Workshop Notes: June 2025
Gigs, program cards and a new Dyski event
Big news at the top:
Workshop System Batch 2 DIY kits are still available at Thonk
Radio Music: Field Recording from the Ether, November 2-6 2025, is booking now.
Right now I’m prepping for a series of workshops at the BRIT School, the free performing arts school just down the road from me in Croydon, funded by the UK record industry.
I finally have a loan set of 12 Workshop Systems for events and workshops - please get in touch if you have an idea.
Meanwhile, a lot of other things have happened over the last month:
IF you’re a new Workshop System owner, it’s great to have you here.
1. Build it 2. Use it 3. Join the community
I’m inordinately pleased that there is now a Workshop System on permanent display, with some pre-assembled systems on sale, at SchneidersKeller in Rough Trade on Denmark Street, London.
This is history on history on history: Denmark Street has been the home of music since the 1920s, original home of Melody Maker, the NME, the Sex Pistols’ rehearsal space and nearby the sadly lost Turnkey, where Mylar Melodies worked and which had a basement synth museum with a VCS-3 sitting on a Fairlight. Rough Trade is the classic British indie record label (The Smiths, The Fall, Dean Blunt). And of course ScheidersKeller is the London offshoot of SchneidersLaden, the world’s most important hardware synth store.
So I’m delighted Edd & Jean-Marcel (son of the late Manfred Fricke, of MFB the great democratiser of European synthesisers) invited me into their space. They’re open 12-7pm Wednesday-Saturday.
Port Navas Sessions: Sound Maps Two is the album we recorded at last month’s Dyski retreat in Cornwall, out now on Bandcamp. I’m always blown away by the creativity of these events and of course there is lots of Workshop System there.
IF you have a Workshop System but haven’t used the blank program card yet, here’s a quick video to explain how to use it and where to find new program card programs.
Once you’ve done that, try this new card from the unstoppable dessertplanet, creator of Goldfish and BYO Benjolin is back with Fifths, a fantastically melodic and quirky quantizer, pitch and pulse sequence and VCA, beautifully explained in the video above.
Here’s almost an hour of me in a lab coat talking rather nervously about the background to the WS at Machina Bristronica last year.
I mentioned Tristan’s Compulidean program card last time - the first Workshop System generative drum machine, with gnarly 808 samples and euclidean patterns. It’s now been updated and improved with slightly less gnarly drum samples.
The most bizarre, ambitious and illegal-in-most-states program card yet is Chris Johnson’s AM Coupler, which turns your Workshop System into a small pirate radio station. It requires some hardware modification and tolerance to legal risks, but… it works. Keep reading for more radio experiments.
Workshop Systems in the wild: Illustrator, musician and chef Simon Fowler played his WS with Dylan Carson of Earth at Stranger than Paradise records last week: “Completely improvised but basically a C# drone. Extremely powerful though a fender twin on volume 2!” I missed Superbooth this year, but Eric from Landscape was there with a Workshop System at the booth. Mark Pilkington was playing his WS at his own Acid Horse festival in Wiltshire last week, in very good gear company.
This video about the Workshop System - or really, about the box it comes in - has been surprisingly popular. Not crazy viral, but much more popular than I expected. I think there’s something there about the physicality of the WS - about it as an object, rather than just as a set of capabilities. It’s something we talked about in Cornwall, the difference between the universal laptop and the limited but tangible WS. I’m thinking about this a lot, let me know if resonates with you.
Finally, I’m very pleased to announce a completely new Dyski retreat: Radio Music: Field Recording from the Ether, which is happening November 2-6, 2025 at the Housel Bay Hotel on the Lizard Peninsula, where Marconi stayed in 1901 while conducting his first long-distance radio experiments. All the details are here, for both paid and grant supported places.
This means I’m currently deep in radio R&D and planning mode. I managed to hack a CV intput into a £20 shortwave radio from Amazon, then at the legendary Dunstable Downs Radio Club boot sale in Luton I bought myself a Yaesu FRG-7, a beautiful old Japanese radio with a bizarre three-knob tuning process. You can hear what it sounds like on this 58-track dump of sounds from an evening’s scanning.
Finally finally, if you bought a Workshop System Kit but haven’t put it together yet, do get in touch if you need any advice, support or help. I might run an online build workshop if that would be useful.
Thanks for reading, see you next month,
Tom