Noisegate Sessions: Christopher Coe with the Moog Spectravox & Labyrinth

In this new series we visit inspiring local Australian artists, bringing both new and vintage music gear, to discover the unique and creative ways they produce music. It’s a chance to see what they do in the moment and capture some of that exciting music making using gear that might be familiar or take them out of their comfort zone.

In our first session, we recently visited Christopher Coe who is well-versed in live techno and crafting unique soundscapes on the fly. Based in Melbourne, Australia, he has collaborated with Carl Cox and runs the record label Awesome Soundwave, which features remarkable live and improvised techno artists.

We visited him in the studio, where he introduced us to the new and distinctive Moog Spectravox and Labyrinth. He jammed on them and explained how it might fit into his distinctive live hardware set-up.

Moog Spectravox is an analog spectral processor that uses a set of 10 resonant filters to process external audio and also operate as a vocoder. It has a lot of tricks up its sleeve and when paired with other members of the Moog semi-modular family like Labyrinth, it can produce all kinds of resonant and filtered effects to the sound being sent to it.

During the session, Chris was sending his drum machine through Spectravox and using the spectral shifter to move the set of filters up and down the frequency, creating a sweeping filter effect.

Labyrinth is a parallel generative analog synthesizer. At its heart is a dual-sequencer that can generate random sequences in a variety of ways, this is then sent to a parallel voice path featuring a VCF & Moog’s first voltage-controlled wave folder. This means you can blend between the two in different combinations to product variations in tone.

This design lends itself to all kinds of music making, in Chris’s world its perfect for generating evolving melodies that sit well on top of driving rhythmic percussion found in Techno and other electronic music. Chris was using Labyrinth as a melody generator that sounded amazing next to the huge kick and the drum machine being processed by Spectravox.

As Chris said to us during the session; “Instant Techno, I mean that’s just Techno.”

A huge thanks to Chris for letting us come by and film having so much fun on these instruments. If you haven’t checked out Chris and his stuff on ASW, go there as soon as you can to the links below. Be sure to check out our more in-depth videos on Spectravox & Labyrinth if you want to find out more about how they work.

https://www.awesomesoundwave.com/

https://www.awesomesoundwave.com/artist-christopher-coe

Link to Labyrinth Video when available

Moog Spectravox and Labyrinth are available now, find your nearest dealer HERE