Refreshingly shrewd and not a little iconoclastic, Ross Fish founded Møffenzeef Mødular with all the creativity and risk you might expect, given the modules in the Møffenzeef range.
On his entry into modular
My foray into Eurorack started in 2012, at college. I studied Sound Design for Film at Savannah College of Art and Design. Very quickly into the start of my degree, I realised that I didn’t like working on films very much. The school had a Doepfer A‑100 system that I learned from in a modular synthesis class taught by Professor Matt Akers, who was very influential on my studies and interests. The two of us started performing together as Moffenzeef, playing live improvisational experimental sound stuff entirely on Eurorack systems that we assembled from bits and pieces of the school’s system and his own personal system.
Most of the ‘music’ we made sounded pretty terrible, but we had a lot of fun performing around town. At the time that I was graduating, the job market for audio engineers was pretty grim and I didn’t really know what to pursue after school. Professor Akers suggested that I learn how to design and build Eurorack modules, so I took his advice. I had no electronics experience at all and just dove straight into it, learning as I went along.
On the DitDit
DitDit is truly the most experimental thing I’ve ever designed and was definitely an intellectual exercise. I wound up creating a pretty unique sequencer that makes patterns that you probably wouldn’t come up with on your own. It started from a conversation I had last year with my older pal Marty Morgenbesser. Marty was telling me about his ham radio obsession and how when he was younger he had to pass a Morse code efficiency exam to get his license. He told me “musicians always seemed to get the hang of it because it has a sing‑song‑like rhythm.” I started thinking and realised that the rules of Morse code aligned with modular clocking concepts; gates with varying pulse widths happening at divided clock intervals.
After looking up the rules of Morse code, I then realised that there was an underlying polyrhythmic structure imposed on the sequences. I thought about the musical implications for these rules and thought about ways the user could alter them while using the device to get different results. I designed what I believed to be the most flexible real‑time Morse code sequencer I could think of, and as far as I know, I’m the only person to make something like this. I’m really proud of it and think it’s one of the cooler things I’ve designed. I couldn’t have done any of it without the programming expertise of my good friend Ben Davis, who wrote the firmware.
On the story of Møffenzeef Mødular
Møffenzeef started with blind ignorance, abundant arrogance, and a lot of youthful naïveté. Towards the end of college, I came up with this noise box thing called the GMO. I decided that I wanted to turn it into a Eurorack drum module and try to start a company like Akers suggested. I was Facebook friends with Lars Larsen of LZX Industries and we were in the same synth groups. I saw that he was moving to Portland, Oregon to work for Darkplace Manufacturing, which he described to me as “a record label for synth companies” where they would fund, manufacture and distribute modules. I told him that I was a Eurorack designer — I wasn’t — and that I had a working module prototype — I didn’t. He invited me to Portland to discuss future prospects. I wound up flying out there with a half working circuit encased in a cigar box. I presented it to Lars and Josh Holley, the Darkplace owner, and did a sales pitch that should have been featured in a Twilight Zone episode. The entire angle of the pitch was “none of these modules are supposed to sound like they actually work, they’re all supposed to sound broken and f**ked up” (this statement later became a core ethos of all future designs I worked on). I still to this day don’t understand how or why they said yes to me, but they did. They wound up giving me a contract to fund and produce my first Eurorack module, the GMO — a ROMpler module that was designed to sound like a broken drum machine. My girlfriend Courtney (now my fiancée) and I sold all of our stuff and moved to Portland to start the company out of Darkplace. After a few years, I moved production in house and started doing stuff on my own.
On the culture of modular
Lately I feel like modular synthesis culture is stale and uninspiring. There is a hyper emphasis on consumerism and a fervent desire from customers for new things constantly. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m making art therapy tools for wealthy people who want to have a hobby. I’m not knocking that — believe me, I’m thrilled to take your money — I’m just acknowledging that very few of my customers are musicians or are even interested in making music to begin with. If you ask the average person at Superbooth why they are interested in modular synthesizers they will give you a similar answer. Most people who buy this stuff use it as a decompression tool at the end of their work day with no real objective or creative task in mind. I approach designing all of these tools with the goal of music‑making in mind. Most of my energy goes into thinking about the physical interface and how a musician would pragmatically use them. A lot of the designers in Eurorack are software developers or engineers and not musicians. I’ve always been a musician first. I feel like a lot of people in the community don’t understand my motivations or why I would make such strange things to begin with. As odd as this sounds, coming from someone who makes dial tone drums and Morse code sequencers, everything was designed with the goal of making music. Running this company has always been odd and frustrating for me. I feel conflicted and misunderstood! I’ve distanced myself from electronic music outside of work. These days I spend most of my time playing Klezmer music with old people. My bass has become my security blanket.