Flame Instruments is a brand that makes synthesizers, sequencers and Eurorack modules founded by Per Salzwedel in the late 90s. Starting with its first commercial product, the MIDI Talking Synth in the late 2000s, Flame has a name for itself with a range of powerful, highly configurable, and sometimes slightly idiosyncratic products that have found many well-known users in the world of music, media composition, the arts and theater.

In this interview with Stromkult’s Mathieu Pé, Per talks about his background, the origins of Flame, breaking into the modular market, the story behind the Määnder, analog vs. digital, getting requests for custom jobs from Ricardo Villalobos, and more – read the full interview below! 

Flame Instruments SB24 Flame Crew: Per, Daniel Dorsch, Sebastian Preller, Felix Bergleiter 

STROMKULT (Mathieu Pé): What led you to start Flame instruments?

Per Salzwedel (FLAME): I've always been building things, but for a long time, these were just one-off pieces or small batches for friends. I remember when I was in school, a friend set up a disco and needed a stereo mixer – this was before commercial hi-fi stereo mixers became commonplace – which I then built for him with a teacher's guidance. In the 80s I then studied electronics for a while and started building things for myself. In the 80s, I was drawing and painting a lot, and even made a living from that for a while. I was living in a shared apartment [Wohngemeinschaft] in East Berlin, and we were doing all sorts of things, including music, albeit just for ourselves basically.

That was also around the time when post-punk was happening, and there were a lot of synths used in that music obviously, which inspired us a lot. And since we had no money, we had to build things ourselves, out of necessity. For example, I remember we didn’t have a drum machine – and getting ahold of one was basically impossible – so we scratched a drum loop into a shellac record, fixed it down with tape, and then ran that through a Vermona [E2010] filterbank. That was our drum sound, and I actually sounded really awesome (laughs).

Then in the '90s I was doing more trip-top style stuff, developed software for installations, and started building more and more hardware for an expanding circle of musician friends. Then around 1997 I came up with the name “Flame” for what I was doing, because I figured that if I was building more stuff, I’m going to need a name for that (laughs). There was even a website already, but at that point I was still building things in small runs, it wasn’t a proper commercial operation yet. But over time, more people got involved and started asking me to build things for them, and with that also came a wider range of things I was building.

What then was the first thing you built as a larger run?

That was the MIDI Talking Synth around 2007/2008. It was a desktop vocal synth with two SpeakJet chips in an aluminum housing, all hand-built by myself. The idea originally came from an installation where I was trying to "teach" the SpeakJet chip German, since its sound engine only comes with English phonemes. That didn't really work out (laughs), but a friend of mie pointed out that you could make great music with it [the chips] anyway, and so I got the idea to build something for a few friends. Then Shawn from Analogue Haven heard about it and contacted me if I could build a few units for him that he could sell. And around that same time, the event space – the Tränenpalast – where I was working went bankrupt, so I suddenly had more time and thought it might be nice to make a bit of money from this building thing.

So I built a prototype within about two months and sent it to Shawn, who then took it to the NAMM, where it was received very well. He also did some promo in magazines, and then things really took off, it even ended up being used by bands like Throbbing Gristle and Nine Inch Nails, real musical heroes of mine. For a while, Shawn was ordering ten more units every week, I basically was doing nothing but building the Talking Synth for a year. That was really the beginning of Flame as an actual business with commercial production runs.

When did you start getting into the Eurorack market?

After the Talking Synth I then made some more desktop units, specifically the Echometer and Clockwork sequencers. I actually built the Clockwork for a friend that wanted to control his Moogerfooger pedals. I took it to SchneidersLaden – I think this was just before they moved into the location at Kottbusser Tor – and when Andreas Schneider saw it he immediately said "this needs to be sold here" (laughs). At the time, they were selling a lot of these kinds of weird little desktop units, and many people made music that way, just using pedals and a couple of desktop units.

This was around 2009/2010, so just before Eurorack really took off in a big way around 2012 when brands like Mutable got involved. My own first module was a module version of the Clockwork sequencer in 2009, which was followed by the TAME Machine, a beat generator and quantizer. That one did really well, because it was basically the first usable quantizer with a scale-selection keyboard in the Eurorack format – there was one from Doepfer, but the version they had back then was pretty cryptic (laughs) and it had no keyboard. I remember talking to Gareth Jones at SchneidersLaden and he was really excited that you could now finally play actual melodies and harmonies with Eurorack (laughs). I know that sounds strange from today’s perspective, but back then, there were so few brands that even simple things like that often didn’t exist yet.

What's the story behind the C-3 Knob Recorder?

The idea originally came from Shawn at Analog Haven. There was already a knob recorder module from Modcan, but it was in the 5U format and he wanted one in Eurorack and asked if I could build something like that for him. And I didn’t want to just copy the one from Modcan, so I modified the original idea a bit and programmed everything myself, which was quite an undertaking.

The C-3 also sold really well at the time since it was basically the first movement recorder in the Eurorack format. It’s actually still going strong today in the Mk2 version, fifteen years later! There’s a lot of cool little things you can do with it, you can input-trigger fast movements so it behaves like an ADSR, you can do loops and one-shoots, and there’s a speed control to adjust the overall speed of the modulation curve.

The next module then was the FX6. At the time, there really weren't any affordable multi-effect modules for Eurorack and so when I discovered the  Spin FV-1 DSP chip, I decided to build a module around that and make it as cheap and small as possible. In the Mk1 version, it was basically just the chip and its eight factory effect programs, I/O jacks and three control knobs for the parameters and it only cost 99 Euros when it came out. About a year and a half later, I then followed that up with the FX16, which came with effects I had programmed myself, and then after that the FX16-CV that added CV control to the effects.

What is the story behind the Määnder?

+The original mk1 version of the Määnder – there is now an updated Mäander-M that was released late last year – came out around 2018, but actually has an even longer backstory, because it was really a combination of ideas from several prior projects, namely the Echometer sequencer, the 4VOX wavetable oscillator module I did in collaboration Sebastian Preller and the Vocorder module, also with Sebastian, who ended up also doing all of the digital control elements for the Määnder.

The way I originally came into contact with Sebastian was actually that  Ricardo Villalobos came into SchneidersLaden one day, saying that he wanted a custom version of the Clockwork sequencer that ran with MIDI instead of CV, so that he could properly sync all of his old drum machines. And he originally asked me to do it, but I felt like it would be too small of a run to justify building, and so I asked Sebastian – who was working at SchneidersLaden at that time if we wanted to do it, and so he ended up building it for Ricardo. That was basically also the birth of the ACME that Sebastian [Preller] built together with Sebastian Niessen from SND and programmed on the basis of the Clockwork, which then also later led to the ER-M Multiclock, which Sebastian originally co-developed for ER-M and is now still making at Floatingpoint Instruments.

So anyways, back then, Sebastian and I had the idea for a vocoder that would let you record the vocoder’s envelopes. And as part of that vocoder project, a friend of mine built me a vocoder prototyping patch in Max where you could play around with all sorts of parameters like the amount of filter bands, and basically prototype different vocoder designs. I then built an actual 15-band analog vocoder prototype based on that and was really struck by how much better the analog version sounded compared to the digital Max patch. However, for various reasons, that project never materialized at the time – I only finally realized our original idea in the form of the Vocorder module in 2021. I then eventually wanted to use all that work I did on the vocoder for something, and I decided turn it into an analog filterbank design that became the filterbank of the Määnder and also the Curves module and later the Black Filterbank module, which is a smaller and more affordable version of the Curves without the individual CV inputs, but with a true stereo signal bath and an additional germanium distortion.

And then basically all of that came together in the Määnder, in the form of a digital wavetable synth with an analog filterbank where each filter band can be individually controlled through a digital sequencer – meaning that each filter band has its own analog VCA and digital sequencer track that are driven by the digital processor. So it is quite a complex mix of analog and digital technology.

So you like a mix of analog and digital technology in your modules?

I actually think that even if a module is purely digital, it will have a different feel compared to software just because of the feeling of turning actual physical knobs, it will feel “analog” in that sense since the way you interact with it is different.

But in general, I am very undogmatic when it comes to analog vs. digital, digital things can sound very good, too. And unlike a lot of people (laughs), I am also a fan of MIDI in Eurorack. I think it has plenty of advantages, and if you remember, it was originally invented in the 1980s precisely to address shortcomings in the analog CV/Gate paradigm. I think there is actually too little of it in Eurorack, even though it is actually quite easy to implement and integrate.

So when possible, I try to integrate MIDI for example in the form of the MIDI Looper that is in a lot of our modules. The inspiration for that actually came from a period in the ‘90s where I was using the MPC and other MIDI sequencers a lot. I find it quite interesting that a lot of the things that people in my circles were really into in the '90s — like musical interactivity and generative music – but couldn’t be fully technically realized at the time, are now coming back in a big way with things like MPE and machine learning and so on.

Last question: what is something that is important to you when it comes to module design?

It is very important to me that modules can work live on stage, and that includes being able to switch between different songs and not just tweaking the same arpeggio for an hour. And because of that, I would say that in general, Flame modules tend to be very flexible and configurable, you can adapt them to all sorts of very specific situations – although you of course also need to know which features to leave out, you can’t put in everything.

I think that philosophy comes from my background in the installation and theater scenes and having custom-built things for my own needs and friends for so long. While our modules may not always be the most flashy or immediate (laughs), we have a lot of high-profile pro users in the media composer, touring, installation and theater worlds, because they can be adapted to solve very situation-specific problems.

So to this day, I think my design process is very driven by my interactions with friends and other musicians. I basically never just sit down and build something out of nowhere, there’s always ideas coming from the outside. How quickly those ideas then end up being realized varies a lot however, sometimes it comes together quickly, sometimes it ends up taking ten years (laughs).

Per with Andreas Schneider

You can find out more about Flame over at the Flame Instruments website and shop their modules over at SchneidersLaden.