All his best, legendary, stuff came way before he got this awesome setup, his recent stuff hasn't been very well received. You don't need a ton of expensive equipment to create excellent electronic music.
As mentioned in the video, you can emulate all of these in the computer anyway, but if you've got the money, why not create something cool like this?
I see it as the equivalent of a shoe closet for sneakerheads. He can finally afford all the cool super tech audio engineering stuff he's always wanted but makes little impact on the output and popular success.
There's absolutely no need for anything complex to play it, you can write simple C programs to generate all kinds of bizarre and beautiful effects.
...Or are you just being reductive and showing off your programming knowledge?
There's a visceral, physical aspect to music-making, however, that begs for tactile feedback. Some people really need that out of their instruments. That's why, in the case of electronic music, the big old modulars are making a comeback.
Now create a C program that reproduces a person singing, with all the variables that a real singer can act upon
Because if you try the same on a big analog modular you won't get very far at all - less far than you can get with code, given that very basic singing synthesis was already a solved problem back in the 1960s, and systems like Vocaloid have been commercial products for more than a decade now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsJCJ02184
...Which is the core problem with analog synthesis, whether it's a modular or a box-of-knobs synth: it's the synthesis equivalent of writing code in BASIC.
You can do it, and it's good for certain kinds of jobs.
But even though a wall of knobs and wires looks like the last word in musical openness, it actually puts some very rigid limits on the complexity and sophistication of what you can do. And worse (IMO) it trains you to think inside those limits instead of encouraging you to explore beyond them.
To me, this statement implies that you either don't understand what a modular synthesizer system is or you haven't kept up with the times. I mean, you literally build your own system by choosing your own components and patching them together however you want. You're free at any time to pull the patch cables and start over. Add one new module changes the entire system.
Other than the fact that you need to be able to plug it into something, I can't imagine anything being much further from the definitions of rigid and limiting. It would be like calling Pure Data limiting because it's a visual programming language. I don't know, it just seems silly to me.
There's a ton of small outfits in the Eurorack space doing really great stuff. To any one who is curious I'd suggest checking out some manufacturers like Make Noise, Mutable Instruments, ADDAC System, Modcan, and there's just too many to name.
Your comment comes across as reductive grandstanding.
I think what I've said is fairly accurate, some people just use ready made software like garage band and feed it samples from "real" instruments, sometimes they don't, but it doesn't change my point much.
Hardware vs Software (which I would compare to the discussion of a data center in the cloud vs hardware on premise)
and Analog vs Digital
Everyone loves to think they are controversial...
I really believe that there are sounds that are achievable most easily with a modular system. One example that springs to mind: the west-coast school of additive analog synthesis often uses circuits classified as low-pass gates (more or less combining the low-pass filters and voltage-controlled amplifiers of east-coast subtractive synthesis). SuperCollider is one of the most actively-developed systems for experimental audio synthesis, and the only plugin emulating low-pass gates I’ve found is in one of the SuperCollider developers’ personal sandbox repo. A google search indicates that apparently someone has written a PureData low-pass gate emulator, but I can’t speak to its quality. My point is, not everyone who wants to try to make music in one of these systems is going to want to write their own C++ or FAUST plugins, or compile a buggy early version of a plugin. So it seems to me that if you want to just make the sound, a eurorack modular system might be the most accessible way to do so.
And I also think the music people make using modular systems is ideally consumed in a manner very different from, say, EDM tracks on soundcloud or spotify. If you are in the bay area, I highly recommend attending Robotspeak’s regular Church of the Super-Serge concerts to get a sense of this (one performance I enjoyed a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Xn6IbItT8). Members of the eurorack synthesizers group on facebook are also constantly posting little snippets of modular music. This stuff isn’t for anyone, but it is certainly interesting. Patches people create on modular systems are ephemeral and meditative, so they're often described as sand mandalas. The user explores the capability of their collection of modules, they find an appealing or interesting sound, and develop some minimal accompaniment around that sound. The graph of possible connections in an even medium-sized eurorack system is quite large, and there are many manual controls on each module (at minimum 3-4). “Saving” a patch involves painstakingly recording each knob setting and patch connection. Re-creating a patch exactly is therefore quite challenging. So people leave their system patched, come to the show, and perform a single 10-20 minute long composition. That’s the set. Very idiosyncratic, hit-or-miss, but usually interesting, at least. I hope this conveys some of the unique appeal of putting together a large modular systems.