Replicating eels and rivers with modular synths — Mystery Circles Singles Series
I. Routine Sounds
Moving to Maryland, particularly the Patapsco Valley was a tough transition from my Rogers Park neighborhood on the Northside of Chicago.
Our personhood, often subconsciously are wrapped in sounds held in daily routines. My old routine— descend three flights of brownstone stairs with a pine green refurbished Miyata Mixte from the 1980s at 7 am. Push my bike through two heavy security doors into Devon Ave traffic. Push that bike across the street to a coffee shop I think was called Ellipses— order an Americano in a thermos. Deep breath, pedal into traffic until I hit the Lake Front Trail, pedal like hell for eight miles with Lake Michigan on my left side. (To which, one night during a high inner seas situation, I watched a wave take out a slushy stand and retreat— I took Clark Street home that night.) Dodge jog strollers, skateboards, and dogs. Shoulder bike into my place of work and ride a cargo elevator three floors to store it.
Let me run that down in sound:
clunk, scratch, thud, thud, traffic horns, Chicago bus announcements in a robot voice, the brakes of a bus, the L in a whoosh, the clatter of espresso tamps and cup clinks, metal thermos lid, idle morning chatter, busses, always busses, wind, waves, steel grate from the early 1900s closing. The Southside accent of my former boss I long to hear again.
Where I live now oscillates between noise extremes. Bugs. Birds. Trees snapping. Gentle river water. The easy quiet of wildlife and weather systems. Then the misplaced suburban fascination with taming trees and their subsequent leaves— blowing, mowing, mulching, chainsaws. Grinding. I often open my window in Spring and utter the standard joke— “sick noise set, dude.”
To escape the suburban Spring noise set, I started visiting a section of the Patapsco River daily. No roar of Lake Michigan— instead a reliable, soft ripple. This became the routine, but instead the coffee was made in my home, the bicycle was changed out for a hike, and in the first stretch of the pandemic— the job became full-time parent. Accompanied by my then preschool son, we became river experts. We noticed when river levels changed, we noticed when flowers grew, we inventoried photos of moths, butterflies, fish, snakes, and iridescent green beetles. We made small swimming pools with circles of rocks, we balanced on logs in the river, we skipped stones.
Let me run that down in sound:
gentle gurgling, bubbling, light rain, cicadas, woodpeckers, cardinals, the buzz of insects that make you nervous, sometimes rain, sometimes ice, and on one occasion we recorded a gentle ice storm with small pellets that lasted 20 minutes, the laughter of a child throwing things in water— splashing
II. The Eels
The aquatic animals changed. We knew the century old Bloede Dam had been removed— it was hard to miss between 1000 year floods in our valley and a changing landscape at our river. The fish came, more oceanic shells, more sea glass— more things you see in our nearby Atlantic Ocean via the Chesapeake. Then the eels. American eels.
Upstream, at Daniels Dam there is an eel ladder, it is a simple tunnel up over the dam with a slightly abrasive surface so the eels do not turn around and slide down. The eel ladder despite its significance being akin to shipping canals and passage— is simple and not much to look at.
In 2018 the annual eel count after passage on the eel ladder was 36, total. After the removal of the Bloede— the annual number in 2022 climbed to more than 36,000. Eels have a mystique that somehow pits gross with enchanted. For all their mystery— they can be caught in an unassuming creek with left over hot dogs, and yet we do not know much about them.
But they are here, in my river, extraordinary and ordinary in one.
III. Modular Synths/ Mystery Box/ Mystery Circles
In this same time frame I acquired a pandemic hobby that seemed to momentarily capture a small audience of teleworkers and midlife parents— modular synths. My story is not unique. Tired parent looking for escape inside, why not try an unreliable and expensive metal box that is akin to building a home computer system that never cooperates? So I did. I was delighted that I could recreate and process sounds. I was delighted that the metal box could shift between sequenced techno and unclocked, slithering glitches.
In February of 2023 I was approached by the label Mystery Circles which, privately had been on a list of places to “someday submit a song” to. I was thinking maybe 3 more years, or maybe when I had more VCAs. Instead David, MC’s founder was ready to roll and okay with the weird girl across from him in a Zoom meeting with no formal training. I could not ask to create alongside a better person.
Mystery Circles tagline is “manifestation documentation”. I felt this fit, I wanted to talk about the eels. Unagi. Not quite our eels in the Patapsco, but freshwater eels in Japan where David would send label email from during his travels. So I joined the catalog of kids with field recorders, a love for the outdoors, and a penchant for figuring themselves out through sound.
So here— in middle life, in the suburbs, next to an unpredictable river that is the Autobahn of eel transport— I offer up Delicate Feedbacks. Unpredictable, and not exactly a bop— but a composition to bring my time on the river to your ears. There’s gross sounds, comforting sounds, ice storms in the valley— but mostly— a sonic story about letting a river be restored. Maybe letting myself be restored, or adjust to a new place. New sounds. New role.
For you process oriented nerds— I used the following in my patches— the Qubit Nautilus (shimmering caustics, yes please), the Make Noise 0-CTRL, Mimeophon , and Maths, a small 1u pluck from Mosaic, the Mutable Instruments Plaits (the company closed in 2022)— to which I did run the final Mutable update on the Plaits prior to this project. Pedals— OBNE Sunlight to deliver the underlying drone, and an OBNE Minim paired with Nautilus effects. Field recordings of an ice storm and water on the Patapsco captured with a Zoom H5.
IV. With Thanks
With gratitude to my friend Markus Cancilla for mastering my weird eel composition and teaching me that not every file can be named “modular eel gross” and “modular eel gross 2”. And to Reid Hitt who made my weird girl dreams come true with their animation for Delicate Feedbacks and for whom we are bonded via sea foam green baritone guitars.
To “other David” at Mystery Circles who recommended me to the label and grows beautiful California flowers, loves their family, and ferries an unreliable metal box into snowcapped mountains to tell stories about their surroundings with a level of precision and mastery I hope to someday accomplish.
Thank you to my family for standing around in riverbeds with me and holding my bag of cables— and my dear IRL friends in the modular/ experimental community who have been punched in the head, carried my gear, let me play a quad show with a mono setup, look the other way when I show up with a case full of voices and no VCAs— Barry, Ryan, David, Jerry, Ato, Landscape, Amoreena, Patrick, Coffin, Johno. (I want to write 400 more names with gratitude, but we should probably have more coffee together) I kept this whole metal box thing up because of you kids. May we all be in the same retirement community droning together.