Feature: Machina Bristronica 2024
Our weekend in Bristol for the UK's premiere synth event
This year's Machina Bristronica, the UK's biggest synth event, took place in Bristol recently, from the 12th to the 13th of October. Stromkult — forming a German delegation with SchneidersLaden, SuperBooth and Doepfer — hopped over to Bristol for an intense weekend of synths, concerts, talks and networking. Here's a little recap of what we experienced!
Hosted by Elevator Sound, Machina Bristronica is a synth and music tech event that takes place over two days and features synth exhibitions, concerts and live performances, DiY workshops and various talks.
This year's exhibitor lineup was impressive, with brands such AJH Synth, Ableton, Arturia, Bitwig, Buchla, Chase Bliss, Doepfer, Elektron, Endorphin.es, Frap Tools, Jolinlab, Melbourne Instruments, Oberheim, Sequential, UDO Audio, Vermona and WMD displaying their products and developments.
One of our favorite new devices was a prototype of Teaching Machine's forthcoming Fuzzbillion desktop unit. Fittingly for its name, it can take fuzz in a billion different directions, as it is a multi-stage amplification, saturation, tone shaping, octaver and distortion device. Its unique feature is that the parameters of its ten stages are controlled with ten numeric 0-10 counters, making it look like a calculator or old-fashioned coding device! See the image below. Since the combination of the ten numbers effectively function as an easily recallable preset, we image Fuzzbillion users will start trading them like secret codes — for our part, we are quite fond of 18432008215 ...
Machina Bristronica also featured a stacked concert lineup, with Hainbach and Look Mum No Computer, German electro hero Anthony Rother, techno legend Surgeon, Nik Void, Hinako Omori, British live modular expert Loula Yorke and Dutch favorite Legowelt.
Synth-YouTube favorite DivKid hosted his own stage, talking to various manufacturers such as Joranalogue, Shakmat and Patching Panda, and hosting artists like Escher Music, Hodge and LEENA. One of our favorite talks was between fellow YouTuber Mylar Melodies and Dieter Doepfer and Holger Zapf about the history and future of Eurorack. A video of the full talk will be forthcoming, for now you can find a little clip over on our Instagram.
We sadly missed the „Sampling Stories“ talk with Dave Rossum of E-Mu fame but saw a conversation between Mary Anne Hobbs, Scratcha and Vanessa Maria about the influence of algorithms on the current music landscape. It was interesting to hear how much things have changed and we think the control large platforms like Instagram have over people's careers and the industry in general can be quite scary. As algorithms become more and more optimized and human creators get lost in AI spam, we foresee a general change back to "web 1.0" forms like actual websites, private chat communities and newsletters (if you haven't already, please subscribe to ours at the top of the page!) — and real-life events featuring actual humans in the flesh such as Machina Bristronica, of course!
Overall, we really enjoyed the atmosphere at this year's Machina Bristronica, with a relaxed vibe and a diverse audience of not just hardcore synth nerds, but also newcomers and just people interested in music in general. Much like with SuperBooth, these kind of events play an important role in getting people interested into making electronic music in a more welcoming and social environment than just ordering some synths online by yourself!
You can find out more about Machina Bristronica over on their website.
Images by René Margraff and Tom Körting.