What is this about?

Addictive Noise is about the endless ocean of analog sound, surfing on the unstable edge between control and chaos.

This is not a mission with a destination, it's an ongoing trip about the different ways to go from A to B, while discovering a lot of ather amazing places, while the horizon moves but stays out of reach.

This is about mostly analog electronics and the endless possibilities of modular synthesizers.

How did I get here?

I started my electronic music journey with a guitar,  an DR-55 analog rhythm box, a Roland Juno-106, an Yamaha DX-7, an Atari computer, ... a simple, limited set-up that continued to excite me for years. The limitation of my wallet was the biggest stimulus to be creative and exploit all possibilities. Sessions with a friend who had a reverb or delay were eargasms. Discussions with friends were about gear, and thinking about the new possibilies that new gear would bring was far more effective to fall asleep than counting sheep. Sleeping was the biggest waste of time after all.

There was a time when I worked in an indy recording studio in Eindhoven (NL), where artists rented or bought multitrack tapes to record their albums. When the recordings were done there were usually several minutes of unused tape left. When the studio was not booked I started to record my own stuff on these unused multitrack tape ends. Most of these recordings got lost because the tapes were claimed by the record label or the rental to keep a recording session was not extended so the tape was reused by another artist.

Losing my "early catalogue" felt like a big drama at the time, but when I listened to cassette mixdowns a few years later there was nothing to regret. Nowadays, I see it as a blessing and a privilege: the ability to slowly develop your art without any risk that it is exposed online and makes you ashame. 

In the next phase I got jobs for commercials and TV shows, so I got my own tapes. I used to work with a guy who liked his AKAI sampler but hated to make backups on floppy disks: in the rush of deadlines he prefered to keep the sampler powered on while we had some sleep between sessions. It was the time when equipment never crashed. 

In the next wave, I sold most of my hardware stuff (except guitars) and changed to Logic Pro on a Mac, doing everything "in the box".
Productivity went up... and up... and up, until I found myself clicking behind my big screen, switching through dozens of amazing software synths and scrolling through thousands of presets and sample libraries. I got stuck! The best decision at that time was deleting 99% of the sounds and presets and making my own sounds instead.

Today I still feel a huge difference between performing without recording and with recording.

Recording is a purpose, a job, a duty, a skill.

Not recording is freedom, living in the moment.
I developed a deep love for live performances without a safety net, started to suspect any laptop I spotted on stage and got into modular synthesizers.

After a while I started building DIY kits. That moment when you first test a self-built DIY module and find out that it works: what a kick! 

But that kick flattens after a few projects. The next thing was a DIY kit that did NOT work: sleepless nights, figuring out how the circuit works, checking voltages and values... and finally getting it right! Finding out that problems were often caused by stupid little things like a wrong connection or a missing wire brings you closer to  the circuits: you learn to respect them and to accept your own limitations and stupid mistakes. This comes at a price: lots of time, money, as well as giving up some projects. 

We need to embrace our failures, we learn much more from them than from our successes!

Then, I started to design my own modules and circuits, a slow path with many obstacles but it became my favourite trip. It's a trip full of destinations but without a goal.

The importance of goals is overrated, it makes the future more important than the now.

Although I love working with software - it is certainly faster and more efficient - I really enjoy drawing circuits with a pencil on paper. Drawing with a pencil opens gates in my mind, it just works and I don't want to know why in order to not kill the magic. If you know why never tell me!