The difference between a formulaic techno track and music that leaps out of the speakers is all in the details. There is no shortage of tried and tested instruments that have shaped electronic dance music for decades, but to truly break the mold you have to get creative with familiar sounds and make them your own. As Gesloten Cirkel, Alex Kislitsyn’s distinctive strain of gnarly machine music has been turning heads since he debuted in 2010 with the knockout Submit X album and a heavyweight payload of releases which have arrived since. In this interview, he shares some of his techniques for adding character and variation to drums and synths, whether you’re laboring over a production in the studio or edging some action into a live performance.
The roots of Alex’s sound lie in the gear he first started using as a teenager in Seoul in the 90s when, unable to afford top-end hardware, he instead got to grips with entry-level groove boxes like the Roland MC-303.
“I was 13 or 14, playing with friends in band practice rooms where they only have guitar amps,” he explains from his home studio in Berlin. “There was a punk club in Seoul called Drug where we could go and watch bands, and at some point, my friends and I asked, ‘Can we play?’ and I basically played by myself on the groove box through a guitar amp. So I think that crusty overdriven sound just came naturally, because that’s all there was.”
Gesloten Cirkel’s I Live In The Midwest EP
When the opportunity arose to jump from the limited possibilities of groove boxes to the broader horizon of computer-based production, Alex embraced it and never looked back. His sound may be rooted in the gritty outboard aesthetic of punk-spirited techno and electro, but since adopting version 3 of Live he’s made it a fundamental part of his workflow. When he performs live now, he might have a circuit bent TT303 along for the ride but the core of his work is done in the box.
A key point he makes is about the misleading allure of totemic instruments like the 909 with their prohibitive price tags and the promise of sounding like your musical heroes. “You hear some sick track, and you work out they’re using a 909 so you say to yourself ‘I’m going to spend all this money on the 909’,” he says. “You get your 909 or 808 and come home and find out, ‘this does not add the sound I wanted to my production!’. Of course, the skill and experience of the artist is a big part of that, but what about their insane mixing chain?”
With that in mind, Alex has put together a ‘grab bag’ of instrument racks and devices which you can load into a Live Project to inject all kinds of excitement into stock sounds. From quick-fire variations to dramatic signal processing, it’s a user-friendly shortcut to the kind of sonic exploration which can push your tracks in unpredictable, ear-snagging directions without the need for expensive racks of effects.
*Live 12 Suite required
To show you what these tools can do, he’s also recorded videos showing some of them in action.
In this first video, we see three distinct methods for adding variation to drum sounds. The first is all about adding noisy overtones to a beat, taking a relatively dry kit into dark and dangerous territory. Chorus isn’t an effect usually associated with percussion sounds, but Alex demonstrates the effectiveness of using an LFO to modulate Live’s original Chorus device (which can be found in the Legacy section of the Core Library’s Audio Effects folders).
“I think the original Chorus is a very unique effect,” he explains. “The way it has this double delay and the times-20 multiplication of the parameters in the XY plot — it’s a nice playful way of exploring the craziness you can get from it.”
Applying these kinds of drastic effects to a whole drum track can seem risky, especially for anyone concerned about their mix and keeping the low end in check, but Alex warns against being creatively limited by the perceived rules of music production.
“I find sometimes people jump ahead in the production process and stop the creative experimentation. Advice like ‘avoid stereo phasing since it will cause reflections in the club room and audio level drop outs, or give a vinyl mastering engineer a headache’ will result in people never trying chorus effects on bass or drums. For one, it’s totally not an issue for digital files or live sets – you can create weird effects by phasing and bouncing your sound around. The main thing you can do to be safe after all the experimenting is put a Utility device on the master, use the Mono Bass setting and ask yourself, ‘does the bass sound equally fun in mono or not?’”
The second and third tip in the video demonstrate simple and incredibly effective ways of creating variations to sounds with the LFO, and fills in your drum sequences using the Arpeggiator MIDI effect and the Note Echo Max for Live device. You can find these effects set up in a Rack preset called Filler FX MIDI in GC’s ‘Grab Bag’.
“You can do very complicated, cool things with these two effects,” says Alex. “You can do it per-instrument, you can change the timing of everything, and now with the Performance Pack you can make one macro for all your arpeggios in the whole set. Doing this you can actually switch to a completely different signature. I think that’s the magical thing, to play with your audience and give them unexpected things that still make sense.”
The second video shows Alex’s approach to an effects rack designed to give a synth sound some added bite, which you can access in the Harsh303 and Verb Rack preset. Rather than a way of achieving one specific effect, it’s set up as a flexible tool to experiment with different levels of processing before feeding into an Amp device. In particular, Alex chooses to place a Reverb before a Saturator to achieve a specific flavor.
“This is the classic thing I talked about where I used to play through a guitar amp,” he says. “I would have reverb on my groove box, but the final destination is the guitar amp so the reverb will get distorted in a particular way — those mids and tails from the reverb will get smashed into the rest of your mix.”
“It’s a little bit of an overdone rack here,” he admits, “because I have a Saturator before an Amp, but I set this up because I hope to show you can maybe mute the Amp and just use the Saturator or play around with pre-driving the signal into the Amp. I guess it’s gain staging, but with a saturator.”
He particularly focuses on the less-explored extended view of Saturator and the possibilities that come from experimenting with the Waveshaper and other curve settings to achieve distinctive kinds of distortion. The key is exploration, where familiar devices can be used to make unfamiliar sounds with the right combination of settings.
Alex’s third video shows what happens when you reverse the compression process. He does this with a tool called GMaudio Squeeze, a Max for Live device created by Groov Mekanik which employs upwards compression to extend a sound rather than restraining it. As you can hear, the 303 sound becomes fatter and more rounded when the effect is applied.
“Groov Mekanik’s device makes the tails of a sound really loud instead of making stuff tight,” Alex says. “It allows you to flip the curve on, say, a kick in such a way where you’re not only getting the punch and the bass, but you’re driving the tail end of it upwards. The device is also very smooth and well put together – it’s very difficult to make it glitch out in an unpleasant way. And since it is Max for Live, it is coming to the standalone Push.”
“It’s easy to get carried away with it and flatline all of the dynamics, I am prone to it!” he warns, “Try using it on a particular instrument to pull some details out or on different track groups with varying settings.”
Alongside the GMaudio Squeeze, Alex also adds a Grain Delay to the signal chain in his third video. This long-standing Live Audio Effect is a complex device with many different uses, but here we’re shown how it can be a powerful tool for pitch shifting.
“I started using Grain Delay when I wanted to pitch down my voice,” he explains. “To use it as a pitch shifter you go 100% wet and you don’t use the synchronized delay, because you want it almost real time. At the minimum time level it will distort slightly, so give it a few more milliseconds and then you pretty much have a real-time pitch shifter. If you put it on some drums, usually you’ll have a wide range of frequencies, and when you play around with the frequency on Grain Delay, and pitch shift to minus 12 or whatever, you’ll hear certain drums get affected but the rest of the track is fine. Then it starts to sound very interesting.”
As well as showing a less-explored approach to a well-known device, in his final video Alex shares an incredibly simple technique to achieve a unison effect by detuning one of Analog’s oscillators. It’s worth noting you need to have both oscillators engaged and feeding into the same filter (F1 in the demo video) with the Oscillator Pitch Key Modulation set to 100%. As you detune one of the oscillators by a very small amount, you can hear the signal phasing, adding movement where there was a static signal before.
“I use detune to slightly offset the oscillators,” says Alex, “not into extreme territory that sounds seasick but just enough to offset the oscillators to mimic old hardware.”
Alongside the Grab Bag of instrument and device racks, Alex has made a Max for Live device called Roar MIDI Note Helper, which allows you to play or sequence the pitch of the feedback on Live 12’s new signal processing powerhouse. Also included with the download are some Live Project examples, one of which is designed to load onto your Push standalone.
*Live 12 Suite required
“The feedback modes are quite a big part of Roar, I think,” says Alex. “Roar is a really crazy device you can use as a saturated EQ, as tempo-synced audio echos or unsynced short delays with high-feedback for Corpus-style string synthesis. There is even a note setting which makes it very easy for you to find the correct delay to get a specific pitch out of something that’s feeding back inside the device.”
“I made this Max for Live device so you can quickly map your MIDI keyboard notes to Roar’s Note setting,” he adds. “but it basically makes a MIDI synth out of feedback from incoming sounds like drums, which is awesome!”
Taking a sideways look at a device and figuring out how to wrench surprise results out of it — it’s clear where the secret sauce in Alex Kislitsyn’s music as Gesloten Cirkel comes from. Now you have a stack of tools to experiment with and find your own secret sauce, too.
Keep up with Gesloten Cirkel on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook, SoundCloud and his website
Text and interview: Oli Warwick