If I had to guess what would best fit the current audio zeitgeist, “free” and “violent distortion” would probably be exactly it. Obliterate, released today by Newfangled Audio, delivers. Get angry. Destroy everything.
I’ve been playing with Obliterate since Dan at Newfangled sent a build a few days ago. It makes sense, in a way. A mild-mannered developer of signal processing tools adept in managing gain staging and taming saturation naturally would also know how to destroy a signal successfully.
Obliterate lives up to the name. This makes even other angry distortions seem gentle by comparison. Funny enough, the project started with some filter code with a bug – and like so many audio engineering projects, that bug got exploited for creative use. There are two resonant filters, each morphable on an X/Y graph between lowpass, highpass, bandpass, allpass, and notch shapes. But the algorithms beneath those filters give you catastrophic levels of digital distortion.
As if that weren’t enough, you even get a switch between ON and MORE ON. (The “more” doesn’t necessarily sound more distorted, but what you will get is more artifacts.)
Now, while it is really over the top, you do get a broad range of sounds by dialing in frequencies and filter shapes. It’s also still a Newfangled plugin, so it includes the same interface for input and output gain and even a blend control. That means you could add some of this destructive power in a subtler way, even if the algorithm itself is anything but subtle. And as usual, the trick to producing completely distorted sounds is actually to keep an even closer eye on gain staging.
But it’s just really, really good. I have no doubt we’re going to start to hear this around. (I remember some folks had figured out weird Reaktor tricks to get these kinds of sounds, for instance, but with far less timbral shaping.)
Disturbing US history aside, I think expressing some gratitude in this phase of the year is a reasonable ritual. So Newfangled sends this nice prose in their email – and I can echo that:
We wanted to celebrate this season of gratitude by saying
THANK YOU to those who’ve supported us, and to all of you who continue to use your creative spirit to make new music – a fundamentally important part of our shared human existence. We love that you make it and we love that we get to be part of it.
Download for AU, VST, VST3, and AAX, on Mac and Windows.
Obliterate product page and permanent free license
While you’re there, you can check their Black Friday deals. And speaking of “free forever,” so, too, is their Pendulate monosynth “based on chaos theory” with a strong West Coast lineage, in a more futuristic form. (If you like it, the polysynth version is paid.)
