PATIENT ZERO: THE SMOKE DETECTOR
INSPECTORA
13
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The very first experiment. Some instruments are born from meticulous planning; this one came about through sleep deprivation, a pair of scissors, and pure chance. Before professional circuit boards and calibrated oscillators existed, there was this faulty smoke detector. A device that regularly woke me up in my old room at night with false alarms, until I ripped out its battery and banished it to a drawer. When I first stumbled across the concept of circuit bending a little later, this very piece of hated plastic was the obvious victim. I didn't have a workshop back then. I didn't even own a soldering iron or a drill, just my room and some spare parts I'd rescued from the trash at some point—an approach that remains the absolute foundation of my work to this day. Every single wire connection inside this device isn't soldered, but twisted by hand; a technique that fortunately still worked with the old, bulky components. Everything about this instrument is salvaged junk. The base is an old Zino Platinum cigar box. Various screws and nuts I salvaged from an old brown storage box serve as the bare touch contacts on the top. The indicator light is the plastic cap from a discarded glow-in-the-dark lollipop I found in the trash.
I placed it directly above the circuit board so that it would carry the LED's optical signal to the panel like a rudimentary light guide. The most absurd thing about this device: it still works today – after 17 years – on the original battery. One of the two built-in switches completely disconnects the circuit, which has prevented the battery from leaking all these years. Today, the battery barely holds any charge. The circuit is practically starving, which, through this involuntary "voltage starvation," gives the smoke detector an even sicker, dying life of its own. Smoke detector circuit boards are designed to scream their warnings until they literally melt. Anyone who (like me later) has ever held a soldering iron to one of these boards knows: the heat at the contact point alone is enough to trigger the alarm. This device isn't a finely tuned instrument. It's pure, indestructible survival logic in a wooden box – and the raw starting point for everything that followed.
THE PSS 2900 MK2
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THE PSS PROTOTYPE // THE VERY FIRST SYNTHESIZER
Flashback to 2009: I had just released a small EP featuring six tracks. Two days before Christmas, a friend showed up and handed me this exact device. It was the very first synthesizer of my life. You could say I was pretty late to the game. Maybe. But definitely not too late. Because from that exact moment on, the obsession with hardware really kicked into high gear.
Initially, I tried to bend the thing twice, but it ended in a total mess.
Not a single modification seemed to work properly, so out of pure frustration, I reverted the whole board completely back to its factory defaults. It took six full years until I dragged that board back onto the workbench for another round. This attempt eventually became my very first prototype for the later PSS series. Since those first steps were technically more than sketchy, I decided to give the device an uncompromising redesign, adding some of the new functionalities of the later models. Through these massive architectural tweaks, the machine behaves completely differently today than it did in its original state. And I have to emphasize: This build is absolutely not about the looks. It is about pure, raw functionality.
THE MUTANT YAMAHA PSS 2800 MK 2
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10 YEARS AFTER ///
After a decade of circuit bending experience and a long road behind me, I realized I had to push my projects even further. This year was stranger than any before: I built a new workshop, only to have it flood twice. I was almost struck by lightning in May, and I had to overcome massive planning issues—because getting the job done right always takes way more time than you think.
It took an entire year to finish this massive, robust machine. All the sanding was done by hand, as always, taking over 16 hours. The wood came from an old cupboard door and a modified window shelf of mine. I can't even begin to describe all the struggles and bizarre things I witnessed during this time; nobody would believe me anyway. But I work like a machine, and I will walk through walls to make things happen. So, I took off and headed into uncharted territory.
I kept asking myself: Why is this thing so static? I wanted to change the visual identity of my devices and give them the massive sound-altering capabilities of large synthesizers. I spent nights hunched over sketchbooks, turning every concept upside down, having these moments of absolute clarity and discovering new approaches. This machine became the ultimate turning point for the entire series. I invented new ways to elevate the simplistic nature of these supposed toy keyboards to a completely new level. I formed a band and built just enough machines to make the whole setup work. We drove around to various spots; barely anything was planned, but in the end, everything fell into place by pure accident. A documentary crew even followed us to capture the chaos. I finished this machine in the absolute final hour just to make it to the gig.
The stress was an absolute nightmare—much like nearly dying earlier this year—but it culminated in one weekend with great people and a concert unlike anything seen before.
At first, I thought we were at a performance festival and were expected to deliver the postmodern noise of the century. But in the end, we turned out to be the artistic big bang of the entire show.
The documentary crew asked for an interview. I wasn't thrilled about it, but I took the chance to speak my mind. The whole concert had a hidden, three-dimensional background that absolutely nobody at the event knew about. There were shocked faces everywhere, and I dare say that no one in the audience that day will ever forget it. All the details will be revealed eventually, but for now, I'll just say this: We are hunting sounds.
Huge thanks to my bandmates who made this possible without a single moment of hesitation. The documentary should be released later this year, hopefully.
The internal architecture of this machine was designed to be entirely modular. Almost every function can modulate other modules on the front panel. But the craziest part? When we drove to that first gig, the inside of the machine was actually empty. Nothing was finished. Only the bend points were hooked up. All the actual circuit boards were installed over the following month.
The night before the gig, we walked to a seemingly abandoned spot in the middle of nowhere. Hundreds of bats were hunting insects under the streetlights, and I just thought: I am exactly where I need to be.
THE ROBOT PLANET
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THE GURU IS MEDITATING ///
This is a compact suitcase synthesizer equipped with a "Crazy LFO", a bitcrusher, a programmable 8-step sequencer, and the "Robot Guru Spot"—a dedicated patch point designed to crash the device in wildly unpredictable ways. (And yes, sometimes the Guru just sits there, meditating.)
The original base unit was pulled straight out of a trash pile. When I found it, some of the lights were dead because of a shattered internal connector. I re-soldered the guts, brought it back to life, and built an entirely new enclosure for it using scrap wood that was originally destined for the fire. Now, it runs flawlessly.
Just a month ago, I opened it up again to add a sync-mod, allowing two of these little mutants to actually communicate with each other.
The Yamaha PSS 2900 MK3
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HALLOWEEN
SPECIAL EDITION
Flashback to 2009: I had just released a small EP featuring six tracks. Two days before Christmas, a friend showed up and handed me this exact device. It was the very first synthesizer of my life. You could say I was pretty late to the game. Maybe. But definitely not too late. Because from that exact moment on, the obsession with hardware really kicked into high gear.
Initially, I tried to bend the thing twice, but it ended in a total mess.
Not a single modification seemed to work properly, so out of pure frustration, I reverted the whole board completely back to its factory defaults. It took six full years until I dragged that board back onto the workbench for another round. This attempt eventually became my very first prototype for the later PSS series. Since those first steps were technically more than sketchy, I decided to give the device an uncompromising redesign, adding some of the new functionalities of the later models. Through these massive architectural tweaks, the machine behaves completely differently today than it did in its original state. And I have to emphasize: This build is absolutely not about the looks. It is about pure, raw functionality.
MUTANT ATARI PUNK CONSOLE
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160 HOURS OF MADNESS
This build felt like it chased me halfway across the galaxy and back. 160 hours of work, 25 meters of wiring, and an origin story that started on solid ice. It all began with a small keyboard a friend had given me. The power switch was barely hanging on by a few wires and splintered plastic. I carried it through the snowy city in the middle of the night, ended up in a spontaneous snowball fight with strangers, slipped, and slammed into the asphalt. The keyboard broke into two pieces. Instead of throwing it away, the scrap ended up in a box—and it was exactly this debris I later needed to build the speaker mount for this project.The casing is a completely custom suitcase build, held together by pure survival instinct and street trash. The wooden side panels used to be an old shelf. The orange cable chamber on the back came from the handle of an ironing board, combined with plastic parts from a toy laser gun and the core of an empty roll of electrical tape. The glowing eyes of the space invader on the front panel were broken out of an ugly sixties lamp I found in the trash. I even had to hunt for the hardware: when I was exactly two nuts short during assembly, I climbed into an empty scrap metal container. Out of seven rusty nuts on the ground, two had the exact right diameter. Jackpot! The speaker on the back is backlit and was completely rebuilt with wood and the cap of a windshield wiper fluid bottle,
because the circuit strictly required an 8-ohm speaker instead of the original 4 ohms.
Inside beats the heart of a heavily modified "Atari Punk Console". For this beast, I had to make my own circuit boards for the first time. The moment the board spat out its first noises, the design escalated. I added a square wave LFO and an 8-step sequencer, which can be flexibly routed to Chip A and B. Every single step of the sequencer can be deactivated to chop up the sequence. The arcade-button-style keyboard not only allows you to transpose the sequence, but almost every function on the front panel can also be switched to optical control (light sensor)—including pitch, high-pass, and low-pass filters, as well as the main speed of the LFO and sequencer.
An absolute standout feature is the "Ghost Hold" function: Since the circuit is a mono synthesizer, there is a hidden button underneath the actual keyboard. Paired with a 12-position rotary switch, it lets you freeze any note across the entire keyboard. This machine is a real beast, and its massive routing capabilities inevitably lead to total cognitive confusion—but it had to be built exactly this way.
The historical core of this circuit, by the way, traces back to Forrest M. Mims III, who published the design using two 555 timer chips (or a single 556) back in 1980 in a Radio Shack booklet as the "Sound Synthesizer". Later, the Kaustic Machines Crew renamed the circuit the "Atari Punk Console" because this raw, unpolished lo-fi noise sounds exactly like the broken video games of the early Atari era.
THE YAMAHA PSS 2900 MK4
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THE STRANGEST ONE ///
This is instrument is really special, because I pulled it out of a pile of junk, under lot of wires and computer parts. One key was broken. The problem is, that I don't use instruments, which are not in a acceptable state and a broken key is enough for me to keep it for over six years. So it gathered dust over time. But I needed it for the PSS line. We wanted to play a gig and I had to build four machines to do the show. So I want online and found a broken Yamaha PSS 480.
The seller said, that there is only noise, which comes out of it. I fixed the problem in a matter of minutes and there was only one loose solder connection and dust inside of it. Bridging dust ist a main problem in many old electronic devices., which were manufactured twenty years in the past and before. The usability of this instrument was a mess and the interface was such horror, that I decided to take it apart. I can't keep everything, but the parts. I took the main machine apart and scrubbed it, until it was like almost brand new. The keyboard was in a good condition and used to fit. And here it is, the Alice Edition, dedicated to a friend of mine.
THE YAMAHA PSS 2800 MK1
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LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER ///
This little guy came out of a trash mountain and was stuck under some smashed laptops and a bunch of cables. I took it with me and gave this buddy a few days to dry.
I was surprised. Sometimes I can’t understand, why somebody would throw it away.
The main problem with these units was the power connector on the back. After a while, it gets wobbly and the unit starts to break down for no reason. Another problem is the power supply. It has to have 12 Volts with 2000 mA. These instruments used to break down during the operation, if they were underpowered. This Synthesizer had a broken Main Switch. You couldn’t change the operation to one hand and so on. So I went down in the basement and pulled a similar contact switch out of a dead Hohner Organ. The measurements were not the same, so I had to cut the iron feather in half, soldered the two contacts together and melted them into the original plastic holding.
Hell Yeah, it worked and the rest is unknown history. The PSS 290 and the PSS 280 have the same board. But I noticed one jumper cable on the board, which seemed to be out of place.
My first Synthesizer or Keyboard was a Yamaha PSS 290. A friend gave it to me in 2010 – thank you very much Karl. My first two Bends on this Keyboard were a true horror. I found a hidden distortion, but every sound used to end in a clipping. So I pulled them out again. But one year later, I tried to bend it again and I had more experience. In the end, I found so much interesting bends and tested it via the first prototype. They are not harmful to the engine. And a big respect goes out to Yamaha, because this machine never hangs up. If you think the unit broke down or crashed, you are wrong. All you have to do is …. pressing some of the keys or adding some more patch-cables. And the Ghost in the Machine will come back. This build was planned as a giveaway for an artist. After two prototypes, I moved the machine to a new level. And it went to London, to “Look Mum No Computer”. May the “Ghost in the Machine” be with you!
THE ROBOT MOON 393
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A HEAVY MOD ///
Nearly three years ago, a friend of mine gave me a MAM Freebass FB-383 - TB-303 clone analog bass synth. It was a rack version of the famous TB 303 by Roland, lacking the programming features. And he said, he got it from another guy, who abandoned it as useless, and he couldn't work with it, because the front panel was almost unreadable. The lettering on the front Panel, which was brushed aluminium, was done in a nearly neon orange.
He only asked me, to change that and to build a new casing for it, which faces up to the actual user. I took the challenge and tried to find bend points on the circuit board, but had no luck. In the end, I was afraid of burning it and so it took six months from start to finish. When you play notes on an external keyboard, the tones tend to fade away. There was one point, when I discovered a fake hold, on the board. This was the breakthrough. And in the end, I called it he "Robot Moon 393". I should have added one or two LFO's, but I wasn't ready for this, at this time. But it turned out, to be the craziest 303 on the planet.
THE TERRORMIN
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THE SMOKE DETECTOR THEREMIN ///
One night, a friend asked me if I could build a Theremin. The answer was yes, but it had to happen my way. Walking home from that party, I stumbled upon a smashed ghetto blaster on the street and dragged it back with me.
I built the enclosure out of an old cigar box and some scrap pieces from broken furniture. I didn't have the right components for a proper Theremin circuit lying around, so I scavenged a smoke detector to generate the main voice. It worked surprisingly well throughout all the test sessions—and ultimately mutated into a genuinely bizarre machine.
THE ROBOTRON ONE
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THE CASIO SPACE MACHINE ///
What started as a simple Casio MA-130 mutated into an absolute monster—a true space machine. I once declared it finished, but let's be honest: in this lab, there are always more things to do.
I scavenged the main circuit board and unearthed a hidden distortion, along with a low-pass and a high-pass filter. I also wired two smoke detectors inside the chassis, each triggering a single note. The trigger time is fixed because, back when I built this, I simply didn't know how to wire it any other way. It was pure trial and error.
On the back of the instrument sits a hidden random trigger that reacts to light like an optical Geiger counter, syncing up with every beat. Above that section is the "Robotron Step"—an 8-step sequencer that allows you to manually inject additional steps into the running sequence. The final block houses a patchable bitcrusher and a simple delay unit. The delay still needs some fixing, but I already know exactly where the flaw in the circuit hides. One step at a time.
Ultimately, this old buddy serves as a prototype testbed for new ideas, and I am planning to completely rebuild it soon to match my current, uncompromising standards.
THE BLACK SMOKER
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THE UNLABELED NOISE BOX ///
My second circuit bend was a cheap, unlabeled toy keyboard. I managed to add a pitch control to it, but one day, the board simply died. Naturally, I tossed its corpse into a scrap box, as I always do.
Later on, I became obsessed with the idea of forcing two distinct voices into a single enclosure. I grabbed two smoke detectors, built a completely new chassis, and resurrected the salvaged keyboard unit to control them.
The keys are incredibly touch-sensitive now, altering the pitch fractions of a second before you even fully press them down. Dead center on the front panel sits a master tuning knob to dial in the exact frequency.
Sure, you could dismiss it as just a noise machine, but it features several patch points that let you dive deep into its sonic capabilities. And as always: almost every single component you see here was built from raw scrap I pulled off the streets or out of the trash.
THE ROBOMIN
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THE TERRORMIN MK 3 ///
This compact beast serves as the raw prototype for the Terrormin MK3. Just like many of its predecessors, the chassis was hammered together entirely from salvaged scrap wood. Inside, it’s armed with a "Simple LFO" and an integrated bitcrusher. I wired up various randomized pitch controls and added a dedicated hold function to completely freeze the tone in place.
The antennas are highly touch-sensitive, meaning you can technically approach it like a traditional Theremin. But make no mistake: the actual behavior and soul of this machine are completely different, heavily mutated, and far more unpredictable. The base section acts as the main control hub, housing the parameters for light sensitivity, overall volume, the LFO rate, and a gritty "robot voice".
There will definitely be a successor to this unit, but plotting the next evolution will take some serious time on the lab’s drawing board.