There’s a circular window in Andy Puls’s recording hut that frames the canyon like a lens, and through it, the seasons write themselves into his music. The Solar Cell, both the name of his remote 8×12-foot studio and his fifth album as A Magic Whistle, exists in that liminal space where human craft meets natural process, where controlled sequencer patterns breathe and shift like weather systems themselves.
This isn’t music made in isolation from the world but in direct conversation with it. When spring storms roll through the Cascade Mountains, Puls feels his tiny structure might slide into the canyon below. When summer lightning splits the sky, he’s there recording, capturing not just sound but the electric tension of being at nature’s mercy. His homemade instruments, the motor-driven “Star Song” and the “Cascadian Sympathetic Steel” built from trees on his property, generate patterns that gather like morning mist, while wordless vocal harmonies anchor these shifting electronics in something unmistakably human. What emerges is music that mirrors the off-grid life Puls has built: responsive to forces beyond control, rooted in place, shaped by the mountain itself.
The Solar Cell is out now via Public Eyesore and Lampspeople Universal. Andy’s webpage (information on his instruments, music, etc) is HERE.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
To start, I’d love to hear about some of your earliest memories related to sound and music. Are there any specific instances that stand out to you as something important or formative early on?
As a child, I think starting at age 5, my parents had me in violin lessons. I wasn’t immensely talented, but the style of music training was classical and involved a lot of listening and ear training. We also had a desktop tape recorder and a Yamaha toy keyboard at home, and as a lot of kids probably did, I recorded silly songs using those. I think the first song I ever recorded was a series of anecdotes about things I had encountered that smelled bad, set to autoaccompaniment rhythms and basslines on the Yamaha.
When I was in middle school, my family got a computer, and I found the basic sound recording program that came with Windows. I started experimenting with recording, editing, and layering sound (“mix paste”) on the computer using those very limited tools. I remember being fascinated with playing things backwards. In high school, I saved up and bought a cassette four track and spent hours and hours in the basement making recordings. I found John Cage’s “Silence” book in the school library, and because nobody had ever checked it out in the 20+ years it had been there, they let me keep it!
And when did your interest and love of sound jump into instrument building? How’d you get started with that?
It was all related pretty much from the point when I became creatively active. My interest in recording immediately led me to want to build circuits, to make weird noises, and shape sound. Analog synths weren’t common or easy to find at the time, but I was really fascinated with them, and the idea that you could run other sounds through them and have wide control over the parameters of the sound, so I just tried to approximate that with what I could find or build or modify. In high school, I started with basic electronics projects, building effects pedals, noisemakers, and circuit bending. My dad has always been a do-it-yourselfer in the broadest sense, and a curious person, so he helped me learn how to solder and repurpose enclosures and things like that. We’d build pedals and then put them in whatever metal box we had around. My dad also worked in a factory and had some surplus and samples of components and other things from there, and amassed objects and materials which could potentially be “used for something someday.” This was the mid-90s, and I also had access to the internet at my high school, so I would look up basic schematics. I also started developing an interest in broader avant garde music through my interest in synthesizers and electronic sound. I subscribed to email lists about analog synthesizers and synth DIY.
When I graduated high school, I went into college hoping to study electronics for audio, but the electronics program at the college was very focused on standard consumer industrial stuff, and I was looking for something more creative. I ended up studying music and electronic sound composition with Jon Welstead, who is an electro-acoustic composer and general technical wizard. He hired me as his technical assistant in the school’s electronic music studios. He helped me get deeper into understanding audio electronics.
Focusing now on the new record, The Solar Cell was recorded almost entirely in a remote off-grid hut overlooking a creek canyon. How did that particular environment shape the music, not just sonically, but emotionally or even rhythmically?
My studio workshop hut is just a tiny little space, 8ftx12ft, on our property, which is off-grid itself. When you are in the “Cell,” you can’t help but experience the natural world around you. It is like a little space capsule, with a big circular window facing out into the canyon. Because it’s on a rock outcropping, with the canyon sloping down below, you feel suspended a bit up in the air. When strong winds blow off the canyon, or it rains or snows, you feel like you might just blow away or slide down into the canyon. There’s a little woodstove that I have to get going every day in the winter. In the spring, when we get most of our rain, these beautiful little clouds form in the canyon and shapeshift and float by, which is one of my favorite things to watch. In the summer, it is beautiful or sometimes pretty hot, and I work with the doors and windows open, so it’s much more integrated with the outside, with all the birds and insects always audible.
So I didn’t exactly intend to make “seasonal” songs, or really even music about nature, but I think I just couldn’t help it from happening because it’s the reality of our life. When I listen back to the songs, I often have a seasonal impression and remember what weather was happening while I recorded it. Several of the songs give me strong impressions of winds whipping around, and an acute feeling of being at the whim of nature. In fact, after I had built my little hut and started working on recordings and giving project files draft names (which began in winter), I found that almost every title had “wind” in it, hah. Eventually, spring came, and the focus and project names shifted.
Really, I think it’s just our immersion in a life that is often dictated by nature, and it’s the fact that I love being here and living my life in the flow of the days and seasons. It just works its way into what I make.
What’s the story behind the hut itself? How did you come to build or inhabit it, and did you always envision it as a recording space?
Around 2015, I bought some vacant land in remote, far Northern California in the Cascade Mountains. The aim was to build a little cabin and come up (from the Bay Area where I used to live) on weekends and such, and explore the vast landscape around here. A little while later, my wife Sarah and I bought some more land next door with a well and a house in very poor condition, and eventually relocated and started living here full time.
I built the hut about a year into living here full-time, purposely for recording and building instruments. We have a young daughter, and our house is pretty small with no extra rooms for a studio. I picked the spot to build because I found it inspiring, and so far it has lived up to that.
There’s a strong sense of the seasons and wilderness woven into this album. Were there particular weather patterns or environmental moments that directly influenced specific tracks?
I would say at least three-quarters of the album gives me a direct impression of the weather that was occurring when it was recorded.
The third track, “Secret Spring,” was recorded later in spring when the weather becomes really beautiful and the wildflowers and birds come out; it was recorded partially outside. The title also refers to the name of a nearby natural spring, which I have hiked to. A few of the song titles (Snackenberry, Secret Spring, Bogus Burn) actually refer to place names of natural features around here, which I find both humorous and interesting in their history.
“Snow Blown” and “Glacial Pacer” are both winter wind and snow songs.
“Clouds in the Canyon” is pretty self-explanatory and was recorded looking directly at clouds floating by out in the canyon.
“Devotees of the Solar Cell” has the feeling of spring blooming into summer, when things become a little easier, the sun comes to rule, and you can just enjoy everything for a bit.
And then “Summer Runner,” the album closer, which is really about wind, rain, lightning, and fire. It was recorded primarily during a night-time summer thunderstorm, which usually brings us risks of wildfires from lightning. Actually, the day I got the LP from the plant and put it on, a strong thunderstorm came through and started some grass on fire down in a nearby valley. The album was ending on the turntable, and I was watching lightning and smelling smoke, and seeing things blow around outside, feeling exactly the intense feelings I had felt when recording it.
The “Cascadian Sympathetic Steel” is such a compelling concept. Can you talk about its design and what it brings to the album’s sound world?
The Cascadian Sympathetic Steel is more or less a normal lap steel but with three sympathetic strings, which share the bridge with the rest of the strings and ring with certain notes played on the other strings. It has a sort of harmonic reverberation. I play it a bit differently from a typical lap steel in that I play most of the strings tuned open, as drone strings or an open chord, and note it with a slide on the highest string. This is similar to an Appalachian dulcimer, which has a “noter” string and then drone strings. So it has sort of a mix of the feeling of a dulcimer, a lap steel, and Indian sympathetic-stringed instruments. It feels to me very much like a mountain folk instrument, but a California mountain folk instrument in that it mixes divergent influences. I built it entirely out of wood from trees from our land: pine, cedar, and oak. It has literally grown out of this place.
I think the main thing it brings is that it’s the main instrument I manually “play” on the album, as opposed to much of the rest of the instrumentation, which is sequenced on my homemade sequencers. It allows me to directly express, whereas with the electronic instruments, I tend to “find” the music as happy accidents, rather than as an intentional act.
There’s a fluidity to the homemade sequencers and synthesizers on this record, less rigid than many modular-based recordings. How do you approach sequencing in a way that stays organic?
I think a lot of that has to do with the design of the sequencers, which are made with shifting tempo built into the way they operate. The main sequencers used on the album are the “Melody Oracle” and another instrument I designed, the “Star Song.” They each have a built-in synthesizer but can also control external modular synths. Melody Oracle is a sort of oblique pattern generator where you don’t sequence note-by-note, but instead choose basic pattern elements which, used in combination, control melodic interval changes and rhythms. Its sequencer clock is in a feedback loop with its melodicaspect, so it also changes tempo depending on which frequency it is outputting. The Star Song has a motor and a rotating disc on which you draw to program it. You can clock the speed of the motor from an external oscillator and control the direction of the disc from an external signal. You can move the sequence back and forth, scrubbing and phasing through the pattern programmed on it. I like to clock it with an oscillator with a slow modulation on it, so the clock is speeding up and slowing down. When that is combined with periodic direction changes and the inherent imprecision of drawing the music in with a marker, it really sounds like improvisational riffing on a theme.
The use of wordless vocals throughout the album feels both personal and elemental. How do you think about the human voice in your compositions? Do you treat it more like another texture, or as a grounding presence?
I think it does add a “human” presence and is expressive of feelings in a very direct way. There is something magical about the human voice in harmony. I’m inspired by a lot of music that uses choral elements in non-verbal ways, like Ennio Morricone, Magma, Mancini, Brian Wilson in his most experimental work, Esquival, Philip Glass, etc.
Most of this album was recorded between 2021 and 2024, but “The Joy Of…” dates back to 2016. What made you want to include that earlier piece, and how does it resonate in the context of this newer material?
After I had completed my album “Vision Magic Voyage” in 2013, I bought the land and started coming up here, working on my cabin as much as possible. I also began working on new recordings, which from the start were inspired by this place, and which I was hoping to record primarily here. But it was too much to try to build a cabin and record here, so I wasn’t getting very far with it. “The Joy Of,” though recorded mostly in Richmond, CA, was actually started on a portable four track here before I lived here full time. That was a lot to explain on the back of the album, so I didn’t include all those details!
Somewhere in there, I met my wife Sarah, got married, had a kid, and then moved here. I also recorded one album that was strictly electronics (“Messages from the Oracle”), which was possible to do without much of a studio setup beyond a digital recorder and a pair of headphones. Once we moved to the homestead, I had a lot of other work to do and no place to record. Recording slowed down considerably until we were more established here, but that song was actually the starting point for this album.
One thing it most notably features that the other songs don’t is a normal electric guitar and bass. The album would possibly have more of that, but my electric guitars, basses, and several other instruments were all stolen from our shipping container not long after we moved here. I actually built the Cascadian Sympathetic Steel in part to fill in with what I felt I was missing most from what had been stolen, though it’s now become much more than that to me. I think even though it has somewhat different instrumentation, the tune and vibe are on the same level with the rest of the album.
Did your relationship with time or pacing shift in the process of recording remotely over several years? Did anything in the slower unfolding of life in the mountains seep into the structures of the songs?
My albums under the “A Magic Whistle” name have generally had more controlled song structures and more perfectionism. In the early 2000s, I recorded solo under the name “Mossmaster,” primarily on cassette four track. On this album, I feel like I reverted to the “Mossmaster” way of working, which was less constrained and more experimental. I have been willing to include ideas in vignette form, to collage different bits and pieces, and to include a variety of styles from fully acoustic to fully synthesized.
I can’t say I was actively aware of this approach being influenced by my life here, but I think the recordings are more spontaneous and translate what is going on around me, rather than being meticulously crafted ideas which come from a more internally or introspectively constructed vision. There probably is something to living more in the flow, directed by less predictable things than it was when I was living in a city and in a daily routine of commuting, living in a grid of city blocks, etc. I hadn’t thought about it very much, but I think there is something to that!
Under the A Magic Pulsewave moniker, you’ve built a wide range of electronic instruments. How did that hands-on practice shape the sonic language of The Solar Cell?
In most cases, the instruments I design are, first of all, for me, so they are used all over the recordings. I think there are only two or three songs on the album that don’t feature one of my electronic instruments.
But even the process of designing devices makes its way into the music. For example, the synth parts on “Summer Runner” are from a circuit idea I came up with as an experiment, but never figured out how to make into a practical object. I loved the way it sounded, but the interface would be a real challenge to make into a flexible and usable device. The recordings are taken straight from a circuit on a breadboard, which was never made into a concrete complete device. The circuit has now been disassembled, so that is probably the only time it will ever be used.
There’s something wonderfully tactile about your electronics where, in some ways, they seem less like machines and more like collaborators. How much do you let the nature of the instruments guide the composition?
Definitely, the machines are more like a collaborator than something I am totally in control of and “composing” with. A lot of the songs on The Solar Cell are based around discoveries that come from just experimenting, playing around, and seeing what comes out. It is “informed” discovery, like I have my methods that are more likely to result in things I find pleasing. For example, I’ll tune it a certain way, find sounds I like, and then start playing with what I have set up. I find something that sounds good and I hit record, and then I figure out how to structure it into a song, what I can remove or add on top, or what to cut to next.
Do you approach building instruments for yourself differently than when you’re making them for other artists or installations through A Magic Pulsewave?
The main difference is that when I build something for myself, it doesn’t have to be easily repeatable; it can be more labor-intensive. I do also use the stock “products” I sell on my recordings, and more and more, when I come up with a new instrument, I go straight to designing it with repeatability from the start. The Star Song is an example; I use the exact same instrument I sell in my own recordings. I also have a new analog sequencer out now, “The Obliquencer,” that isn’t featured on The Solar Cell at all, but I am making new recordings with that. What I am using is exactly the product I sell. I still build some instruments or modules that are just for me, but if I think I am going to produce it for sale, I will start on that process right from the start.
In a time when so much electronic music is software-based or plugin-heavy, what keeps you committed to physical circuitry and analog design? What does it give you musically, or even philosophically, that other tools don’t?
The tactile nature and the physical object are important and inspiring to me. I make things I want to look at and manipulate, that I can hook up to a lot of other physical things. The object inspires you to play and make discoveries. It looks nice sitting on the table. It invites you to come use it. Software just doesn’t do that at all for me. Computers don’t do that for me in general. I have done recordings that involved software sequencing in the past, but really just to achieve a certain control and precision. As mentioned earlier, I abandoned that precision in these recordings and embraced chance a lot more on these songs.
And, as always, to close, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Commonly on my turntable are Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, Sons of the Pioneers, Moondog, Magma, Don Cherry, Tomita, Vangelis, Dieter Moebius and Harmonia, Autechre, The Focus Group, Mancini, Pete Drake’s “talking steel guitar” records, Arthur Lyman and other Exotica, J.D. Emmanuel, Planetary Peace, Laurie Spiegel, Indian Classical Music, lots of international folk music. Have to cut myself off there.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
One Comment