Introducing 'Glitches From The Heart' by Perplex On
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Discover a new world of glitchiness in FRMS v1.3.0 with the release of the new ‘Glitches From The Heart’ preset pack by Perplex On!
Following the success of FRMS’ first guest artist preset pack from Supremeja Music, we are excited to bring you another fantastic set of sounds, this time from the amazing creative talent that is Perplex On!
FRMS v1.3.0 is available to download now on Mac, PC, iOS and Android. Note: you need to update to this new version in order to see the new pack listed.
With his YouTube channel full of amazing creative experiments, we asked Perplex On to produce a video to showcase the pack, and he delivered to us a beautiful combination of light and sound. Click here to watch the result - a personal demonstration of the patches he created, playing them on an iPad set against a mesmerising backdrop of projection visuals, shining a light on the true colours of FRMS granular synthesis.
Ahead of the release, we caught up with Perplex On to talk about the inspiration for the pack and the video, and get an insight into the creative process.
Who is Perplex On? Can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
“Perplex On is a Newmedia-Artist from Munich, Germany, focusing mostly on mobile music making and homemade audiovisual experiments. The sound can be described as a mix between Ambient and IDM, packed with sonic glitches and floating melancholy. The result is, on the one hand black metal for digital sleepwalkers, but on the other hand dream pop for existentialists. What drives my work is the steady contrast of serenity and stress, dream and reality, audiovisual peace and war.”
Can you tell us a bit about the pack and what kind of sounds we can enjoy?
“The name of the pack “Glitches From The Heart” is a reference to its content: It’s a combination of rather calm, spacey, yet intimate and personal sound explorations, coming straight from my heart, constantly broken up by rather wild glitchy textures, dissonances and sonic experiments, infusing the feeling of uncertainty, relentlessness and maybe even randomness. I worked with a couple of very personal field recordings I’ve collected over the years, like walking through freshly fallen snow, enjoying a breeze at the sea, experiencing the acoustic environment at an old graveyard or witnessing electro-magnetic fields that surround me every day. There are also tentative piano pieces interwoven from many years ago, when life was supposedly easier. It should convey a sense of peace, warmth and beauty of life, while at the same time pointing towards the uncertainty and fragility of it. Furthermore I’ve experimented with binaural samples in a few patches, trying to throw the listener into even deeper sonic landscapes by placing sounds in a virtual space.”
How was your experience of using FRMS for sound design? Are there any features of FRMS which really helped the process? Or any features that you particularly enjoyed using?
“Generally speaking, I’m a huge fan of granular synthesis, allowing for dissecting, destructing and reorganizing sampled material in completely new and surprising ways and often beyond recognition. By combining this method with FM synthesis, FRMS expands the sonic possibilities even further. The frequently unpredictable and ruthless nature of FM synthesis combined with sample-based material really helped my sound design process to create soundscapes, that are both unusual and maybe even inconvenient but at the same time include warming textures and mellow parts, that expose themselves over time. Besides, the extensive modulation matrix helped a lot on bringing life and movement to the sounds. It really opens up for a lot of experimentation, unusual combinations and expressiveness, for example when using various LFOs and aftertouch on freely assignable parameters. That’s where FRMS really helped me in realizing my artistic vision.”
Do you have any favorite patches from the pack?
“My very personal favorites are maybe ‘You Will Disappear’ for its almost ethereal feeling and ‘Footsteps In The Snow’, as both include very personal field recordings and paint a sonic picture that I can enjoy myself at the moment.”
What was the inspiration for the incredible visuals you created for your demo video?
“A key aspect of my work is trying to elevate the presentation of performing electronic music in an evocative way. The mere act of watching someone pushing random buttons or touching a glass surface isn’t very thrilling per se. An exciting visual presentation can really enhance the overall experience by merging the acoustic events with visual clues. It’s inherent of granular synthesis to break down sonic material into tiny grains. Therefore, an idea that immediately came to my mind was to visually translate these grains into an interactive particle system, representing each sonic grain as a visible particle flowing in time and space. Actually, the UI of FRMS does this in a great minimalistic way, where grains and their density are displayed on top of the waveforms. By expanding these visual clues in a playful and reactive way, using a particle system modulated by sonic parameters in real-time (such as amplitude or sound frequency that affect the speed, size and turbulence strength of the simulation) and projecting these into the real world of the performance, my aim was to get the viewer to enjoy an immersive audiovisual experience – or at least differentiate the demo from an ordinary rather boring walkthrough.”
You can download FRMS v1.3.0 now, and purchase the brand new ‘Glitches From The Heart’ pack from your Imaginando account dashboard, or from FRMS in-app store menu.
Team Imaginando