NOGASAYAN: Sculpting Chords from Urban Ghosts on the Digitakt 2

The journey begins with a field recording—a slice of Berlin’s traffic, captured in the wild and brought home as raw material. NOGASAYAN invites us to see the sampler not as a mere playback device, but as a vessel for transformation. By looping a minuscule fragment of the recording, the Digitakt 2 is coaxed into behaving like an oscillator, its mechanical heart now pulsing with the city’s ghostly echoes.

This technique blurs the line between found sound and synthesis, turning environmental chaos into a controllable, melodic element. The process is tactile and intimate: a playhead dances across sample start points, guided by LFOs, generating unpredictable movement and subtle texture. Here, the sampler exhales fog and fractured light, inviting us to listen not just for notes, but for the stories hidden within noise.

With the Digitakt’s monophonic limitations, NOGASAYAN demonstrates a clever workaround—resampling. By copying and tuning the processed field recording across multiple tracks, each voice becomes a brushstroke in a spectral chord. The act of resampling is more than technical necessity; it’s a ritual of rebirth, where each layer is sculpted, enveloped, and finally merged into a single, playable sound.

This approach unlocks a world of unique timbres, as overdrive and envelope tweaks infuse the chords with warmth and movement. The result is a sound that feels both organic and otherworldly, ready to anchor deep techno or drift through ambient landscapes. The Digitakt 2, once a vessel for rhythm, now becomes a portal to magnetic resonance and evolving harmonic clouds.

Sound design, in NOGASAYAN’s hands, is an act of emotional cartography. After resampling, the new chord is shaped further—filtered, stretched, and adorned with effects. Reverb becomes a cavern with no end, delay and LFOs breathe life into static tones, and the once-familiar field recording dissolves into a shimmering haze. Each parameter tweak is a brushstroke, painting a landscape where memory and imagination collide.

The interplay of randomness and intention is key. By modulating envelopes and layering random LFOs, the chord evolves, never repeating itself in quite the same way. This is music as living sculpture: a soundscape that blooms, decays, and reforms, echoing the emotional depth at the heart of ambient and minimal techno. The process is less about control and more about discovery—letting the machine reveal its hidden ghosts.

Building chords from a single field recording is a testament to creativity within limitation. NOGASAYAN shows how, by copying, tuning, and resampling, the Digitakt 2 can sing in polyphony, even when its architecture says otherwise. Each note—low, mid, high—emerges from the same sonic DNA, yet together they form a harmony that feels both unified and expansive.

The beauty lies in the details: subtle overdrive on the bass, careful envelope shaping for sustain, and the interplay of effects to create evolving space. This approach turns technical boundaries into invitations for exploration. The Digitakt 2 becomes not just a drum machine, but a storyteller—each chord a nebula, each sound a fragment of memory refracted through circuitry.