Bitfight 83 $20

Web puremagnetik.com Format PC/Mac, VST/AU

The latest in Puremagnetik’s ongoing series of cheap and cheerful plugins for creative sound design perfectly illustrates its influences and concept with the background graphic of its GUI. Subtitled ‘Cascading Bit Reconfigurator’, Bitfight 83 is an acrobatic digital distortion effect that’s been inspired by vintage 8-bit games consoles and the Commodore 64’s once-groundbreaking SID soundchip, and aimed at bringing interesting flavours of lo-fi grit to instrumental sources of all kinds.

As with its stablemates, Bitfight 83’s interface is decidedly minimal in terms of the controls on offer, and the only documentation provided is the annotation built into the interface itself and a brief video on the website. With this particular series of plugins now well established, it’s about time Puremagnetik started making proper manuals for them, as they’re not always as intuitive as they at first appear – this one being a prime case in point.

The destruction begins with the Bits and Fold knobs, the first simply dialling down the bit depth as it’s lowered, the second governing the sample rates of two ‘cascading’ foldover distortion processes. How these work isn’t made at all clear, but the separation between them is adjusted and LFO-modulated using the Cascade, Spread and Rate knobs. The Vibrate control sets the depth of volume modulation from the same LFO (ie, tremolo); and finally, Blend is your dry/wet mix pot.

The sonic fruits of Bitfight 83’s unusual architecture range from subtly enhancing digital crunch to weird modulated decimations made splendidly unpredictable through the interaction of the two distortion chains. Once again, Puremagnetik have succeeded in pulling together an unorthodox set of algorithms and parameters in an experimentation-encouraging framework.

Any electronic producer who’s been looking for something a little anarchic and untamed will get far more mileage from this than the pricetag might suggest. n8/ 10n