Borderlands is the ultimate iPad instrument – a melding of hardware and software. It takes every virtue of the pad – swiping and pinching and zooming – and forms them into meaningful compositional gestures. It’s unlike other musical instruments and can inspire a welcome refresh of your musical thinking.
Snippets of sampled sound and music are visualised and laid out over the screen. They can overlap, lay at different angles and be moved and resized with your fingers. Multiple playback circles can also be sized and dragged by fingers over the samples to play small sections as granular sources. The movements of both the samples and the playback circles can then be recorded into looping sequences. That’s essentially it – but this creates an intricate and exotic rearrangement of the sound sources. Granular playback creates a glowing shimmery sound which tolerates the component sources.
Recent updates of Borderlands include examples by a familiar gaggle of experimental persons which demonstrate what works. Presets are usually annoying in synthesisers, but here they’ll get you inspired and working quickly.
The only annoying thing is getting your sounds onto the iPad. It’s not the software’s fault but it can sometimes blow your flow.
Audwall
I can’t help but laugh – in 1982 I made up a fictitious instrument called the Audwall. It was a Roland XY plotter with a tape recorder head on the pen mount. Where the paper would usually go was a sheet of magnetic surface made by multiple strips of 2 inch recording tape. The plotter could write and read the sound signal over this surface backwards forwards and of course at angles, which caused odd time distortions. It was a thought experiment and a prank. Borderlands uses a virtual digital surface in this manner – something that I could never have conceived at the time!
