While working on the Atlas patch—and reflecting on the influence of external forces on organic life on Earth—a parallel arc began to unfold. It placed me in front of a familiar conundrum: beauty versus fair expression, or perhaps honesty, when trying to tell a specific story or explore a concrete idea.
On a technical level, I knew I wanted to work with a reduced setup—ideally a single case—and to push MI Marbles further than I usually do. My first attempt came with its struggles, but eventually I arrived at something I genuinely liked. It sounded good to me. Marbles was behaving beautifully, and I revisited some functions I hadn’t explored deeply before—like feeding external random voltage into the quantizer instead of just programming a scale or melody and letting Marbles do the rest.
Everything seemed right.
And yet, something wasn’t working.
I wasn’t resonating with the patch on a deeper level.
Why?
What was missing?
First attempt
So, while that question hovered around my head like an uncomfortable fly, I found myself unplugging everything—clearing the canvas for a clean new attempt to get something that would make me smile, or at least something that wouldn’t turn me into a suspect of soulless music-making.
This time, the tools were mostly the same. As you may have noticed in the first clip, I had already failed at my original plan of using just one case. Strega made its inevitable appearance (gotta love Strega), joined by a small 4ms Pod48X filled mostly with utility modules and the always-reliable µOrnament & Crime.
The result was beautiful. Stunning. I was listening to these sweet Lydian melodies intertwine and dissolve into differently flavored delays, smiling for sure… but something was missing.
“What do you mean something’s missing, you bastard?
The piece is beautiful! The objective has been achieved!
Just record the video and let’s get this thing done!
It’s truly beautiful—don’t you see?”
Second attempt
But… no.
I didn’t see it.
Or rather—I didn’t feel it.
As beautiful as the music was, it didn’t translate what I was trying to express. I couldn’t find Atlas in it. I couldn’t find organic life on Earth, nor the relationship between the two. The elements weren’t speaking to each other inside the sonic spectrum. The story wasn’t there.
So once again, I found myself facing the same opportunity:
To let go.
To bring impermanence back to the foreground.
To be humble.
To be honest.
And so, for the second time, I unplugged everything.
The canvas went blank again.
Beauty, I remembered, cannot — in this case — be a means to an end.
Or at least, it shouldn’t be.
And then it came back to me, like that same persistent fly, now oddly conciliatory, landing gently on my head and echoing my own words:
This final attempt became Atlas.
