Modular Monthly

Create some chaos with TouellSkouarn

TouellSkouarn began making handmade boutique guitar pedals in 2010, moving into the Eurorack format some years later with designs often based around fuzz and distortion. Today we have the Strakal Orsel and Skorn da Bask. We’ll start with the Strakal Orsel, billed as a tube distortion and crude VCA. It’s certainly not a VCA we’d normally be patching but it’s glorious as a distortion and feedback module. There are two NOS (new old stock) Russian tubes which can be driven, have the levels between them adjusted, and one of them can be switched between Triode and Pentode for a different upper-mid and high-end response. The module can be pushed a lot further with onboard feedback. The module kicks, screams, oscillates and creates loads of amazing noises and distortion tones. You can turn the module into an oscillator or unique highfrequency noise generator, great for modulating filters and other sources for crackly audio rate overtones.

The second module, the Skorn da Bask, is also happy in a clipped, distorted state (three onboard oscillators and 24dB low-pass filter). The filter drives nicely, modulates really well and the resonance is clipped and driven, giving it a unique, raspy character around the cutoff. NB: this isn’t a tripleoscillator synth voice – it’s three, free-running oscillators that can be routed to the input of the filter or the cutoff modulation of the filter. It excels at abstract use with drones, interactive gestural rhythms and free running tonal exploration.