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Two nights ago, after weeks of idling, played a full gig and then an extra hour with Sombra Del Mar, finishing around 1am. Got home an hour and a half later. Kind of sleepy throughout Saturday :-) This year starts with late-night gigs, as we have also played on the New Year night from midnight and until, like, 4am. Kind of a level-up, although I still recall playing with my past bands even later a couple of times. With Lacklustre…
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Having finished Rho Ophiuchi and after I finished two more tracks for a current customer I’ll be taking some time away from the music, apparently. A hard problem needs solving soon, and all my attention will be likely dedicated to it. Still I’d be happy to hear suggestions on what synth should I do banks for next.
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RHO OPHIUCHI is a full preset bank for Adam Szabo’s VIPER – 128 patches, mostly dialed up from scratch or from each other. There is a few exceptions – more of them later. VIPER is a synth that makes a valiant attempt on emulating Access Virus A/B/C/TI hardware synths, and is partially compatible with them. Partially, because it can only import banks ans presets from the hardware, and because not all the Virus’ waveforms are bundled with VIPER. Anyway, VIPER…
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Bought this beauty just before New Year, and now rabidly stack new patches for it. While it can read (with limitations) patches and soundbanks from Access Virus TI, it goes way further: aside from VA oscillators there are Multisaw, Wavetable, Grain and Formant oscillators, and you are not limited to Virus’ hardwired selection of waveforms, as it is capable of reading the custom ones. I’ve made some already, but not too many yet. The waveforms are expected to be: mono,…
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Just relaunched and heavily updated the website, changing theme/design, removing the redundant section (‘Soundware’ is linked directly to Gumroad now), and making it more suitable for mobile users. So – welcome again!
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MATRICES is a preset pack for Native Instruments FM8 software synthesizer, one of the absolute pinnacles of 6-operator FM-synthesis. The synth is old: next year it hits 20, but the only thing obsolete about it is its unscalable interface. Otherwise it’s still a hell of a synth with a very broad sonic palette, and immense depth. It takes some time to get a firm grip of: FM synthesis is not quite a straightforward thing, after all, and, dare I say,…
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Actualized quite a few pages here, including ‘bands’, ‘solo works’, and ‘soundware’ sections. Added all recent releases – it appears I had as many as four full-lengths this year, and the new items at blacksidedsun.gumroad.com. This was a very productive year, and more is in the works.
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Finally managed to revive Absynth 5 in my system. Native Instruments dropped it from their active roster, and even those who have purchased it earlier may have hard times installing it on Windows 10. In my case it was kinda outrage: Native Access (a controlling/licensing/updating software) would download an .ISO file, then report installing it… without actually doing it. No installation path, and version 0.0.0 was the only things I’d been getting earlier this year. Since I did not actually…
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‘Chromatography’ is the presets pack for Cherry Audio Rhodes Chroma software synthesizer. The demo below features several instances of Chroma. Other than a master bus limiter (ReaLimit from Cockos Reaper), no external effects are used. Rhodes Chroma was a seminal instrument from early 1980s developed by ARP shortly before their demise. The design was purchased by CBS Musical Instruments and put into production by their Rhodes Division in 1982 – already as the Rhodes Chroma. A keyboardless version was produced…
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‘The Day of Life Forgotten,’ the experimental electronics net-label, have released black-sided sun’s latest album ‘Summa Timorum’ (The Sum of Fears). As per label’s message: ‘Dark ambient, post-industrial, experimental electronics. New album by black-sided sun delivers exceptionally dark and precisely detailed sound scape. An epic, and hopeless, sound canvas, both startling and attracting at the same time.’ LP was recorded June-September 2025. Voices were generated with Vital software synthesizer and online text-to-speech service luvvoice.com. Other than – and a fragment…
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Developers of Surge XT, a fantastic software synthesizer that I use religiously these days, have included a bunch of my patches into nightly builds, which means they will be featured in the next version of the synthesizer. Many of those patches have been used while making the next album by black-sided sun due to arrive next month.
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Autumn hits hard: temperatures are down, if it rains, it pours, and the intense live season is basically through, although Sombra Del Mar isn’t going to slow down: we’ve booked for a month ahead. I believe over these recent months I’ve played more live shows than ever before – I mean, probably more than throughout all of my career since early 2000s and until 2022. Truth be told, I’m tired. But it is vital to keep going… to stay in…
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I’ve blogged recently about the AI muzak from YouTube that I have to hear every time as our band’s scrambling for live performing. It looks like there’s kind of a development. Expectedly unexpected – or vice versa: the AI ‘reimaginings’ of classic rock music – or any other. I’ve bumped into a flick of Scorpions’ classics… that turned out being AI forgeries. Yes, pretty much the same arrangement, sounds close to the original, but a totally different voice – bland…
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Metallic groans, clangs, tinklings, jinglings, blips, radio static with something alien coming through, – PHI MU LABS: COLD FOUNDRY is the soundbank for KORG WAVESTATE & WAVESTATE NATIVE assembled specifically for creating the unsettling, dystopian, grim cinematic atmospheres. It largely consists of field recordings, including those created back in early 2000s. Some of them (not all) have been previously published at Freesound.org, and still available there for free. Certain sounds are lucky catches, others – like the bowed cymbals –…
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PHI MU LABS: DRONOLOGY is a library of presets for KORG WAVESTATE hardware synthesizer and KORG WAVESTATE NATIVE plugin. This library’s primary emphasis are multisamples and programs, as per WAVESTATE’s nomenclature. 16 Performances are available too, but largely for demo purposes. Each multisample is basically a soundscape on its own, so the majority of programs represent a single multisample each. Intended for use in movie or stage show productions, and with experimental music genres as well. Demo below showcases several…
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I’ve been pretty silent recently simply out of fatigue. A lot of things is happening, some good, some bad, some neutral. We had a hellish gig last Wednesday, when my keyboard’s LCD display nearly died (I’ve kind of fixed this later), a loudspeaker standing on a subwoofer literally fell off it almost right on my gear (no casualties other than a can of shitty beer). The reason is that the wooden floor of the stage had been replaced with a…
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100WT – 100+ wavetables in .WAV format created using Vital, by black-sided sun project. Most of them are resampled from the field recordings with bells and whistles added. Check it out here: https://blacksidedsun.gumroad.com/l/recjc Vital appears to export at 88.2kHz, so there is also a 44.1 version converted using Reaper. Compatibility checked with: SynthMaster 2.9, SynthMaster One, Surge XT, SocaLabs Wavetable.Partially compatible with Full Bucket Music’s WhispAir and ModulAir. Appears to be loading up only some part of the wavetables. At least…
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A quartet of expats from Russia and Belarus. Seen a thing or two in our lives, some even more than they ever wanted to. Nowadays we’re playing music that is in high demand, and surprisingly those are rock’n’rolls above all things. Frankly I’m no big fan of the old rock’n’roll when it comes to listening, but playing them is an entirely different thing. A cool one, in fact. The primary presence is at https://www.instagram.com/sombra__del__mar/ We had a rather good show…
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Static Apparitions has hit 202 collections on Bandcamp now. The highest score, however, still holds 2023: The Longest Road, part I – 312 collections: Its followup landed in 274 Bandcamp accounts: The long-in-the-work Aurtengwl is in 280 collections so far: Other than that there was Detritus, the album released by Russian net-label ‘The Day of Life Forgotten’. I can only see one collection containing it. I have updated ‘solo works’ page.
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First place in Drone category on Bandcamp, and fifth place in Ambient category right now. Also dropped the special version, as promised:
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Static Apparitions – a new release of my project ‘black-sided sun’. Genre – dark ambient. Released by Neotantra label (a lot of gratitude goes to Lee Norris). Released as free download. Tomorrow I’ll launch a special version of this album on my own page.
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Dropped the first track from the next album last night. The track is called ‘Sleep’, and the album – ‘Summa Timorum’ (Lat. ‘The Sum of Fears’). Genre: Noise, Dark Ambient, Industrial.Release: TBA The track has been created using Surge XT and Vital, custom-made patches only.
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The onslaught of AI upon the music field is staggering and terrifying. Over the last few days I’ve stumbled upon an incredible amount of the low-effort content on Youtube, covering some unexpected areas: there are AI-generated extreme metal ‘records’, AI-generated krautrock, and, of course, tons of AI-spawned ambient. These genres tend to be less formulaic, and relatively marginal, compared to pop music. Yes, probably there are tons of AI-spawned pop too, I just don’t want to dive into this mud.…
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I have a mini-amp for Behringers near-field monitors, but a month ago or so its (lousy) power adaptor went South. A new one just arrived so I have the stuff back in business.
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A short but fierce hurricane cut our yesternight performance short as we started our third set. Played just one song – during which summer restaurants chairs started flying around. That’s how it was: ‘Titanic vibes’, some people commented afterwards. Well, indeed. Especially when you’re on the stage that has been already crushed down by snow earlier this year. Afterwards I’ve read that two people have been injured during the hurricane by a falling piece of loose roofcover, just a couple…
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Cyanea is the bank for Vital I’ve been working on over the last few weeks. Vital is a mighty thing, although I’d love it to have some features of Surge XT. Just a wishful thinking, anyway. The full version of Cyanea pack consists of 56 presets, with half of them being pads. There are also 108 custom made wavetables – Vital has a great wavetable editor and is capable of exporting them as .wav files. There is also a free…
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Just dropped another preset library – this time for DCO-106, Cherry Audio’s take on Roland Juno-106. Get it here: https://blacksidedsun.gumroad.com/l/pj106 These timbres are re-implementation of my earlier presets for TAL U-NO-LX synth – PJ-6. The initial idea was to set the sliders in the same positions and see what holds. But that just did not work. So the PJ-106 variants of preset were tweaked or re-dialled to sound more like patches from PJ-6. It turned out way trickier that expected.…
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My attempts to translate the patches from TAL U-NO-LX to Cherry Audio’s DCO-106 proved to be way more problematic than I expected. These emulators may cover similar instruments (Roland Juno-60 and Juno-106, accordingly) but some of their aspects, such as LFO, inverted Envelope for the LP filter, Arpeggio settings, Unisono mode – they all are strikingly different. Filter itself behaves a bit differently too: in U-NO-LX it’s 0-to-1 scale (logarithmic?), in DCO-106 it’s frequencies. So the exact reproduction with mere…
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Back in 2020, during the COVID pandemic, I’ve completed one of the longest of my projects – an LP ‘Equinox: The Rite of Spring’. It tells about a catabasis-type journey through the night of Spring Equinox, i.e. March 20. A journey that followed a catastrophe. It started out in 2011 with a very grim two-part dream about the sun disappearing, and how the city I’ve been living in back then kept going as though nothing actually happened. I’ve expanded the…
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Just released PJ-6, a new soundpack for TAL U-NO-LX synth, which is an emulation of the classic Roland Juno-60 hardware synthesizer – beefed up to become a sonic powerhouse, despite its somewhat limited architecture. There is a free introductory version, and the full pack is available at Gumroad. PJ-6: a soundpack for TAL U-NO-LX synthesizer by black-sided sun is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
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