An Anatomy of a Flourish

I spend a lot of time watching YouTube tutorials and demos of the sort of equipment either I fiddle with myself or that exemplify the sort of synthesis I like writing about. In a few recent videos from the musician Lightbath, notably this one (“Twist, Slide, Tap | Hybrid Modular • Ep 3”), he has talked a lot about a particular thing he does, which he terms his “flourish.” It’s a sound I love, this sweep through various stages — sometimes octaves, sometimes aspects of an effect, sometimes notes in a chord — that sends my ear back to Laurie Anderson, circa Mister Heartbreak, and that I’ve experimented with thanks to a module called the Bizmuth.

You can dial in to an example at 14:22 in this video. Note that this is a very in-depth tutorial, and it’s just one in a series that provides an even more detailed explanation of the hybrid of computer and physical modular synthesizers that he employs. I’m noting it here specifically because of this one detail that he lingers on. (Thanks to Chris McAvoy for having brought the video to my attention. I subscribe to Lightbath’s YouTube channel and have written about his music in the past, but this one had eluded me.)