The Analog Session 

The Analog Session

Concrete Seq 1 (Club Mix) - 5' 24"
Fun-Fare (Club Mix) - 5' 09"
N5 From Outer Space - 7' 36"
Promenade Am3 - 10' 37"
Sunday Morning - 6' 14"
In My House - 5' 58"
 It.122 - 5' 46"
Concrete Seq 1 (video version) - 8' 11"
 Fun-Fare (video version)" - 6' 42

All tracks composed by Alexander Robotnick (Maurizio Dami) & Ludud Pinsky (Lapo Lombardi).
Audio and Video recorded at Robotnick's Studios (Feb 2009).
Thanks to: Massimo Montagni, Stefano Fuochi.

connections:

Alexander Robotnick:
www.robotnick.it 
www.myspace.com/alexanderrobotnick 
www.youtube.com/mauriziodami 
www.thisismusicltd.com/label/alexander-robotnick/ 
http://soundcloud.com/alexander-robotnick 

Ludus Pinsky:
http://www.luduslab.it/ludus/  
http://www.myspace.com/luduspinski 

HISTORY  
In February 2009, Alexander Robotnick and Ludus Pinsky put together  their  personal  analog synths  to organise and perform  an Analog Session.
The idea was to recreate the purely analog sound  of the 70s and early 80s, which  the two artists consider being the true “electronic sound”.
The Session lasted 5 days , 3 of which  to set up and connect pieces of equipment and to fix  sync problems and VAM malfunctioning.
TRACKS
7 tracks were recorded, mainly developed on improvisation.
There were 2 and sometimes 3 sequencer lines  written in Midi  driving 3 Midi/Cugate convertors.
Improvisation  consisted in  controlling the sound  of the synths and playing  Logan , Wasp, and JX3P.
VIDEO
The entire session was recorded in real-time by two cam-coders so that every sound event is documented  by the video.
RECORDING
The session was recorded on 10 audio channels
EDITING
Being all tracks mainly based on improvisation, the artists  didn’t pay much attention to the their individual duration .
In the end the sessions selected for  every  track were  more than 15 minutes long each.  The  less significant parts  were therefore cut out  both from the audio session and  its video recording  so that the video  was still  in real-time.
The video was shot by 2 static cameras  ; a few shots of individual pieces of equipemnt were  added in the editing but it’s  essentially the  real-time recording of the Analog Session.
MIXING
Tracks were  mainly processed by analog outboards , such as tape-echo and vintage effect boxes.
No further track was added to the originals recorded.
.

LAPO (Ludus Pinsky):
This is a modular with 1970s technology. These are the original of a project of the mid70s by a magazine called “Electro Formant” that I restored and assembled. And these are chlone filters. This is a Moog chlone , this is a Polimoox chlone, which is a Russian filter, this is an MS 20 chlone etc. etc.
Then there’s another Formant oscillator, the original one and several Formant envelope chlones. VCA is also a chlone. Then there are these ring modulators, this one in particular is really old technology, it’s a passive coil ring modulator .
This is a sequencer that I assembled. It’s a mix including a TB303 slide. It has 8 steps that can extended to 16 , and 4 lines. 
Then there’s this controller, made of 4 ribbons to control the voltage of whatever you need. There’s an LFO and a Joystick taken from an old Yamaha controller. 
Ant this is the good old Logan from the 70s.
It’s all technology developed before 1980 because apparently in the late 70s a law was passed that banned the use of several metals, such as lead, in manufacturing transistors, and indeed all synths manufactured after the law do not sound exactly like those made before . Only experts and real lovers of that sound know and understand .

Maurizio (Alexander Robotnick)
This is a mix of the things I used in the 80s and stuff that I acquired more recently.
I recently bought this biphonic Oberheim from the late 70s. , the famous SEM.
Then I got this WASP from a friend , which I used also in the early 80s.
This is Korg Mono-Poly , an instrument I’ve always used , also to compose “Problèmes d’Amour” as well as A.Robotnick’s early works.
Here we have - kind of hiding in here - a classic Roland TB 303, which does its job in this session with the typical TR 808.
Here below we have a Korg Stage Echo that I’m using to transform the sound of the WASP and the resulting effect is really great.

Maurizio & Lapo:
Hi, I’m Alexander Robotnick and he’s Ludus Pinsky, my faithful pal in elechtro-madness and a true elechtronics wizard: he succeeded in restoring and assembling
several analog synths, very difficult to handle, and so we decided together to do this purely analog session…..different kinds of tracks, from house to techno. The common denominator of these tracks is that they make no concession whatsoever to present time digital sound . For that purpose we used the modular that you can see at our back - which Ludus assembled with a lot of patience and self-denial - and some old synths that I used in the early 80s.The characteristic of this session lies in its sound which is closer to the 70s’ mood than the 80s’.
Of course the 70s mean both good and bad. We immediately realised the negative side when we started to put together all this stuff because after three days we were still struggling with technical problems of all sorts. First of all the cabling itself: we went down to the basement to dig out hundreds of cables to connect and interface everything. And then each instrument presented some problems; we had to tackle some quite difficult technical problems. 
But finally we made it , we managed to produce sounds first and the music we composed was essentially just some notes, because the main feature of elechtronic music of the 70s was improvisation, so we didn’t write down every sequence on the computer, some sequences were written directly on the instruments.Then of course there’s also a laptop with some MIDI sequences, not many though; these MIDI sequences were then transformed into CV and GATE to pilot analog synthetisers. On top of that we transformed MIDI-Sync into an old Sync, an analog signal that allowed us to play also TB 303 and 808 sync.
We used a recorded audio trigger by which we controlled the sequencer of the modular you can see at our back.
You may like this session or not, it’s up to you; we had fun and trouble as well but we believe it was worthwhile. I don’t know whether we’ll repeat this experience in the near future. But we wish to encourage others to repeat it because the “softness” of the elechtro-sound of the 70s certainly pays you back for the hard work done. 
Enjoy it!