With a visualization that has a cartoon head barfing out rainbows when you play music, Hultén’s Doodlestation is a wonderfully absurd synthesizer made for the modern age.
If you haven’t treated yourself to any of Love Hultén’s work, it’s definitely a ‘do no miss’ from us. The Sweden-based audiovisual artist and woodworking aficionado makes some incredibly eclectic synths and modular electronic instruments (even including one made from plastic dentures) using his unmatchable imagination along with synth-building and electrical skills. The Doodlestation is no different from his past creations in that regard, but purely on its own, it’s a rather fun instrument to play. For the most part Hultén combines existing instruments with custom enclosures and graphics, and the Doodlestation does it too. When you play a key or a set of keys together, a custom MIDI visualizer pops up on the screen in the form of a Nyan Cat-ish cartoon boy that barfs out rainbows. The rainbows, cleverly enough, take the shape of the waveform the synth is playing, going between sine, square, sawtooth, or triangle.
Designer: Love Hultén
The Doodlestation is a Frankenstein monster mashup of a Sequential OB-6 module, Moog DFAM, Hologram Microcosm, Theremin setup, and a Tape Echo, combined with Hultén’s custom visualizer and a custom keybed. The color combination seems pretty on-point considering the Frankenstein monster reference with an olive-green paint job, combined with a few colorful keys, plugs, and cables adding a bit of vibrance to an otherwise old-school-looking setup.
The name Doodlestation and the visualization come courtesy a partnership with Evan Keast, founder of the Doodles collection of NFTs. Hultén has made commissioned synths in the past and mentioned that this was a commissioned piece too, on his Instagram. The visualization is one of the key mascots of Evan’s Doodles NFT project.
