SOMA LABORATORY IS not well known to guitarists. Based in Russia and Poland, the company was founded in 2016 by radio engineer and musician Vlad Kreimer after the successful creation of his LYRA-8 synthesizer, a device that, in a unique move, generates tones from eight tunable touch-sensitive plates. Unlike most musical instrument makers, Soma’s devices are designed to make musicians rethink how they approach the tools for creating music and, in doing so, break with the usual constructs of pitch and rhythm that define Western music, all while engaging more with themselves, their environments and each other.
Cosmos is a perfect example of that ethos. To quote the company’s literature, it’s “a drifting memory station designed to work with meditative states through music.” To put it in terms more familiar to guitarists, Cosmos was inspired by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s Frippertronics system to create ambient washes of sound through a combination of extremely long delay times and multiple delay lines.
