Primitive Coastal Electronics

Everything Is Connected To Everything Else.

The purpose of the PCE project was two-fold: at the outset, it began as an endevor to build tools I wanted but didn’t have for use in recording. It was also to act as an educational/informational platform for things I am working to create, understand, and control—namely low to medium-gain discrete drive designs which took advantage of NOS/recycled/upcycled/surplus/salvaged components where applicable) to see how much could be done with low part counts and an emphasis on exploration of user control and player technique (tone is in the fingers, so I am told.) Much of this is approached from the angle of it being functional sculpture and less so as market-ready audio equipment. While am not an engineer per se, I am coming to understand that those tendencies are in my blood, and I suppose I have my family to thank for that (or maybe I just enjoy the way burning flux smells, for better or worse.)

These days, when it comes to circuits for audio amplification, I realize that there really isn’t anywhere left to stand except the shoulders of giants. Many of the things I am interested in exploring here have been iterated on time and again since the late 1950s, but after spending years standing in front of amplifiers, modular synthesizers, abstract paintings, et al., I can, at best, offer a new way of looking at and experiencing music technology, in perhaps a similar way that the Eames brothers challenged the perception of what furniture was supposed to be made of, or even function as (lofty as a goal that may be)—or at the very least, present something akin to “studies” (in the B. Thom Stevenson sense of the word.)