The Blindboy Podcast - Meditations on the Analog Synthesiser from the Cuck Chair of a Carlow Hotel

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

A history of analog synths and mass produced hotel art and how they intersect with inteligence agency espionage Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Suspend the Brendan from the end of his legs, you squelchy pendergasts. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, a pinpricked Vincent or a steeple-chasing Quiva, then you know the crack. Welcome back.

I'm unsure if you can hear it because it's quite faint but we'll be joined by the pitter patter of rain on my tin roof again this week it's just a trade-off I've had to do I moved into this new recording space this new office about nine months ago

because the previous place where I was recording it was just getting really busy with people slamming doors and talking so I moved to a quieter floor in the building up at the top where there's hardly fucking anyone. But I didn't factor in the fact that I've got a tin roof. So sometimes we're disturbed by the sound of birds.

But mostly, it's what you're hearing now, it's rain. And at the start, this was really frustrating. I was like, fuck, am I gonna have to wait until it's not raining before I press record? Because that's really difficult in Ireland, where it rains a lot. So what I do instead is when it starts raining, I put a microphone up to the roof and I record the sound of the rain and I bring it on as a guest I embrace it. And it's quite nice.

Although right now it's a status yellow wind and rain warning which may become profoundly aggressive on my window pane. I'm looking out at shimmering sheets of silver sideways rain slashing through Limerick City. Like a carryman's bread knife. But I have to cycle home in that. I have to cycle home in this in a boat. In a couple of hours, but I'm looking forward to it. Because I've got my full Gortex. And I'm going to pretend that I'm Coocholin.

Dying. Tying himself to the stone. Fighting the armies of Connacht that come towards him in waves. Except it'll just be me on a bicycle. Outside Tesco. In full Gortex. With that. That eggy smell.

That eggy smell of dry city dog shit when it's awoken by rain and gets blown by the wind. If you've been following me on Instagram at Blind by Boat Club, you'll know that over the past week I've gotten my hands on some analog synthesizers and I've been posting videos of me playing these analog synthesizers. Every fucking night I'm obsessed. I feel like a child. I have in my possession pieces of musical equipment that I've quite literally been dreaming about since I was a child. First off I never thought it would be possible for me to own an analogue synthesizer because they're so unbelievably expensive, incredibly expensive. A real deal, original analog synthesizer, even the cheapest ones, start at about 5,000 or 6,000 euro. Now obviously I didn't do that.

and I'll explain how I got these analog synthesizers shortly, but an original analog synthesizer, most of them, they're prohibitively expensive, even today, because a lot of them were made in the 1970s, the 1980s, by small boutique companies. Synthesizers in the 1950s and 1960s, electronic musical instruments, they weren't intended for, like, pop music on the radio. but they were being pitched towards classical music composers, specifically modernist classical music composers.

Early electronic music and synthesizers was being used for abstract art. Very intellectual high-brow abstract art. It was for composers like Caroline Stockhausen, who was trying to push the boundaries of what classical music could be by embracing these brand new electronic instruments. And modernism, modernism in art. And I'm going to keep this incredibly simple so I don't go down rabbit holes. A late 19th century, mostly 20th century movement where artists across genres deliberately broke with traditions and started to embrace science and technology to move forward to radically change.

art. So modernism in writing. Let's go with an obvious one. James Joyce. I've done an entire podcast on this. I can't remember what it's fucking called. What made Joyce's work modernist? He was looking towards

the theory of the unconscious mind from Sigmund Freud. So when Joyce would write from the first person, like in Ulysses, he's not just writing the words that come out of his character's mouths. He's trying to write the free associative way that words form in the character's mind before they become words

that leave their mouths. And that's why some of Ulysses can be difficult to read. Also what Joyce was doing. And I did a full podcast on this, specifically his short story, The Dead. Joyce opened the first ever cinema in Dublin in 1909. So when Joyce was writing fiction, he was doing so with the awareness of this new technology called the film camera and in a story like the dead in particular it's quite cinematic like that's a tough one for us to understand because we know nothing but moving images we're bombarded with video before the advent of cinema moving images people just had the internality of their own minds or paintings

and Joyce's writing the dead in particular feels like him imagining what cinema could be. So that's modernism. In painting, you had the impressionists in the late 1800s, right? They would have been proto-modernism. They're painting with an awareness and a literacy in the emerging science of optics. How the human eye perceives light. Then you have the cubists who are almost responding to the threat of photography, a new emerging technology where you have a box that can take a photograph of reality and represent it. And then painters are going, well, what's the fucking point of us anymore?

So with Cubism, they go, can a camera do this? And they completely reject perspective and representation. And start to paint abstractions. And then all this presents a challenge to classical music. So in the late 1800s, he had a Russian fella called Igor Stravinsky

who completely rejects established forms in classical music and then starts making mad shit. In 1913 he had an orchestral piece called the Riot of Spring and it caused riots. So anyway, the first analog synthesizers. Let's say the 1960s, they were being marketed towards universities. Classical composers like Caroline Stockhausen making abstract art who wanted to push classical music forward by using machines, using electric, electronic musical instruments. They were being bought by universities and places like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

They were unbelievably expensive in the 60s. You're talking between 80,000 and 200,000 euro in today's money. But then by the mid to late 60s, you see the emergence of pot. pop music as a huge industry and pop musicians start to become quite wealthy. So there was a synthesizer called the Moog modular. Massive thing made in the mid-60s about the size of a wardrobe with loads of knobs on it and little wires coming out of it all over. Crazy looking thing.

And Mick Jagger purchased one of them in 1967 because Mick Jagger had 80 grand. Mick Jagger was in the Rolling Stones they were at the height of their success. He had 80 grand to purchase a giant synthesizer that was intended for universities. It was used on the Rolling Stones album Their Satanic Majesty's

request, which was a late 67 album. It's not their greatest piece of work but fair play to them. The competition had suddenly got very psychedelic and very strange and very weird and the Rolling Stones were like well fuck it we got to keep up. So Mick Jagger bought himself a huge big Moog modular synth.

Because in 66 and 67, the Beatles and the Beach Boys introduced modernism to pop music by treating the recording studio itself as an instrument, as a creative tool. I'm being very broad about this stuff because this is an area of obsession for me and I'm trying to avoid very deep. detailed rabbit holes. So I'd argue the first big mainstream use of an analogue synthesizer in a pop song is the song Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. So you know good vibrations, it's a fucking banger. But in the song Good Vibrations, there's a little instrument and it sounds like this. So you know that from the song Good Vibrations, the beach boys. That's the first time most people would have heard an analogue synthesizer. And that's the theramen.

And the modernism there is... It's psychedelic. It's Brian Wilson dropping acid for the first time and going, I heard some sounds on my trip. Now, we tried to do it in 1965 with a Beach Boys song called California Girls. I wish I could play these songs for you as I'm speaking about them, but California Girls' 1965.

The song opens up and an... organ comes in and there's a reverb on the organ and that was Brian Wilson's first attempt at. Making music sound like an acid trip and that predates the Beatles and it kick the Beatles up the arse to go psychedelic. But in 67, Brian Wilson is like, look I just had an acid trip and I heard some sounds and instruments don't exist that can recreate these sounds. It was vibrations, good vibrations and we need to figure out how the fuck to make whatever sound that was that I heard while I was on acid. One of his session musicians whips out of Therriman. I know there's music nerds listening.

Okay? I know that's not the first ever analogue synthesizer in a song. I'm not speaking about the contributions of someone like Delia Derbyshire. I'm not going down to any Wendy Carlos, rabbit holes, because I want to do those as separate podcasts. I'm keeping this broad. I could also point to a 1961 song called Runaway by Del Shannon, another fucking banger, but, which appears to have an analog synthesizer in it,

but it's not an analog synthesizer, it's a vacuum tube oscillator. I'm keeping this simple. Also, regarding good vibrations, I know it's not technically a pheromine, it's a modified pherom in with a keyboard. We're not getting into that. I want to keep this broad and understandable for an audience who mightn't have a clue about any of this stuff. But it's fair to say that that's the first time that most people would have heard

an analog synthesizer on the fucking radio and that changed the game completely and then Mick Jagger is like, what the fuck was that? A synthesizer? What's that? So he goes and spends 80 grand on a Moog modular synth. So I've got my hands on a couple of analog synthesizers and I've been

playing with them all week and posting videos to Instagram. I want to explain what an analog synthesizer is and why it's so special. So a couple of minutes ago I said I was going to cycle home in the rain. But I've just done that. Several hours. I've

past since I spoke that sentence. And now I'm no longer in my office studio. I'm in my home studio. And I know you're thinking, but blind by I can still hear the rain in your office. But for continuity purposes, I'm now playing a recording of the rain in my office earlier so you don't notice a transition. I keep saying this podcast is a piece of writing. It's a gigantic novel. It is because technology allows me to edit my words with the precision that I cut at a word processor. If you read a novel on a page or read an article that's written on a page, it's one continuous body of text. But when the author was writing that piece of text,

they could have been in multiple different locations, different times, and you don't notice it because it's a full body of text. That's what this podcast is. I write with my mouth for you to read with your ears. I have two separate studios and I make sure that the sound is identical in each one so that it's seamless like a body of text. The first bit of this podcast was recorded about four hours ago. In that time I cycled home and ate my dinner.

But while I was cycling home in the rain, I was thinking to myself, how do I explain what an analogue synthesizer is, especially to people who might not be musicians? Now when knowing your head you're thinking of it's a keyboard like a piano with lots of buttons and knobs on it and it makes electronic noises

that's correct but what makes an analogue synthesizer unique is how it generates sound so as I was cycling home the rain was battering off me and it was windy it was a fucking storm now I'm loving it because I'm covered in Gortex

so I'm not getting wet I'm wearing gloves the only bit of exposed skin that I had was on my face. Storms are very beautiful things when you're dry and warm and when you can exist in the storm and just observe it.

But as I came to the end of my journey the rain subsided and it became calm and there was a light little drizzle and I stopped and listened to the silence of it where the rain isn't fallen anymore but why you can hear

are the drops of water coming from the leaves of trees and then I heard a buzzing sound a hum and I looked up and it was electrical pylons you know when it's really light

and drizzly and electrical pylons start buzzing and humming and you get kind of scared because you're wondering that's not right I can hear the fucking electricity is this safe and that phenomenon it's called

corona discharge and it's what happens when the high voltage from electrical pylons leaks into the wet air and that makes the air vibrate and then you hear it as a buzzing sound and then it hit me

that's an analogue synthesizer that's a fucking analog synthesizer the buzz and hum of a wet pylon in a calm drizzle is an analog synthesizer except it's uncontrolled buzzing an analog synthesizer is a box that contains

analog circuitry and it turns electricity into sound. So with a pylon, it's electrical voltage, right, but nature is controlling the conditions. So it's the rain, humidity, the wind. Nature determines what that sound is. But with an analog synthesizer, it's the same electricity, but it's not exciting air and and moisture, it's exciting analogue circuitry, which I then have a huge amount of control over using lots and lots of little knobs. An analog synth, you're taming a force of nature. Like gravity, electromagnetism is a force of nature. Electricity is a manifestation of that force. So electricity exists in the fucking wild. Lightning is electricity. I'm using a electricity right now to speak. You're using electricity to listen to me, to think. When our muscles

move, it's electrical signals in our nerves that cause muscles to move. So electricity, it's a manifestation of a force of nature. An analog circuitry allow you to harness that force, but then put great amounts of control over it, then hook that up to an amplifier, a speaker, and generate controlled sound. electrical pylons are an analogue synthesizer, just nature is controlling what you're hearing. Now what makes that special as a musical instrument? I've been a music producer for over 20 years. I've been playing synthesizers for 20 fucking years to make electronic music. But these were digital synthesizers, virtual synthesizers that are on my computer screen.

They're like video games about synthesizers. We call them VSTs, virtual studio technology. just like a word processor a word processor is a virtual typewriter Photoshop If you edit images now on Photoshop

or even on an image editor on your phone The words that we use Such as Barn and Dodge Crop Filter, layer These are all things that people have to do With their hands at one point And now we do them digitally

Similarly, could I have made this podcast 30 years ago? Absolutely not Why not? Because I'd have been recording onto tape. The past 18 minutes that I've been speaking, there's been several hundred tiny little edits. And you know how I edit? I can see my words up on screen and I click on a little razor blade and I cut the words. 30 years ago, that would have literally had to have been a piece

of tape, an actual razor blade and some glue. It would have been impossible. Remember the modernist classical composer Carl Heinz Stockhausen that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago. Do you know what he was doing with classical music before he started using synthesizers? He was cutting tape. He was recording classical instruments onto tape and then cutting them with razor blades to create sounds that had never been created before. Frank Sappa then went on and did that and the Beatles did that on fucking Sergeant Pepper. That's my critique of radio and television. I work in radio and television and when you're on radio

and you have a professional a trained broadcaster interviewing you even if it's a pre-recorded interview they have a sheet of questions and they keep bringing you back to that sheet of questions and they don't let you deviate

or ramble and go on tangents because a lot of the rules of radio broadcasting are stuck in a pre-digital mindset where if a guest goes on a tangent it would mean cutting pieces of tape and it would take hours and loads of loads of money. That's gone. The great modernist Samuel Beckett has a play

from the 1955 called Crapp's Last Tape and it's just a play about a man on stage who every day of his life he pressed record on a tape and did a personal diary and now he's at the end of his life listening back to all the days of his life. Beckett made that play as something.

Something surreal, something absurd. Now it's just a podcast. So if I was making this podcast in the 70s, what would I be doing? I would be physically writing the podcast out with my hands as a sheet of text. And then I'd read the entire thing out. And if I fucked up, then it's razor blades and glue and multiple hours of hard work. But you see, that wouldn't be this podcast. Because I write with my mouth for you to read with your ears.

and oral writing is very different to physical writing. Oral writing is a bit more automatic. It's closer to what Joyce was looking for. I couldn't have made this podcast

in 2010 because in 2010 the computer technology that I've been able to afford it just wouldn't have been able to handle the size of the audio files that I can give it now.

So virtual synthesizers are like that. They're digital on screen. But digital is numerical. It's a programming language. It's one's in. zeros. Digital is exact. So when I'm using a virtual synthesizer, which I've been doing for 20 fucking years, it sounds a bit like an analog synthesizer, but everything is exact. Every time

I go back to it, the sounds are exactly the same. And if you have the same virtual synthesizer as me and the other side of the world and they're both digital synthesizers, we're getting the exact same sound, exactly the same. No two analog synthesizers are the exact same. You're controlling a force of nature. Electricity. Each time it's slightly unpredictable. It's not digital. It's not ones and zeros.

It can go out of tune. If you leave it plugged in for too long, it gets hot and the sound changes slightly. It's much more sensitive to touch. Like a guitar, an analog synthesizer allows the individual artist and musician's personality to come through in the sound's. that are being made. If you and I are on different sides of the world, we both have two separate analog synthesizers. No matter how hard we try to be the exact same, there's going to be slight differences, slight variations, slight expressions of our personalities. Proper old school

analog synths, they don't have presets. And a preset is basically a button you press and it takes it to a sound. Like a button, think at all keyboards you would have had as a kid. Press the piano button and now you hear a piano. An analog synthesizer isn't like that. You have to build the sounds from scratch using 60 different knobs. An analog synthesizer forces you to mix your own colors rather than using paint straight out of the tube. And that's a more expressive and skilled way for an individual artist to create. I'm trying to get you to give a shit about something that you might and give a fuck about, but I've been dreaming about this since I'm seven years of age. I'm not joking you.

All right, I used to listen to the prodigy, I used to listen to Dr. Dre With my shitty Cassio keyboard and I could never get the sounds. And even when I moved onto a computer and started using these virtual synthesizers, virtual recreations of classic synths, I still couldn't get it.

And now finally, I have my own analog synthesizers and I'm in heaven. So I got two analog synthesizers. Did I spend thousands of euros? No, I didn't. I bought them incredibly cheap, around 100 euros each. So as I mentioned, analog synthesizers used to be made in small batches for a very small market of people who could afford them. When digital since became a thing in the late 70s and the 80s, a lot of companies just stopped making analog synthesizers. So the ones that were left became very rare, very expensive.

and very difficult to maintain and repair, and that pushed the price up further. But since around the pandemic, this German music company called Beringer started to mass produce analog synthesizers at scale in a huge big factory in China. So for the first time ever, actual legitimate analog synthesizers became a large, affordable for anybody to buy. However, this company bearinger receive a huge amount of criticism in the music community because some people feel what they're doing isn't ethical. Some online critics accuse them of copying and cloning other companies designs and potentially putting small boutique music companies out of business. And I'm being very careful with my language there. so I don't get fucking sued. But it's a fact that they've had lawsuits brought against them for copyright infringement. But I want to point out for that ethical reason.

The two synthesizers that I bought, I bought them secondhand. From a person online who was selling them used. And I want to point that out too, so I'm not inadvertently doing an advertisement for this massive, massive company where a lot of musicians have ethical issues with what they're doing.

But what this company do, they make exact clones of classic analog synthesizers. So I got my hands on a mini-mug clone and a profit clone for just over 200 euro. If I was to buy an actual profit and an actual mini-mug, how much would I pay today? Between 12 and 15,000 for originals from the 1970s and that could end up in a bidding war because there's only so many of them available. So actual analogs, synthesizers are, they're out of the price bracket of 99% of people. And to be honest, even if I won the lottery, I'm just not buying a synthesizer for seven or eight grand. I couldn't justify it. I'd go without it. And even companies like Moog, if you want to buy an analog synth

from them that they've made this year, it's still five grand. So Beringer stepped in and said, okay, we're going to, we're going to make these available for 300 quid, brand new. They're literal physical analog synthesizers that are the same price as the VSTs, as the virtual instruments that I've been playing for 20 years on my computer and they're fucking identical

and it's tearing the music world apart because a lot of musicians can't say no and like me both of these synthesizers I know I'm like the back of my hand because I've been playing them digitally VSTs for 20 fucking years so when I finally got them

in my hands physically there's no learning curve I just went straight at it and it's brought intense joy into my fucking week it's really made me fall in love with making music again anyone who makes music on a computer

using virtual instruments you can get completely overwhelmed by choice by all of the presets that's not the case with analog since you're building the sounds yourself and you have to commit you have to really commit to a sound and then record it.

So the process becomes more tactile, more personalised, easier to enter a state of flow, playfulness, a better sound and better music as a result. I've just been making music for the sake of making music. Playing for the joy of playing. And the past week has been, it's been therapy for my neurodivorgent burnout, which I'm consistently in and out of.

I was able to give my brain a rest this week because when I'm in flow states, in musical flow states, I'm not thinking, I'm doing. Now I do have some hot takes this week around the history of synthesizers and how they intersect with intelligence agencies and espionage. So I'm going to do an ocarina pause now. But instead of an ocarina, I'm going to play ye a track, a track that I made during the week with my analog synagogues. synthesizers. I'm not making music with any specific goal to release it. I'm making music for the joy of making music, but I'm recording it too, because you know I score my own documentaries. When I make documentaries, I do the soundtrack myself. And when I release audiobooks, I also make a soundtrack for the audiobooks because I can and I love doing it. So I'll play in instrumental

track now. This track is called St. Finnbars and N. I'm a song. Nudes. St. Finbar was the patron saint of Kark. He existed in the 5th century and suppose I was thinking if you had a time machine and you could give St. Finbar an iPhone, you know, what photographs would he take? And then I thought, how long before he starts taking photographs of his own dick? So that's why this instrumental piece is called St. Finbar's Nodes. And this song showcases my two wonderful analog synthesizers. The bass line is played on my mini-mug. The cards are played on the prophet. Beautiful, gorgeous sound or the prophet. That's my favorite one of the synths. That's a polyphonic synth, which means you can play cards on it, whereas the mini-mug, that's monophonic, so you can only play one node at a time. And all you really need is one polyphonic synth and one monophonic synth and you're sorted.

I'm never using a VST again. Not after this. This has changed everything for me. I'm so happy. Also, I was recently gifted another piece of dream kit. A compressor called an Alisysus 3630 compressor. This was gifted to me by a podcast listener called John, who he saw me talking about this Alisyses 3,630 compressor,

and how I've wanted one my whole life. And he just mailed me and said, I have one of these lying around and I don't use it do you want it and I said fucking yes please and it's not particularly fancy it's it's actually known as a piece of shit compressor from the mid 90s but the reason I'm obsessing about this compressor

is it's what daft punk used so daft punk have a very specific sound especially on their album discovery and that's because of their use of compression compression is it it's an effect that makes the quiet parts loud the loud parts quite. But I put it on the master of this track

and it makes the drums, the snares in particular. I've got that lovely, bumpy, daft punk feel. So this is a quick track, St. Finnbar's Nodes that I made the other night with my analogue synths.

And we're going to have that instead of the Ocarina Poss. was St. Finnbar's nudes. I fucking love making that. Even though it's 30 seconds long or whatever the fuck it is, the gorgeous warm sounds of those analog synths and making decisions,

making musical decisions that I simply wouldn't make with a virtual synthesizer. It just wouldn't happen. Because I have my hands are touching all these knobs and the synth itself was roasting hot because I'd been added for fucking hours and it's just subtly going out of tune

but not so much that it's discardant just the right amount that it gives it a bit of personality okay here's an advert for some bullshit this podcast is sponsored by you the listener via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast if you enjoy this podcast if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction

Even this week where I'm being a selfish fucker and talking about analog since, and I don't know whether or not you're interested in that, but you know my fucking rule. I got to speak about whatever I'm legitimately passionate about. I've been obsessing about this all week. I don't think I've thought about anything else. I can't show up here and bullshit you and speak about something else. What I need to do is be congruent, be emotionally congruent. speak about what I'm actually interested in

and hopefully if I'm passionate and authentic with it then that translates into a listenable experience for you and I'm able to do that because this is an independent podcast I'm not beholden to advertisers this is listener funded

this is funded by you it's my full-time job this is how I pay my bills it's how I pay my wages it's how I purchase my equipment for my studio it's how I bought those synthesizers which they're not just for crack

I make music as part of my job and one of the reasons I score my own documentaries is because music rights is one of the biggest pains in the hole when it comes to television if you make a piece of television and it gets broadcast on a TV network

like RTE or BBC you're using their blanket music license so you can use any song you want but then when that piece of television leaves that network and it goes on to a streaming service or it's shown on a different network, you have to renegotiate the music rights, which is often so expensive that you just can't, you can't do it. So by writing and scoring my own music for the documentaries, it means I have complete ownership of it. And because of that, my last documentary, slaves and

scholars that now that's shown on all of the Aer Lingus flights and all of United Airlines flights which is hundreds of thousands of people now seeing that documentary and that becomes that becomes a streamlined process when you're like yeah I own all the footage and I own all the music work away so that's the practical reason there of why I make the music for my documentaries aside from it being tremendously enjoyable but anyway if you like this podcast and you want to support it directly, please consider becoming a patron, all right? All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee.

Once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen to the podcast for free, okay? Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living and I'm not beholden to advertisers. They don't get to come in and tell me what to say. Upcoming gigs.

Thursday, I'm in Cork, the home of St. Finbar's Nudes. I'm in Cork in the Opera House as part of the Cork Podcast Festival. There's literally like 20 tickets left for this gig. Thank you to the people of Cork. If you're thinking of coming along, get the tickets now. I have a fucking wonderful guest. I have a world-renowned expert on biotechnology, specifically plants. So the conversation will be about food security,

using plants for medicine. Response is to climate change. It's going to be really interesting. Then 4th of April I'm up in Castle Blaney in Monaghan. Really looking forward to that. That's a nice little small gig. Really tiny little gig. That'll be nice and intimate.

A couple of tickets left for that. And then I'm in Limerick. I'm in Limerick for the homecoming gig. On the 9th of April at the University Concert Hall. That's almost sold out. And then I'm back in Vicker Street. Up in Dublin. on the 20th of April.

You know my Vicker Street gigs. I love Vickers Street. And that one is on a Monday night. Lovely quiet Monday night gig. Be like going to the theatre. Then I'm in Galway for that gig that was cancelled

and rescheduled on the 25th in Leisureland. Two nights in Berlin in June. Very few tickets left for the second night of Berlin. Sheffield then in July and trying to keep quiet. it for the summer. I don't want to do too many summer gigs so I can...

Ah, fuck it. I have two little toddlers and it's hard to explain to him when I disappear after a gig for a night and don't come back until the next day. They've been having unbelievable crack with the synthesizers too. I'm sure it's fucking perfect. I play the notes on the keyboard and then all they have to do is twiddle the knobs and make sounds. Amazing for him. But I'm in Sheffield in July on the 7th of... No, the 5th of July at the Crossed Wires Festival. That's in Sheffield City Hall. And then my big tour of England, Scotland and Wales, which is very nearly sold out.

Glasgow, London and Guildford. You're down to the single digits there for the tickets. So, yeah, October 26. Brighton, Wales, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead, Nottingham. So I have some synthesizer hot takes. I was gigging in Carlo there about a week ago. And when I finished the gig, I went to my hotel. I'm very familiar with hotels because of my job, I tour. So I stay in a lot of hotels. And I'm always fascinated in the hotel room by what's called the cock chair. So in a hotel room you have the bed, sometimes you have a desk, and then often you just have this one lonely armchair that points at the bed and it doesn't appear to serve a purpose.

You can sit on it maybe if you want to put your shoes on while you're sitting down. Usually I'd throw claws on it but it's just this chair pointing at the bed. and it's referred to as the cock chair. Some people have a theory that what it's actually for is it's for couples who are swinging. Now it's plausible by stay in a lot of hotels. And certain hotels do have architecture that's geared towards debauchery.

The obvious one, of course, a lot of hotels have full-length big mirror besides, the bed. That's for people having sex so that they can look at themselves having sex. That is what that is for. That's what that is for. And it's in a lot of hotels and we all know what that's about. Because who the fuck wants to look at themselves sleeping? That one's quite vanilla. That's in lots of hotels. That's in family hotels. Then another one you see which is quite rare. You'll see this in hotels in big cities, cities that might have a bit of a party culture and this is disappearing. This is more of a Celtic Tiger

2010s type of thing. You get into the hotel room and the coffee table is a mirror. Okay? A mirrored surface somewhere. That's for cocaine. That's what that is for. If the coffee table is a fucking mirror, that's for people to do cocaine. You see that in hotels that are very close to a live venue, very close to a nightclub. That's a cocaine hotel. But then the cock chair, that's in all hotels. It's just an itinerant chair on its own that doesn't appear to serve a purpose, but it's pointed at the bed. And people reckon this is for a husband, usually a husband who likes his wife to have sex with other men. And while the wife is having sex with another man on the bed, the husband is sitting in this chair.

watching and enjoying himself. Now, the history of the term cock chair, like cock is a cockhold, a cockhold, and a cockhold is somebody, somebody who's in a marriage, but they invite a third person in, or I don't know with the word cockhold,

is it consensual or not, but the modern understanding of cookholdry is that it's fully consensual, and this is what the couple are into. It's a form of, swinging but one person likes to be viaristic. But the phrase cocking chair, cocking stool, that goes back to medieval times. It was a chair used for public humiliation.

Often to punish women, women in particular in medieval times, it was... You'd think of it with the witch trials. It was, they would dunk. A woman would sit on a chair, she'd be tied to a chair and they'd dunk her into a river. and then parade her around the town in this cocking chair as a form of public humiliation. Often for people who were accused of the crime of being a scold. A scold used to be a crime in medieval times. It meant being a public noisance.

But it was misogynistic. It tended to be women who were accused of the crime of being a scold. And they were then put in the cocking chair and either dunked in the river or perused. throughout the town. But when I get to a hotel, I always have a good old sit in the cock chair. To make use of the room.

Now, I have to say, if there's a desk or if there's anything beside the cockchair, then it ceases to be a cock chair. Now it's simply a chair beside a table and it serves a purpose.

It's only a cock chair when it's a weird, uncomfortable chair where you're going, why the fuck would I want to sit there? It's the point to doing that. Do I just have to do I just think? Because it's not pointed at the TV, that's the thing.

Every hotel room has a television. But if you're to watch TV in a hotel room, you sit on the fucking bed. Why is the cock chair not pointed at the TV? Why is it pointed at the bed? That's the thing. But when I sit in the cock chair in every hotel, what I do is I look at the terrible artwork. Hotels have awful, awful art.

And it doesn't matter whether the, hotel is fancy or shit. All hotels have really shit art and it's deliberately shit art because they don't want people nick in it and it's art that has to, it's decorative, it has to blend into the background and I'm always fascinated by hotel art because it's all equally shit. They're paintings that are inspired by abstract expressionism but there's no, no one has had to think about the colors or the composition. It's often just splatters of paint on a canvas.

In the cheaper hotels, the hotel art is, it's on canvas but it's printed. In the better hotels, it's still somewhat printed on the canvas, but you can tell a human hand splashed a brushmark on the canvas. So I always sit in the cookchair and look at the bad art. and when I see an actual brush stroke because you got her, I went to fucking art college for years and I actually, I was a painting tutor

in my early 20s. I used to teach adults how to oil paint for about two years in my early 20s so I know my way around the painting and I'm always fascinated by the ones that clearly a human hand is involved and I can tell

that the paint that's used is often it's not the type of paint that you use for art, it's often house paint, it's house paint and it's applied not with an artist's brush but with a house painting brush the type of brush that you'd use to paint a wall

and usually these paintings it's mostly printed on canvas and then a person comes along with bright red or bright pink and they just splatter onto it with a fucking house painting brush. And for years I've thought to myself, who are the humans that do this? Where do these hotel paintings come from? Because they're in every single hotel that I go to regardless of where the

fuck I am around the world. There's this generic hotel art. So it has to be made and purchased somewhere and humans are painting these things. So while I was sitting in the cup chair in Carlo at the weekend. I finally said to myself, why don't I just try and find out? I've been wondering about this for years. Why don't I just try and find out where the fuck does generic hotel art come from?

But also, I kind of wanted to be back in Limerick playing with my fucking synthesizers. So I also couldn't stop thinking about synthesizers. And I felt that lovely little autistic tingle. That little challenge. where my hot takes come from, where I said to myself,

I can't stop thinking about the origins of generic hotel art, and I also can't stop thinking about my synthesizers. I wonder are these things connected in any way, or can I weave them together in some way so that they are connected, and I can, because the common thread is espionage. So in 1945, World War II was ending, and for a very brief period, Russia and the United States are kind of on the same side because they've both defeated the Nazis.

So the Cold War hadn't, it wasn't in full effect. They were kind of diplomatically okay with each other. And the United States had an ambassador, a US ambassador, in Moscow. And Russia was so friendly with the United States. that they gave the US ambassador in Moscow a gift. And it was a piece of artwork that the ambassador was to hang on his wall. It was a handcrafted, hand-carved, wooden seal

of the great seal of the US. So that the United States Eagle, I think it's what you have on US coins. Now this is 1945, remember, okay? So the US ambassador is like, thank you so much. Russia and he hangs this hand-carved eagle on the wall of his office in Moscow. Now it's 1945 so he's not thinking it's a piece of art.

How could a piece of art be dangerous in any way? It's a handcrafted, it's a piece of wood. It's just a gift. It's a gift from some boy scouts. It's just hanging on the wall. It's fine. So he's not even thinking that this thing might be a threat. So do you remember earlier?

I mentioned the instrument that was used in that Beach Boys song, Good Vibrations. I said the instrument was called a theramine. The theramen could be argued with the world's first analogue synthesizer invented in the 1920s by a Russian called Leon Theramen. Also the Therriman would have been the world's first mass produced affordable analog synthesizer because when people did, didn't have 80 grand to buy a big Moog synthesizer in the 60s. Most people who started off with electronic instruments, they would buy a Theraman kit. They were purchased from catalogs and it would arrive in your GAF and you'd have to build it yourself and you'd have to solder it. This was difficult. This was an electronic instrument that you put together yourself.

But that was the only way that it could be affordable for people. But Leon Therriman invented the the Theraman in the 1920s in America and this fella was a genius, a proper genius, a pioneer of electronics. And the Theramen as an instrument, it's mad looking, it doesn't even look like a musical instrument. It's like a little wooden box with a single metal antenna coming out of it. And to play the Therriman, there's no keyboard, there's no buttons, there's nothing. You move your body. And when you move your body around the pteramine, it generates a sine wave, that whistling sound. So people who could play the pheromon had to be particularly skilled because there's no fretboard, there's no keys. You had to use the movement of your hands and body. And the pteramen was very good

at generating a sound that sounded a bit like an operatic singer. So in the 1920s 30s, in America, the inventor, Leon Therriman, became quite famous because he would tour his electronic musical instrument to concert halls and he would demonstrate it. And people were like, look at this amazing inventor with his amazing electronic instrument. What the fuck is this? Because it's the 20s, it's the 30s.

And that's that instrument that I plagiar at the start on the Beach Boys song, which is the first analog synthesizer. But what a lot of people don't know is So Leon Therriman was living in America and then he disappeared He disappeared It's likely that he was kidnapped

By Russians And made to go back home We do know he spent some time In a Goulag in Russia In the 40s It looks like the Russians We're just going What the fuck are you doing over there in America

What is this Theraman thing that you have You're a genius An electronic genius We're going to kidnap you and bring you back to Russia and then after Golag he ended up working with the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, probably under Jorese. And while working for the KGB, he invented an ingenious listening device that didn't require any power. It was like an opposite of the Theraman instrument. So with the therriman instrument, your hands and body disturb an electromagnetic field, and that changes and creates a sound.

But then with this microphone that he invented, it was like the opposite. Sound disturbs the electromagnetic field around the microphone, and that sends out a radio signal. Now, how it operated without a battery, I don't fully understand. But I think if this, microphone was in a room. There could be a van outside the building and they would direct radio waves at the microphone in the building.

That would cause it to vibrate, pick up sounds in the room and then distribute it back to the van using radio waves, almost like a mirror, but a mirror with sound. Anyway, you know where the fuck I'm going with this. That wouldn't seal in the office of the US ambassador in Moscow. in 1945 that contained hidden in it, Leon Therriman's microphone. And it was picking up all the conversations that were happening in the U.S. ambassador's office in Moscow. The Russians were able to listen in. It was the world's first espionage listening device.

And it was so advanced that the Yanks hadn't even imagined that it could be there. The microphone was called the thing. The reason it was called the thing is in 1951, which is six years after the Russians had given the gift of this wooden seal to the Yanks. They opened up the wooden seal and was like, what the fuck is this thing? So they found an electronic device, but they didn't know what the fuck it was. So they called it the thing. and then they had to analyze it, they sent it to MI5, they had to reverse engineer this thing to figure out that

holy fuck this is a microphone that doesn't have a battery, my God, and then when they figured that out it became top secret. The US didn't come out and say, hey, the Russians have been bugging us with this fucking thing that we don't understand what it is. It was so embarrassing they kept it as a top secret. They could not announce this. And they only announced it in 1960.

So this widespread spying that went on between the Soviet Union and the US and the Cold War, this was kept secret. This spying was secret. Like now we know it's all out in the open. It's generally accepted that intelligence agencies exist and everyone spies on each other. But in 1960, the Americans had a U-2 spy plane, which was, a plane that could fly really, really, really high, almost in space and take photographs.

And this was a secret. And the Russians shot down a US plane, a spy plane, and captured it, and went to the media and said, look, the yanks are spying on us. And then the international community was like, oh my God, the yanks are spying. So then what the yanks had to do is they'd go,

well, we're only spying because they were spying on us. And then they unveiled the thing and said, at this, look what they put in the Moscow ambassador's office in 1945, a fucking microphone with no battery. So that's the analog synth connection there, that's, you know, the fucking theramen. He did a reverse theremin and created the world's first espionage listening device. And I suppose I was thinking that way, sitting in that cock chair in the Carlo Hotel, you know, thinking about, like in 1945, the Yangs wouldn't even imagine that a piece of art could be listening to you or watching you. That was nuts.

But now, like, I don't really think this way when I go to hotels. When you go to a hotel, you're fairly safe that there's not going to be hidden cameras there. But all of us now, when we go to Airbnbs, which are run by private individuals, most people are paranoid about hidden cameras because that shit happens. So what a lot of people do, women in particular, You get into an Airbnb and the first thing you do is you turn off the lights and then you flash the torch of your phone all around the room and see if you see a tiny little reflection somewhere, the reflection of a camera lens. Then another thing you do is you connect to the Wi-Fi and you scan and if you see a Wi-Fi that you don't know that looks a bit strange then that could be the Wi-Fi of a hidden camera. And then the final trick that sometimes can work is if someone has a hidden camera in an Airbnb,

a little pinhole one, if that has night vision, like infrared, it should give off a little infrared signal. So what you do is you turn the lights off and then you take out the front facing camera on your iPhone, the one that reads your face. And if you scan that around the room, if there is a hidden camera that has night vision,

it will give this little flash, an infrared flash, and then you can detect it. And that's fairly standard behavior. That's standard behavior for now that we live in a surveillance society. A lot of people will do that when they go into an Airbnb in particular. But I still hadn't answered my question of, where does all this bad art come from? This terrible generic art that's on the walls of

every single hotel no matter where you go. Where does it come from? And who are the human hands that are definitely painting some of them? So they come from one region in China, a place called Daffon Village in the city of Shenzhen. And it's called Daffon Painting Village. And you say village, it's probably the size of limerick. And it contains tens of thousands of very skilled artists.

And they churn out paintings for the international market. Now, some of them are really, really high quality. So museums who don't want to display original paintings, they'll go to Daffon Village in China and someone will hand paint a perfect clone, a perfect replica of a Monet or of a fucking Leonardo. And that goes up in the museum. So there's serious high quality copies and clone.

going on that are painted by very skilled human beings in Daffon Village. A bit like Beringer, a bit like Beringer who are making these perfect clones of classic analog synthesizers for cheap. They've got a factory in China. It's so big. It's called Music Tribe City. Like Daffon Painting Village, this is a fucking city and this is where Beringer make all their synths, all their pedals. It's so big and so streamlined. line that you can buy yourself a fucking a mini mug for 300 quid these perfect copies these perfect clones but in daffon painting village in Shenzhen yes they make incredibly high quality perfect copies of paintings but also they charn out a lot

of shit and that's where hotel art comes from all the generic hotel art that you see around the world it comes from daffon Village in Shenzhen in China where you have thousands of artists just painting these generic abstract paintings and then selling them in bulk really cheaply to hotels and hotels buy them up. So I'd gotten to the bottom of that. But then as I researched more, an espionage thread starts to emerge. So the people who purchase from Daffon Village, it could be museums who want perfect copies. It could be you.

You can go online. You can go online. I've looked them up. There's websites that has lists of thousands of classic paintings. And for a very cheap price, like 150 quid, you can have a very skilled artist paint you an oil painting, a proper oil painting. That's a decent approximation of a money.

And have it sent to your house. But also, who buys these artworks are, Scammers. If you're in a major tourist city, Paris or London, you could have an artist that's the side of the street and they have all of their oil paintings there. Really highly skilled work and they're selling this. But they didn't paint that. They bought it from Daffon Village and now they're putting a huge markup on it and selling these high quality paintings but pretending that they're their own. sometimes galleries will do it galleries will just buy a bunch of cheap real oil painted

landscapes from China and then sell them in their gallery at a markup and pretend that it's local artists and that bit I find fucking strange because it's kind of racist so Daffon Village I've looked into it

it's not a sweatshop it's not people being exploited churning out art a lot of it is really skilled proper painters getting paid for their work often working in little cottage industries they just happen to be producing a high volume of paintings

or producing multiples of the same paintings but it's still a skilled human being artist doing a decent oil painting like a fucking good landscape that you'd be happy to purchase in a gallery or want to hang in your own house because it's a good painting

but the value the value of that painting goes down when a person in the West finds out that it came from this painting village in China that's why the gallery owners scam and say no this is a local artist and as soon as it's a local person

doing this painting the value goes up. So I don't understand that. A good oil painting is a good oil painting. And it shouldn't matter if it came from Daffon Village in China. The only answer I can come up with there is it's a racism of sorts. But one story started to, while I was doing my research on this, a story started to pop up.

From January 2001. So the US Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, in 2001 had to put out like a security notification to all the other branches because a pattern was starting to emerge. So for the first six months of 2001, in more than 40 cities in the US, anyone who was working in the US government, whether that's the drug enforcement agency, the ATF, the Air Force, the Secret Service, the FBI, all of them reported art students knocking on their doors selling paintings and claiming look I'm a down and out

poor art student these are my paintings would you like to purchase them and then the art students started to knock at the doors of federal agencies in offices and buildings that weren't publicly listed

so like a DEA office and this is undercover why are the art students come and knocking at the door selling their paintings and they all had the same story. They were Israeli, Israeli art students selling these oil paintings and this was happening in more than 40 American cities at the same fucking time in federal buildings and at the private addresses of federal employees.

All of these Israeli art students with the same story and the same artwork, the same oil paintings. Some of them were arrested because they were trespassing. when they started to arrive at buildings where it's like how the fuck do you know what this building is because this is undercover how do you know what this is? They would arrest them and when they did arrest them

they found that they had counterfeit work visas and fake green cards so that was in March 2001 that the federal agencies put out this internal bulletin saying look everyone has been approached by Israeli art students

selling these paintings this is starting to look strange So after that bulletin, then they started to arrest and detain the Israelis. So they started to come down hard on them and 140 of these Israeli art students were arrested. Now the thing is, this is six months before 9-11. So this particular story is very much, it's tied up in 9-11 conspiracy theories and particular conspiracy theories that believe that Israel knew in advance. about the 9-11 attacks or that Israel was tracking Al-Qaeda operatives in the US but wasn't sharing

that intelligence with the US. But that Israeli art scam from 2001 they were most likely sourcing those paintings. They were the Daffon Village paintings, those generic but high-quality oil paintings and then they were using this to pretend to be art students, poor art students. and it's reckoned the reason they did that is they couldn't work in the United States so if you're a Massad agent and you're in the United States

trying to gather intelligence but you can't work being a down and out art student selling your paintings is a perfect cover and just so I'm not accused of peddling conspiracy theories US agencies describe the pattern as quote potential organized intelligence gathering

Now where am I pulling my information for this? I'm not going through Reddit threads. There's an article in Salon magazine, which is a legitimate source for journalism. This article is from 2002. It's there online. It's a massive article that investigates this exact situation using evidence and quotes from US federal agencies.

And the name of the article is the Israeli art student mystery. by Christopher Ketcham and that's in salon.com and it's written in 2002 so those were the connections that I made in that cocks chair I stared at the shitty art

found a definite synthesizer fucking connection Leon Therriman the inventor of the analog synthesizer also invented the world's first listening device that was hidden inside a piece of art that was hung on a wall and then when I'm trying to find the origins

of shitty hotel art I then traced that to daffon painting village in China and find a near identical espionage campaign where pieces of art that might have listening devices in them that might, I don't know what they were doing, there was no mention of,

there's no mention of any of the art itself being confiscated. So I don't think that they were trying to put listening devices in that art and hang it on the wall. I think it was simply, possibly Israeli spies just trying to get close to federal agents in order to get information of any description. And I'm pulling that quote because in the Salon article, one of the DEA agents, so this is drug enforcement federal agency, so they know how to, they know about intelligence, they know about interrogation, they know how to get information from people. So one of the DEA agents said to Salon magazine, they were very attractive, blondes in tight shorts or jeans, real lookers.

They were flirty, flipping the hair, looking at you smiling. Hey, how are you? Let me show you this. Everything a woman would do if she wanted to get something out of you. So those are federal agents going, I know what's happening here, because I've trained in this ship myself, so I know what that is. And then another DEA agent said, after the students called to his personal address, he looked out the window and noticed that they didn't call to any of his neighbours.

So they were deliberately targeting federal agents to just try and get close to him. So there's my hot take. These are my Cuck Chair observations that I'm giving you so that I didn't subject you entirely to an autistic rant about how much I'm obsessed with analog synthesizers at the moment. Okay? Before I sign off, I'm going to leave you with a final piece of music that I composed the other day. This one doesn't have a fucking name, what'll we call it?

Paul Meskell is alive and well. What I enjoyed about making this track is I didn't just use my analogue since. I got to whip out my Hoffner bass and play a palm muted bass guitar style, which would be a beach buzzy type of bass guitar. style, specifically the bass player, Carol Kaye. She's an incredible fucking bass player. She played on pet sounds. Then I got my Moog, my mini-mook to sound a bit like an organ,

which I was doing because in David Bowie's song, the man who sold the world, Tony Visconti, the producer, he got the Moog to sound like an organ. And then at the end, on the lead of the Moog, I got it to sound like the music. got it to sound like Barney Warrell, one of my favourite synthesizer players. He was in Parliament Funkadelic and then later he was in Tom Tom Club. Before I play this track, Paul Meskell is Alive and Well. Um, nothing against Paul Meskel, just why can't I write a song called Paul Mescal is Alive and Well? It's a fact. I'm glad that he's alive and well.

If I was to recommend an album where you can bathe entirely in the, in the, in the, beauty and splendor of analog synths. The Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis, who was a Greek classical composer. If I was Elon Musk, instead of being a giant fucking fascist transphob who buys Twitter, I would instead

spend my money on a Yamaha CS-C-S-80 analog synthesizer. They cost about 150,000 euros. There's only maybe 5 or 600 of them in existence. Most of them aren't in good work and order. It's a synth from the late 70s. It was incredibly expensive at the time. It's something like 150 kilograms in weight.

One of the most beautiful analog synthesizers ever made. I got to touch one once in a show. studio in London a Yamaha CS80. That's what I'd buy myself if I was Elon Musk. The Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis is composed entirely on the

Yamaha CS80 analog synthesizer. And it was Vangelis trying to imagine he would have composed that in 1982 for the film Blade Runner which was set in 2019 and it was him trying to imagine what would music sound like in 2019 in the fucking

future. So he used the Yamaha CS80 to do that. Most of he aren't going to give a fuck about any of that information, but I really needed to get that off my chest. So here's a track called Paul Meskell is alive and well. I'll catch you next week. Rub a dog. Wink of a swan. Genia flecked to a shrew. Dog bless.