gommage

the oldest go first

20 HP

A looper that grows old. Each year the number on the stone falls by one, and every layer as old as the number comes apart into petals and drifts away. The loop builds, then eats itself from the oldest end, until at zero there's nothing.

The GOMMAGE panel: black, with a tall hooded figure in gold dots, nothing inside its hood, its shoulders and sleeves coming apart into petals. Down the middle, two numerals and twelve slats of bare circuit board, and small petals of bare circuit board up both sides. PAINT's button at the top; YEAR, NUMBER, WIND and FEED at the edges, each with its jack beside it; CLOCK, PAINT, FALL, ERASED, ZERO and LAYERS round the middle; OUT, IN and PETALS along the foot. gommage at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. PAINT is a button: press it and the year turns now. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is a stand-in rack playing a new part each year into IN, with GOMMAGE's loop over it. Listen plays the patch from its top.

example patches

The years, the number, the layers and the petals here are GOMMAGE's engine as it's designed, running in your browser, with a smaller memory than the module's (a bar of up to 2.5 seconds; the module's is 5.4). The rack is a stand-in, and its years are short: a bar each in most patches.

Layers and years

Everything that goes in goes down as a layer, and every layer has an age: how many years ago it went down. A year is a few bars. All the layers play at once, the newest at the top of the stone, the oldest at its foot.

IN: audio, ±5 V: what goes down. It isn't passed through, so mult it if the loop should sit under it.
CLOCK: quarter notes; a loop is a bar of four. Unpatched, 120 BPM.
YEAR: how many bars a year lasts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 16 or 32. A year's passes go down into one layer, sound on sound.
FEED: how much goes down each pass. Fully left nothing, and the loop only plays and comes apart; at noon IN at full; past noon the petals too, so what's erased drifts back into the newest layer.

The number

Each year the number falls by one, and every layer as old as the number is erased. So the loop deepens a layer a year to about half the number it started from, then loses one a year until, at zero, there's nothing. A year of silence, and the count starts again.

NUMBER: where the count starts, 1 to 24. The number never goes back up: turn NUMBER below it and it falls there at once, erasing as it goes; turn it up and the next count starts higher.
PAINT: the button, or a gate at its jack: the year turns now. The number falls, the oldest go and a new layer begins. The button lights each time the number falls.

Petals

Nothing just stops. An erased layer comes apart into grains of itself that scatter across the bar, some backwards, lifting in pitch as they drift, thinning out until they're gone. The petals up the stone's sides flicker as they go.

WIND: how a layer goes. Fully left, a clean cut; then it crumbles where it stands; then it blows apart into a cloud. Fully right, a cloud that lasts thirty seconds and rises an octave. It blows on every cloud in the air, not only the new ones.

What comes out

OUT: the loop, and the petals unless PETALS is patched.
PETALS: the petals alone. Patched, they leave OUT, so they can have a reverb of their own.
LAYERS: 0.4 V a layer: the arc as a CV, rising as the loop builds and falling as it's eaten.
FALL: a trigger each time the number falls. Into a sequencer, and every layer gets something new.
ERASED: a trigger for each layer erased.
ZERO: a gate, high through the year of silence.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: 4 knobs, a lit button

Inputs

IN: audio, ±5 V
CLOCK: quarter notes, a rise through 1.2 V; 120 BPM unpatched
PAINT: gate, the year turns on each rise
CVs: YEAR, NUMBER, WIND, FEED: ±5 V, added to the knob

Outputs

OUT: audio, up to ±9 V
PETALS: audio, the petals alone
LAYERS: 0 to 4.8 V, 0.4 V a layer
FALL, ERASED: triggers, 5 V for 10 ms
ZERO: gate, 5 V