“The goal was to capture sounds from rare gear that’s almost impossible to find”

The studio is jam-packed with vintage electronic instruments & studio equipment, and at the end of October, Hilo Sound enjoyed a residency at the location.

Hilo Sound is a Danish audio design studio working with vibroacoustic sound systems, spatial experience design, and body-felt music: Innovation in how sound is built, played, and sensed.

How are you going to use this week’s work?
After our time in this synthesizer sanctuary, we ended up with a solid library of recordings ranging from one-shot samples to ten-minute jams. From that, we cut loops for our Hilo ambient production toolkit and live performance setup – feeding directly into our ongoing work with ambient and vibroacoustic music.

Which one was your favourite machine?
The KORG Triton had a fantastic selection of motion pads in its vast preset banks – perfect for ambient soundscapes and vibroacoustic textures. The PRO ONE was great for its hands-on control and powerful analog bass. Cinema Engineering 6517-E (modified by Fairman) filter in combination with the analog delays worked really well with both the Fender Rhodes and the Solina Stringer, for expanding rich sounding ambient cloudiness. Overall, the machines that combined movement, texture, and space worked best for our sound as architecture dogma.

How did you spend your time in the studio?
We spent our time harvesting samples from the vintage synth collection and creating analog effect chains. The goal was to capture sounds from rare gear that’s almost impossible to find. The process was simple: Find a good synth pad, patch it through hardware FX, and record jams with a focus on meditative, ambient soundscapes.
We also explored the studio’s impressive vinyl collection and library of books on music and club culture – which was inspiring both sonically and intellectually. Sonic Intimacy by Malcom James was right down our alley.

All artists in the residency have been given the task to leave something for the next one in the studio. What’s your contribution?
We left a selection of ambient soundscape loops and an Ableton Sampler preset that generates generative pads even from short samples – along with a small vocal recording of a poem called “Copenhagen 5 AM.”