Hi Producers !

You had the album, now you have the synth !

ANEMOIA

nostalgia for a place you have never known

You have been here before — or someone has, and the memory reached you anyway.

A corridor with no end. Fluorescent tubes humming overhead, one of them dying. Carpet the colour of nothing. Somewhere down the hall, behind a wall you cannot find, music is playing for no one. It is three in the afternoon, or three in the morning; the light cannot decide. The building is empty. The building has always been empty. And still, it feels like coming home.

ANEMOIA is a synthesizer built to live in that feeling. It is not a collection of sounds. It is a place.

Not a synth. A building.

At its heart is a warm, drifting synth engine : six detuned voices, a tape path that ages as you play, a swimming-pool reverb that blooms in the silences.

But around that instrument, a whole building breathes on its own. Neon tubes flicker and ring. Ventilation swells. A door closes somewhere down the hall every few minutes. Rain falls on a skylight you will never see. Muzak plays behind a wall for no one.

Leave it running and play nothing at all, and the room keeps existing without you. That is the point. ANEMOIA is as much a room-tone generator as it is an instrument  :  load it on a track, play nothing, and it scores the empty space by itself.

The corridor is watching

The interface is the building. A long fluorescent corridor stretches to a vanishing point above your controls ,  and it responds to everything you do. Play softer and the sound drifts further down the hall. Roll the mod wheel and the whole space recedes under your thumb.

Turn the HOUR macro and the light bleeds from pale afternoon to sick fluorescent green at 3 AM. And the whole view is a CCTV feed , scanlines, a blinking REC light, a timecode that glitches. Switch rooms and the channel changes with a burst of static, like flipping a security monitor. At 3 in the morning, the picture tears more often. 

Five rooms, each its own camera, each with its own reverb and its own decaying world:

• CORRIDOR — the bare hallway where it all begins
• NATATORIUM — an indoor pool, caustics rippling up the walls
• EMPTY POOL — that same pool, drained and silent, a puddle in the deep end
• SERVICE TUNNEL — a square concrete duct running deep under the building
• CAR PARK — a vast underground deck, pillars fading into the dark

What's inside

• Warm subtractive engine : dual oscillators, sub, drift, and a lush detuned unison for cotton-wool pads
• A tape machine that fails as you play  : wow, flutter, hiss, print-through pre-echo, and a "lost generation" bitcrush that ages the signal like a copy of a copy
• Swimming-pool reverb : shimmer, infinite freeze, and a reverb that swells into your silences instead of ducking out of them
• The living building : neon hum, ventilation, generative muzak, closing doors, blowers, and rain, each on its own timer, each mixable and mutable
• Play without playing : a generative engine that re-triggers your held chord at random; latch it and lift your hands entirely
• Signature macros :  LATE, MEMORY, VACANCY and HOUR: single gestures that move dozens of parameters at once, dissolving a patch into something half-remembered
• 150 factory presets, sorted by type :  pads, textures, drones, keys, plucks and basses,  plus save/load for your own. Share your presets with others !
• Expressive control :  pitch bend and a mod wheel mapped to distance, so you can walk a chord away from you as it rings

Everything you make should feel remembered rather than played

Filtered. Detuned. Incomplete. The way memory actually is.

The word anemoia names a very specific ache: nostalgia for a time or place you have never actually known. An empty mall at closing time. A hotel corridor in 1987. A drained swimming pool lit from below. You did not live these moments, and yet you miss them.

This instrument is a machine for that ache.

Specs

Windows : 64-bit VST3 + Standalone (Windows 10+)

MacOS : 64-bit VST3 + AU ,  Universal (Apple Silicon & Intel, macOS 11+)

Note for Mac users : 

ANEMOIA is a free plugin distributed outside the App Store, so it is not notarized by Apple. On first use, macOS may say the developer cannot beverified, or the plugin may simply not appear in your DAW. This is normal for independent plugins and does not mean anything is wrong. If ANEMOIA does not show up after installing, open the Terminal app (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and paste ONE line for each format you installed, then press Return:

    xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/Anemoia.vst3

    xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/Anemoia.component

Then rescan your plugins. This clears the "downloaded from the internet" quarantine flag that macOS adds. You only need to do it once. (Logic users: if the AU still doesn't appear, quit Logic and reopen it; macOS re-validates new Audio Units on launch.)

Presets : 150 factory + unlimited user presets

Type : Polyphonic

Should run in any modern VST3 or AU host: Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic Pro, Reaper, Bitwig, Studio One, Cubase, and more.  

Credits

Programming — Fabien C. 

(c) Rusted Plugins Studio, Rusted Music Studio. 

Field recordings — HenKonen · steeltowngaming

Please report any bug in the comments !

Bye Producers !