In 2021, I discovered the world of modular synthesizers and started experimenting in VCV Rack. What struck me most was the almost limitless freedom: you could not only choose ready-made instruments and effects, but literally build your own musical systems out of individual modules and connections between them.
I was learning, watching a lot of YouTube, recreating other people’s patches, experimenting, and gradually starting to understand what was happening inside these systems. About a year later, in 2022, I realized that I had accumulated more than fifty patches created along the way.
That was when the idea came to turn some of them into an album. Not just one album, but a series of three, each reflecting a separate stage of my journey with modular synthesis. I decided that the goal of making an album series would become extra motivation to keep experimenting and developing in this direction.
The name came quite naturally - Patchwork. Each album was meant to be a kind of mosaic made from individual patches, different in mood, structure, and idea. The word is also connected to patchwork sewing, which my wife was into at the time. That is where the idea for the covers of the series came from as well.
Then another association appeared: why not name the three albums after the levels of English-language textbooks - Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced?
That is how my first album, Patchwork For Beginners, appeared in 2022.
After that, my life changed quite a lot. The biggest change was emigrating to another country. Moving, a new life, and the need to put myself back together in some way pushed music into the background for a long time.
Everything is Broken illustrates that time very well. In February 2022, I was working on this patch. During the following year and a half after the war started, I kept returning to it, but I could never finish it. It almost disappeared completely, but in the end, when choosing patches for this album, I decided to keep it as a snapshot of that time and a memory of the state I was in then. I simply loaded the patch and manually brought up several voices on the mixer, which made up that patch - that is the whole arrangement.
In 2024, I gradually returned to VCV Rack. I started putting patches together again, but now I had a slightly different attitude to the process itself. The pieces I liked most, I immediately recorded as audio and put into a separate folder, without trying to decide in advance whether they would ever become part of a release.
So this folder gradually grew.
And then, in 2026, after recording another patch, I looked at the material I had accumulated and realized that it was probably time for the second part of the series.
That is how Patchwork: Intermediate appeared.
For me, the word Intermediate here does not simply mean “more complex music.” It is more like another stage in my relationship with modular synthesis. On the first album, I was mostly learning the language of VCV Rack itself and trying to understand what could be done with modular systems at all. On the second one, I was using them much more often as a complete musical instrument.
Many tracks on Patchwork: Intermediate were recorded live. On Do You Hear Me?, I played a lead that was meant to break through a droning wall of sound; on Patch N45, I changed the sequencer structure on the fly, patching it live; and on Sora No Kujira, I turned off the quantizers altogether, allowing the lead voice to turn into something like whale voices.
As a result, the second album turned out to be not so much a continuation of the first along the lines of “now everything is more complex,” but the next layer of the same Patchwork - another set of musical fragments created at a different time and by a different version of me.
In the future, this story should have a third part too - Advanced Patchwork. The logical continuation seems to be recording it entirely on a hardware Eurorack synthesizer, but I am not sure I am ready for that yet. There are many wishes - too little time.
But the further I go, the less I see Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced as levels of mastering modular synths. They are more like chapter titles.
Because Patchwork itself, it seems, never ends.