Metamyther & the Sonic Frontier: Newfangled Audio’s Chaotic Heart

Dan Gillespie’s guiding ethos for Newfangled Audio is a deliberate turning away from the gravitational pull of analog emulation. Rather than chasing the ghosts of vintage hardware, Gillespie sees technology as an unbroken horizon—a space to create what’s never existed, not just to reanimate the past. His time at Eventide, deeply involved in analog modeling and collaborating with hardware legends, left him craving invention over imitation. For Gillespie, the quirks we revere in classic gear were often just limitations of their era, not the true intent of their designers.

This philosophy is the spine of Newfangled Audio’s offerings, where the goal is not to worship the dust of old circuits but to shape new myths for the ears of tomorrow. The plugins are invitations to step away from nostalgia and into uncharted territory, providing tools that empower users to push beyond what has already been done. As Dan expresses, this is not about erasing history, but about building roots that nourish new growth. The result is a product line that feels less like a museum and more like a laboratory—every slider and knob a chance to discover something unknown.

In the luminous core of Generate lies its chaotic oscillator—a double pendulum, trembling between order and wildness. Gillespie recounts the moment when a conversation with his brother, a mechanical engineer, led him to the mathematical chaos of physical pendulums. Coding its motion into sound, he found textures that defied both randomness and predictability: not noise, not purity, but a living instability, always on the verge of blooming or unraveling.

But chaos alone is not enough. Gillespie describes wrestling this unpredictable engine into musicality, coaxing it to hold pitch and respond to the keyboard’s geography. The true revelation came when he threaded the chaotic source through Buchla-style wavefolders—imparting shimmer, overtone, and a distinctly West Coast flavor. The result is a synth voice that doesn’t merely mimic old paradigms but invites the player to drift inside magnetic resonance, tuning the edge where control almost slips away. For seekers of new nebulae in synthesis, Generate is not just a tool but a terrain.

As the conversation flows, Gillespie reveals a shift in Newfangled Audio’s design language: from showcasing technical prowess to crafting tools that feel as natural as breath. Early plugins were born from a fascination with new algorithms and auditory models, but user experience soon took center stage. Feedback from mastering engineers—those with hands deep in the mix—sparked a new focus: make the process intuitive, let the ears lead.

This culminates in plugins like Fixate Mid-Range, where adjectives become actionable—‘de-honk’, ‘de-harsh’, ‘de-mud’—wrapping complex psychoacoustic science into inviting macro controls. Underneath, the software listens, analyzes, and suggests, but the interface remains a canvas for instinct rather than a maze of parameters. This approach is both deeply technical and utterly human, recognizing that the magic of a good mix is found not just in mathematics, but in the way sound lands on our skin and lingers in memory.

Gillespie’s journey is one of constant balancing—between the elegance of engineering and the wildness of creative impulse. His reflections on Eventide, modular synthesis, and the unpredictable nature of performance reveal a life spent chasing both rigor and risk. He acknowledges the pressures of commercial product cycles, the temptation to perfect endlessly, and the necessity of letting some projects remain unfinished sketches, secret nebulae on his hard drive.

The conversation drifts into the importance of community, personal practice, and the role of fear in creativity. Gillespie’s insights echo the modular world: the case is never finished, the act of making is always in flux. In both software and life, he suggests, the real innovation happens when we are brave enough to let go—when we step into the unknown, trusting that each experiment, each sonic ghost, will teach us something essential about listening and being.