tripstream: mono-poly

On friday the 13th of july during the Tripstream, Rotterdam based synthesizer guru Dennis Verschoor aka Mono-Poly will perform an in-store liveset using his modular synth setup. The event is open for everybody to visit and has free entrance, if you are not able to visit the store you can tune in to www.grooveline.org for a livestream. For those who are not familiar with Mono-Poly, we asked him some questions.

You are an expert on modular synthesizers, but a lot of our readers are young and more familiar with VST plugins. Could you please give a brief explanation on what a modular synth is?

Well it’s like building a custom bike, you can choose every part you like and patch it together.
Perhaps a bit like a Lego synthesizer. In a regular synthesizer you got a standard routing:
Vco’s — Vcfs — Vca ( controlled by envelope generators/lfo’s/sample and hold)

In the modular you patch up every routing you like and use even more exotic stuff like waveformprocessors that aren’t common in most synths.


Mono-Poly arguably has one of the sickest modular studio set ups in the country

Could you please tell us how you came in contact with electronic music and what made you decide to collect synthesizers?

I got into house music in the 80s/90s and at the end of the 90s I slowely started to collect keyboardsynthesizers. It started with a mono/poly and jx3p but got bigger and bigger every few months. At some point I realized that I really loved twisting knobs and I got an Arp 2600. That really got me into the modular stuff and at some point I didn’t have any synthesizers with keyboards anymore but just modulars.

You released two albums, ‘Atlantic Storm’ (Strange Life Records, 2009) and ‘AniTsalagi Svnoyihi’ (205 Recordings, 2011). Could you please tell us something about the making of these two albums, your musical direction and any future projects you are currently working on?

Well releases started with a track on a compilation called: “Analogy 3” in 2007. The idea was to release a dutch compilation with analogue stuff only. A drone track I had done was used on this release. In 2008 I did a spacious first release as: “zond3” on Doppel-Ganger records in Japan. A year later (2009) I had pretty good contact with Legowelt who asked me to come up with an ambient/drone album. The same year “Atlantic Storm” was released on Strange Life Records.

Around 2010/2011 I was doing a lot of self generating/playing patches with a system I got. Nordvagr from 205 recordings was really excited about these patches and I already had for over an album of recordings. So a few monts later we had this album done. This time not really space stuff but harsh heavy industrial rythmic stuff.


Check out Mono-Poly playing his live set at the 2011 edition of legendary underground festival ‘Free Rotation’ in Wales

Do you have any advise for young and upcoming producers who make music using a laptop and are eager to make the switch to hardware?

My tip would be follow your heart and use whatever you feel good with. There isn’t really bad musical stuff to make music with. There are just a lot of bad/uninspired musicians.

You will be performing an in-store liveset at the Triphouse Rotterdam recordstore. Could you please tell us what visitors can expect?

Well expect a trip from spacious ambient to experimental techno/idm-ish stuff.

Triphouse Rotterdam presents Tripstream
featuring MONO-POLY (modular synthesizer live set)

friday july 13th 2012
Triphouse Rotterdam Store
Josephlaan 38, Rotterdam
19:00 – 01:00, liveset will start around 22:30

Before and afterwards the show, Mono-Poly will be available to provide background information on modular synthesis and the equipment he is using. For a live stream of this event, tune in to www.grooveline.org