MESS Ltd

Donate in the next 24 hours and support access to MESS FOR ALL and an enriched creative life.⁠
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We believe the cost of participation should never be the reason someone misses out, so we strive to make everything we do at MESS as financially accessible as possible. ⁠
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Donations will go towards co-creating workshops with communities, subsidising course places, and building real pathways into music and electronic arts for people who've been locked out of the creative process.⁠
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Donate at mess.foundation/messforall⁠
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📸

Never touched a synth before? Fantastic. 🔌⁠
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Synth 101 is your slipstream into the wide world of synthesis. Designed for complete beginners and taught in the MESS education space, it covers the core building blocks of electronic sound: oscillators, filters and envelopes. ⁠
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Working in pairs, you'll learn to create and shape sound from the ground up, with plenty of time to experiment and ask questions.⁠
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Coming up: ⁠
🔊 Saturday, June 27⁠
🔊 Monday, July 13⁠
🔊 Saturday, July 18 ⁠
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No experience needed, no gear needed. Just curiosity about electronic sound.⁠
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🎟️ Tickets via mess.foundation/school/workshops/
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P.S. We also have a Synth 101 especially for women, trans & gender diverse people. Learn more the MESS website.
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Artwork by

RIP Vladimir Kuzmin (1953–2026), the Soviet engineer who created the iconic Polivoks synthesiser.⁠
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Built in the early 1980s at a factory in the Urals, the Polivoks came together without access to foreign technical literature, guided instead by experimentation and investigation. Setting out to give Soviet musicians access to the sounds they were beginning to hear across the globe, Kuzmin instead ended up making a synth that sounds like nothing else. Working alongside him was his wife Olimpiada Kuzmina, an industrial designer who gave the instrument its tank-like look.⁠
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The Polivoks is adored for its raw, aggressive filter, which has been studied and cloned by synth-makers around the world ever since, including SOMA.⁠
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"Every musician who uses the Polivoks finds something for their music... In some cases, I myself don't understand how they achieve certain sounds." – Kuzmin⁠
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We're privileged to have a Polivoks synth here at MESS, on the other side of the globe, where it's still played and still finding new sounds.