By Keith Walsh
Lo-fi music can be made on a budget. Case in point: tunes by greedy CIRCUIT, who uses anything he can get his hands on, to make indie electronica without busting his wallet.
For example, I asked about the glitchy sounds on his new release, the compilation Last Year Wasn’t So Bad. Greedy CIRCUIT, aka Jon Elzey writes: “With ‘mutually agreed pandemic’ and ‘ventilator for two’ I’m pretty sure I used a heavy helping of Glitch 2 which is a free vst!”
On his newest album, which came out just a day or two after the compIlation, I heard what sounds like a classic Roland TB-303 Bassline machine, or an emulation. “On the new album I used a free plugin by Yooz Music called the BL-303,” Elzey writes. “The drums tended to be stock 909’s and I used a Roland SP404SX for the samples.” There’s not much polyphony on Greed Circuit’s tracks. “ I don’t pay attention to the polyphony very often,” he says.
The songs are minimalistic, atmospheric, often upbeat (though with darkly pessimistic titles and soundbites), and despite being encoded as “lo-fi,” the fidelity is quite gorgeous. In contrast to some lo-fi artists who use cassette recorders to create, Elzey uses a digital DAW on his PC.
“More often than not,” he says, “I use an old version of Native Instruments Maschine 1. Lately I’ve gotten into using hardware synths (a Novation AFX station, an MC-707 and I just acquired a Korg Monologue) but none of that material has been recorded yet. I turned last year’s music into a compilation because I wanted to bookend my computer vs. the hardware synth pursuits. I am getting tired of my DAW crashing and becoming more fascinated with knob twisting.”
The drums on the albums blend in well, ranging from analog noise bursts to digital samples. Part of that is due to the variety of sounds from an innovative Roland drum machine from the 80s. Elzey writes: “For the newest album I had sampled various drum machines, but none of them seemed to fit as well as that basic 909 sound. Right now, I’m experimenting with digital delay on drums to see what I come up with. I have a short attention span which seems to suit me well.”
The lo-fi aspect of greedy CIRCUIT is due to the austerity of Elzey’s approach. “The philosophy behind greedy CIRCUIT,” writes Elzey, “is you can make music that resonates with you by using materials that are relatively cheap. Music is for everybody, not just for famous producers with loads of cash to toss about. Anyone with an iPad, an old laptop, or a couple hundred bucks to spend on a synth could be doing what I do.”
The new album, You Must Be So Mad At Me features samples and soundbites from Hollywood films. I caught a reference to the original Night Of The Living Dead and asked Elzey what genres he generally prefers to sample. He writes: “I am surprised that you caught that! Me and my wife are fans of horror in general, and anything in that general vicinity.”
Greedy Circuit On Bandcamp
Greedy Circuit On Soundcloud
Greedy Circuit on Facebook
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