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Tech

DIY Wizards Build Otherworldly Synths for Trent Reznor: Video

Cousins Leon and Brian Dewan build every piece of their solid-state analog synthesizers. All the way down to the circuit boards. Motherboard stopped by their lab for a visit.

Back in May, 2010 Motherboard reported on Trent Reznor’s latest musical outfit, How to Destroy Angels.

It was a 40-second long video on YouTube that caught our eye, turned our heads and blew our minds.

Wondering what on god’s green earth was being played by Mariqueen Maandig’s goth-y fingers, prompted us to seek out the engineers of the alien machine, which seemed just as likely to be a prop from Lost in Space that it did to be an actual instrument.

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In the end, it turned out to be a Dewanatron Swarmatron, a very real, solid-state analog synthesizer built from scratch by cousins Brian and Leon Dewan.

Motherboard stopped by Leon’s home outside of New York City. It is there where all of Leon and Brian’s instruments are housed and where their eponymous band, Dewanatron kicks out the jams.

We had special access to their lab as well as a look at the making of one of their Swarmatron’s.

Dewanatron’s rigs owe their inimitable sound and aesthetic to Brian and Leon’s past lives as a furniture maker and inventor’s apprentice respectively. They are as much a hodgepodge of two schools of engineering as they are infallible.

In fact, when we caught up with them at their HQ, Leon reflected on his brief but quixotic interaction with How to Destroy Angels after they purchased a Swarmatron from Big City Music L.A.

Trent was immediately able to get some amazing sounds out of the Wwarmatron he bought, according to the people who sold it to him.

I found this to be amazing, because when I took it for a spin myself, I had a hard time conjuring more than a medley of toneless bleeps and bloops.

To my credit, the Swarmatron I played had no labeled controls, whereas all the instruments the Dewans build and sell to other people do.

Perhaps in an effort to assuage the placate the frustrations of people like me, who tend to approach synthesizers with about as much tact as a caveman, Leon created the user’s manual for the Swarmatrons the day he started shipping them to Big City.

For more home brewed instruments, check out episodes of Sound Builders on Motherboard.