Did you strike upon an angle of approach you thought would be the right thing to do for Telefon Tel Aviv?

After five years trying to figure if I was even gonna do the damn thing in the first place, I had to figure out what the sound was gonna be. Once I got my brain around that it was like, ‘Oh, I'm not gonna be able to do this with my current skill set.’ I realised I had to dig in on Max, so I started learning Max online around 2016 and then spent two years while tinkering with little melodies and lyrics and saving them. While doing all that, I spent two and a half years building the tool kit I needed to make the record.

Q: You've previously talked about working with presets. There's a producerly orthodoxy that you should steer clear of the presets. But that doesn't seem to worry you so much.

A: Another thing I did on this record: with Ableton Live and with Max For Live there's lots of great ways to control the parameters using different types of LFOs and randomisers and envelope followers and stuff like that.

In this YouTube video at the 8:00 minute mark, Robert Henke provides a rough outline of Monolake Studio circa 1995.

"The EIS began with awareness and use of the delay that could be heard between the record and playback heads on reel to reel tape machines that is now emulated and elaborated in Max/MSP software."

Also in an interview included in the book "Pink Noises", by Tara Rodgers: "It’s a long history of how things change from analog to digital. I still work with a hybrid kind of thing. I’m using Max, I’m using the computer as a programming and processing environment, but I’m still playing the accordion, which is a nineteenth-century instrument. All the sound is derived from acoustics rather than from electronics, but I use the computer system to process the sound. There’s still plenty of places for me to go, even."

In the YouTube video "Synesthetic Sensory Stimulation with Ryoichi Kurokawa," Ryoichi Kurokawa is shown using Max/MSP, highlighting its role in his creative process.

FJO: How many different programs are you using to make this all happen simultaneously? I see you have Max/MSP open.

IM: For the music, this is all Max/MSP; the controller is Max/MSP and Jitter. And this is another effect. And I use GRM [plug-ins], and in that way I relate to physical musicians, but otherwise I’m not really physical at all. For the visuals, it’s a whole bunch of things made using FinalCut and then Flash to put together the animation.

can be seen at 1:10 in this video

In an interview with XLR8R, Greg Davis confirms his frequent use of Max/MSP software for music production.

So my colleague Boris Klompus and I put a contact mic on a set of Swedish spoons, and ciphened it through a Max MSP patch, and were able to doctor the attack / tone / decay to such a way that made it seem electric, and almost wrong-sounding, to make that tone ominous, gut-hitting, and wholly unignorable.

Mentioned in this July 16, 2020 Fifteen Questions interview.

I’d say some of the essential tools for me (software and hardware) are Ableton, PaulStretch, the OndeMagnetic and MaxMSP.