Live & Indirect Sessions | Ed Blomquist – Octopus Petting Zoo, Vol. 1

My name is Ed Blomquist, and I live near Boston in the US. I am a member of the lines community (llllllll.co) and I have been teaching in the Music Business/Management Department at Berklee College of Music in Boston for the past 30 years. My favorite class is Music Technology in the Marketplace.

I have been making music with synths and other electronics since the early 80s, and with guitar and bass since the early 70s. I also sing and play hand percussion, flutes, and other random stuff.

My primary project is Underwater Airport, but I also have released recordings on the streaming platforms under the names Rivers and Skies, Nulmatica, The Free Range Experiment, and of course, Ed Blomquist.

My first real synth was a Korg MS-20 which I got when I graduated from college in 1981. I got an Akai S612 sampler when I studied Electronic Music at Wesleyan University in 1986. I began my journey into eurorack in 2014. My current system is shown in the photo.

This recording is a collage of various stereo modular synth tracks that I have recorded using a 4MS WAV Recorder, a 6hp module that is the last thing my signal goes through before the audio output. This module allows me to patch as I am inspired to do, and then simply hit a single button to capture the stereo output of my system. It is one of the most useful modules I have. Prior to that, I had to try to pay attention to the modular while also monitoring Ableton Live, where I was capturing the signals, often in more tracks than the two afforded by the WAV Recorder.

I had imagined that it would be useful to capture multiple tracks which I could then mix in Live. But I realized that dividing my attention between the modular and the computer was a fool’s errand, at least for me. So instead, I have recently started using Live to assemble collages (mashups perhaps) of the discrete stereo track captures created entirely in the modular.

In order to remove excessive decision making, I have largely been dragging audio files into Live more or less in the order that they were recorded on the WAV Recorder. This has been quite satisfying, as the results feel to me very much like old-school sci-fi soundtracks.

I am planning to release an ongoing series of these kind of modular collages under the title Octopus Petting Zoo. The track we are listening to is Volume 1 in that series.