Blog | Fogelberg.com

Kasper Bjørke Quartet: The Fifty Eleven Project

The Fifty Eleven Project is an ambient concept album by Danish DJ and producer Kasper Bjørke and friends. It interprets and evokes the emotional rollercoaster Kasper experienced from his cancer diagnosis and throughout the five years of regular check-ups. The album is a two-hour journey where vintage synthesizer sounds meets real pianos and strings.

Since each track has its own story to tell it never gets boring and everything is very well produced – think Brian Eno meeting the piano melodies of Jon Hopkins. Out on Kompakt.

January 14th, 2019|Blog, I recommend, Music|

My website was nominated for CSS Winner

My webdesign for Fogelberg.com was nominated for CSS Winner of the day, 10th of January 2019.

I didn’t win that day, which I didn’t expect to really. It’s not that I don’t believe in my design.. I do, but I have always found that it’s usually harder to win the hearts and soul of everybody when doing edgier stuff (music, design, general art). A clean cut minimalistic fashion site will always attract more eyeballs. As will animations, no matter how UX-unfriendly they are, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I’m glad the people at CSS Winner appreciated and nominated my design. The current score of 7.4 is pretty good, I think, considering it’s just a site about me and stuff I like, basically. I call the design style Fogelberg.com Outrun Glitch, for the heavy use of the colors blue, purple and cyan combined with glitchty and noisy elements.

January 12th, 2019|Blog, Design|

New timeless synthesizer music from C-Jay

An unexpected piece of synthesizer music was released on Replug today in the form of a brand new album from dutch producer C-Jay.

Adem is clearly inspired by the synth masters of the 70 and early 80s. It is a great sounding collection of synthesizer compositions, full of swirling arpeggios, sweeping pads and mysterious melodies. The first thing that comes to mind while listening is Tangerine Dream, but this album thankfully manage to stand on its own legs with its own identity. Adem sounds completely unlike something I would expect to be released in 2019 and I love it. Put on your headphones, lie down and get ready for a long journey.

January 11th, 2019|Blog, I recommend, Music|

Synthwaves from Thorsten Quaeschning & Ulrich Schnauss

Beautiful warm analogue melodies with a bit of retro feel. I have been listening to Ulrich Schnauss for 20 years or more. Thorsten Quaeschning is a new sonic acquaintance for me. Love what they do together. Love this album.

January 10th, 2019|Blog, I recommend, Music|

Finished another modded Game Boy DMG-01

Check out this Game Boy that I modded recently. It’s an original red Play it loud shell with new yellow buttons and golden screen. All the usual mods of course: Backlight screen, Bivert chip, Prosound, Less noise and new silicon parts. I enjoyed doing one that really looks like a 90s toy

January 8th, 2019|Blog, DIY, Gameboy, Retro|

Lyseric techno from Blondes

In my little blog series with music that currently inspires me I continue with Blondes and their album Warmth. It was released in 2017 but I just recently found it through Spotify’s excellent recommendation engine. The duo is from New York and consists of Sam Haar and Zach Steinman. Warmth has of 10 tracks of lysergic techno fused with their characteristic synth-work and atmospherics.

January 7th, 2019|Blog, I recommend, Music|

I’m building the BASTL Cinnamon State Variable Filter

This lazy Sunday I’m building the DIY kit version of the BASTL Voltage Controlled State Variable Filter for Eurorack.

It’s one of the missing pieces in my Eurorack system since I don’t have any good stand-alone filter. Actually I bought it about a month ago but I have been setting this aside until the new website was finished and launched. I expect this build to take around 2-3 hours.

Here is a video from BASTL where they demonstrate the Cinnamon.

January 6th, 2019|Blog, DIY, Hardware, modular|

Proper Electro Acid from Stefan Gubatz

The album Mono from Stefan Gubatz shows that all the hardware you really need to make a great sounding Electro Acid album is a Roland TB-303 and a Roland TR-808 drum machine. Add some reverb and delay to that and there you have it. Masterfully programmed groovy beats and trippy basslines. This one goes straight into my saved albums library on Spotify.

Originally released in 2015 but now available for streaming on Spotify as well.

January 5th, 2019|Blog, I recommend, Music|

Retro-modding old Game Boys to look good and sound great

One of my little past time hobbies for the last 6 months or so has been modding old Nintendo Game Boy DMG-01. Here are some of the nicest looking ones that I’ve done.

They all have similar internal mods, which usually are: Better visuals in the form of a backlight device and a bivert chip. Better sound with the so called Prosound mod, Bass mod and power strip capacitor mod to reduce noise and hiss.

I also always replace the internal silicon parts and the screen that covers the LCD display. Last and probably most important is to make the shell look cool which is either done by modifying the shell in some way or just finding the right combination of original shell color, screen and buttons. I gave also done some experiments with spray painting. The finish of the Game Boy at the top of this post was done by spray painting real aluminium spray two times. Two layers of coating was then added to make sure that the color stays on with use. It was a lot of work but I think the result was really good. The aluminium particles made it glitter in sunlight.

The result of my modding is something that you can use to plays the old classic Game Boy games and actually see what is happening on the screen without being in direct sunlight or under a lamp. Also the sound is of course much better: bassier and clearer.