After a couple of years helping to promote his friends' electronic dance music nights in Washtenaw County, Evan Oswald started thinking about ways to grow the local EDM scene. An avid dancer and sometimes DJ, Oswald saw an opening for a regular weeknight happening that didn't take away from what others were already doing well. After some trial and error, he settled on Gear Lords, a monthly Wednesday night series focused on live music production where genre is less important than the means of production; Gear Lords performers create electronic music using hardware—sequencers, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, etc.

"I was talking about live sets. People that would plug a bunch of pieces of equipment into each other—a bunch of wires and knobs and stuff," Oswald says.

While he admittedly didn't know much about how the music was made at first, and many people told him why it wouldn't work, Oswald pushed ahead as promoter and recruited friend and musician Javan Cain (AKA "OMO") as Gear Lords' resident artist. A year and a half later, Gear Lords has hosted around 30 events at a handful of venues around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, building a regular community of performers and patrons along the way. 

"I really just wanted more going on in my neighborhood, and I didn't want to copy other people or step on other people's toes," Oswald says.

Gear Lords offers a platform to explore experimental sounds, trade equipment tips, and develop new artists, several of whom have taken the stage after attending previous events. Oswald has seen the growing community make an impact on the music.

"[With hardware-based production] There's more free variables, right? There's more knobs. There's more flexibility. There's more creativity. There's a lot more going on. And those artists, in my opinion, need a little bit more time to season," Oswald said. "They need practice. They need platforms. They need friends to play with and a lot of practice. And when they do that, the upside of it is that the sky is really the limit."

Equipment varies heavily from musician to musician, and styles range from ambient to danceable to out there. Oswald says part of the fun is talking with the musicians about how they made a particular sound or seeing them connect over things like how to fix a half-broken piece of rare gear. He and Cain also promote other hardware-based shows in town, encourage others to host their own events, and have even been approached about hosting a night in Detroit.

"I'm an anarchist and one of the things about anarchists is we're consumed with mutual aid networks, communities," Oswald says. "I think of church, but without the God stuff. It's just a bunch of people that care about each other."

Another growing community plugged into the hardware-based electronic music scene is the Ann Arbor Bleep Bloop Collective (a2b2c for short). Eik Eikenberry, who creates music as The Chillennial, founded the monthly meetup as a way to learn more about a kind of music he'd discovered after stumbling upon a livestream on Twitch.

"Suddenly there was a person making these beautiful alien soundscapes from a colorful panel of what looked like switchboards," he says. "I asked in the chat what this was, and was told all about modular synthesis."

After checking out an event and demonstration by North Coast Modular Collective—another local synth group that hosts concerts and workshops—at the Ann Arbor District Library, Eikenberry saw huge potential in the standing room only crowd but was disappointed to learn the next event was six months out.

"So I posted around various local social media channels advertising a new group all about modular synthesis to meet monthly, with the hope that someone would show up that could actually teach me how this stuff worked," Eikenberry says. "Thankfully, quite a few did."

With a traditional synthesizer, a keyboard is typically involved, and the signal path and options for altering the sounds it can make are predetermined by the manufacturer. Even if there are lots of choices, there's a limit to what can be done. With modular synthesizers, players build their own setups from individual, interconnected modules that can interact with each other to create any number of sounds, depending on what modules are available and how they are used.

Eikenberry says one way to think of modular synthesizers is like playing "sound Lego," with different "bricks" — i.e., "modules"—that can be used to make, change, or control a sound.

"If you want to get poetic about it, you are having a conversation with a device you have built and assembled piece by piece, for a very specific musical purpose, and everyone's is different," Eikenberry says. "It's like building your own musical lightsaber."

Today, a2b2c has about 40 members and regularly draws a dozen or so people out to its meetups. The informal info swaps and jam sessions started out of the downtown Ann Arbor library before outgrowing its conference rooms. Some members have since started performing in the area, including sets at Gear Lords. Eikenberry hopes to host events outdoors once it warms up.

"Getting into this hobby I had no idea we even had a music scene, much less a hardware electronic music scene specifically," he says. "Learning about Gear Lords shows, and then meeting other artists who would show up to our meetups, a lot of natural networking happened."

Even as the group grows, the idea is to keep it "newbie friendly" and inclusive.

"We have had ham radio operators visit without knowing the first thing about synthesis," he says. "By the end of the meetup, they had radio frequencies running through effects chains to get some pretty fun effects."

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer.

The next Gear Lords is Wednesday, April 23, at Ziggy's, 206 W. Michigan Ave., Ypsilanti, from 7-11:30 p.m. $5 cover. More info on the Ann Arbor Bleep Bloop Collective is available here, through their Discord server, or by joining their mailing list.