VMP Magazine

When I first started getting into modular synth, about a year and a half ago, some of my friends who were already deep into it warned me. Eurocrack, they called it. Just as addictive as crack and twice as expensive. I had laughed, liking the play on words and the joke, and then I looked up prices online. Baffled, I had no idea how I could begin to build a kit. I went to the Moog Music store in downtown Toronto to talk to a staff member; she typed me up an estimate of the most basic things I would need to make a functioning kit from scratch (on a budget), and it came to just over $1,500 CAD. Minimum. Well, I thought. I’ll just need to save this up, and buy everything at once. And so I started to save money.

Some music is designed to be unheard. “Background music,” you’ll call it. “Elevator music.” “Study music.” You know exactly what it sounds like, but you can’t name a single song. It’s the instrumental stuff you pop on in the background, hour-block loops off YouTube to help you study, or to just have something going while you do a mindless task. It’s the music you hear in a hotel lobby, kind of jazzy, somewhat upbeat, certainly not morose but, overall, bland and unmemorable. It’s not music; it’s Muzak.