Is Mutable Instruments Clouds 2 imminent?
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Does the new Blades dual filter promotional image have a glimpse of the long-awaited Clouds 2 softly focused in the background?
Clouds 2
The giveaway is probably the word DENSITY which is clearly seen in the top right of the photo. Not far from it is another one that less clearly says FREEZE. Those two words on a single module can only mean one thing – CLOUDS 2!
Mutable Instruments Clouds 2? · Source: Mutable Instruments
It’s been well over a year since Émilie Gillet from Mutable Instruments announced that she was taking time away from developing the sequel to the biggest selling Eurorack module of all time. In that time we’ve seen a few new modules come along and updates on existing ones. Blades was released just today! So Émilie is certainly at work producing wonderful modules which makes you hope that at some point Clouds 2 would be on the agenda.
Clouds was a texture synthesizer. It had the ability to turn audio into an atmospheric ambient mush of granular sounds and deep reverb. It became a must-have module and defined elements of the sound and vibe of Eurorack for a number of years.
Recently on the Mutable Instruments forum an innocent conversation about putting together a Eurorack system that included “Typhoon” which is a third party extended version of Clouds was replied to by Émilie who suggested that they should leave a “blank instead of the Typhoon and wait a bit…”
That comment back in October and the image above point to the very likely and very soon arrival of the Clouds 2.
So what would a successor to Clouds contain? Good question. Émilie has been known to express doubts about the functionality of Clouds. She considered it too complex and nowhere near as good as she hoped it would be. So it’s likely to be simpler with an easier and more understandable workflow, higher quality, high concept and all out on the front. If it is the module in the image then it’s a fair bit smaller. The original was 18HP like the Blades in the picture and so it looks more like 14HP. As for what it will do to your audio I think it’s best we wait and see.
I know Émilie has felt the enormous weight of expectations over this module and that must be difficult. From my point of view every Mutable Instruments release has been a little gem of design and functionality and that’s because her approach, her ideas and her attention to detail is uniquely Mutable Instruments. I’m one of the few people who admit to not getting on with Clouds very well and so something simpler would be right up my alley. It will be awesome and I can’t wait.
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