🔗 Space Oddity: the weird history of the Soviet ANS synthesizer - 5 Magazine:

Picture a soundwave which is generated by music software from a passage of music. Now imagine drawing the soundwave first and having the software “read” and “play” it. That was the concept of the ANS — Murzin’s synthesizer named after his inspiration, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin.

(via The Tonearm)

I find stuff like this fascinating, not just because of the weird ingeniousness of the instrument/machine itself, but because of all the strange cultural and artistic connections that digging into this sort of thing tends to turn up.

Now I find myself wanting to re-watch both Solaris and Stalker, and have gone down a bit of rabbit hole with the band Coil. Their ANS box set seems to only be on YouTube, so I’ve got that on in the background. Like basically all of Coil’s music, it is interesting and really good, while also being unsettling in a way that is hard to put one’s finger on.