty-four: a generator's sound with its lane, named by family (ANVIL 1, ANVIL 2), loaded into any generator. SHIFT + ARP held.
Snapshots
Sixteen whole-machine states to a session, morphed into over 0 to 30 seconds.
Sessions
Sixty-four, saved in the FM-1's flash, and backed up to a computer from this site with the presets and the global setup.
Modulation
Two LFOs and eight routes on every slot, onto macros, levels, pans, sends and any effect's values.
Loopers
Tonitor's looper on each generator: ten loops, overdubs, reverse, pendulum, random, half and double speed.
Master
Tonitor's delay and plate reverb, the master's alone, a send per generator; their tails always ring out.
USB audio
The FM-1 is a class-compliant audio interface: record the master straight into a computer, or the three generators on three channels.
MIDI
In over USB and the TRS jack, out over USB: each generator on its own channel, notes and CCs (level, pan, DISINTEGRATOR, FX MIX, sends). GLOBAL SETUP: SHIFT + SAVE held.
A readable screen
Few words, very large, high contrast: made for low vision.

Norilsk runs on the M-VAVE FM-1 (JieLi AC791N). It is unofficial: see the install page before installing.