From Create Digital Music:
OTO Machines’ BISCUIT is new 8-bit effect processing hardware from a boutique design firm in Paris. The essential effect is all 8-bit: using 8-bit converters and processing, you can add crunchy, digital waveshaping, delay, pitch shift, and step filter effects. But because those processes produce distortion and aliasing, BISCUIT combines its 8-bit effects with an analog resonant filter. (It’s switchable, so if you want to retain all the artifacts, you can – but you also have a filter at the ready.)
The whole design is a lovely exercise in reducing a set of sound capabilities to their most essential elements. The appearance of the front panel, though, is deceptively simple. Multifunctional uses, all provided within the eight buttons at bottom and the parameter controls at top, allow effects from filtering and basic bit reduction to wild, radical bit destruction, step-sequenced filtering, delay, and even a little synthesis.
The BISCUIT is also fully MIDI-enabled: every control sends MIDI, and every function receives MIDI CC. Critical to its step-sequenced and delay functions, BISCUIT receives MIDI clock, as well, or you can use tap tempo.
Finally, quality and local production figure prominently in the OTO: the company advertises that they don’t outsource production and work entirely with local companies in France.
Price: EUR529 including VAT (so 442,30 if you’re outside Europe). Available now:
http://www.otomachines.com
That’s pricey, I know, but it also packs as much sonic power as a collection of several Moog effects – and likewise might be the only effects box you need.
And, oh yeah – the future of BISCUIT may provide more than it does now.
I got to look more closely at the BISCUIT (think “bis-QWEE” as in French), at least on paper. I’ve also had the chance to talk to one of the creators about the evolution of this box, which reveals something of the process of hardware creation in general.
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