Another piece that accumulated organically: I'd started by putting up a few drum racks against each other (64-pad rock kit, bongos, Hilda kit), and then put a few chords and figures of different keyboards (Live's MkI3 Mellow Piano and Puremagnetik's CP-70 pack, on the electronic-only setting). I put down Epiphone P-J bass, and then Res-O-Glas guitar through EHX LPB2ube, one pass through a mild overdrive, and another through more extreme boost.

Inline effects: M4L Humanizer on drums and MkI3, Drum Buss on percussion. EQ-8 for bass rolloff on bass, various combinations of Auto-Filter (for drive and to roll off weird direct-sounding harmonics from the Alumitones) and Cabinet on guitar. Sends: Convolution reverb (studio room impulse) and Auto-Filter with LFO into Echo on Tweezy Tape preset. Various auto-pan, and full-chain master on the stereo mix.

Title from one method of growing symmetric crystals of samarium, this week's element.

This one developed along one direction and changed course a few times before veering into somewhat psychedelic space funkbot territory. I started with tablas and 909 samples, and put them through a vocoder, gate, and reverse reverb, which made them more accents than primary rhythm. I added the usual dry funk kit, but instead of auto-filtering the kick, I just punched up its level significantly--as a result, I think it conflicted less with the bass than it often does. As an x-factor, I added LFO to adjust the bit level of Redux randomly, which pumped the cymbals in a pleasingly weird way.

I tracked a bunch of soft synths and then took them out, finally returning to one soft synth. I tracked bass (through EQ8 to pull down sub-100Hz and side chain with the kick) and guitar (Reuss RF-01 fuzz, Vox Wah, and Auto-Pan with a square-wave tremolo in time), and Bastl Kastle modular synth for flavor.

I used three different convolution reverbs, one cascaded set of delays, and filter delay with LFO auto-filter in front.

Title from the use of the Kastle.