Nekyia Circuits is a new Eurorack developer company from Greece debuting with four modes: Root Locus, Opal, Obsidian, and Sosumi.
The Eurorack market is growing and growing. New modules are added almost every day. Things became a little quieter for companies. There are a few new ones here. But today it’s time again for a new company.
This time, we welcome Nekyia Circuits from Greece. They debut with four new modules.
Nekyia Circuits
There are four modules to start with: Root Locus, Opal, Obsidian, and Sosumi. They have a classy black front panel and plenty of features but still with an “analog” operating concept (one knob per function).
Nekyia Circuits Root Locus
The biggest module in the first series is Root Locus. It’s an analog 12dB/octave multimode filter based on the CGS512 VCFQ filter. More precisely the Serge Voltage Controlled Resonance Filter. Besides the classic filtering features, it hosts a dual input crossfading mixer with gain control and a variable mode output with CV. This allows you to sweep between filter modes.
There is also a ping input for generating percussive sounds, and a sub-range switch turning it into a filter for control voltages, a VC slew limiter or a quadrature LFO.
Opal
The second new Nekyia Circuits module is called Opal and is a three-channel switched attenuverter and summing mixer, for audio and CV signals. Each channel has a 3-position switch for bus assigning or muting.
It also supports offset-voltage (+/-10V). Channel 3 also features a 2x voltage multiplier switch for doubling the channel’s voltage. Here is a demo.
Obsidian
There should be an LFO at the beginning. The module Obsidian takes on this job. It’s a dual analog VC LFO with triangle and square wave outputs and some creative additions. There is a symmetry function for wave shaping, and both LFOs are cross-modulated if nothing is patched. So LFO1 modulates the LFO2 rate and vice versa.
Obsidian also features various analog logic outputs (sum, diff, min, max) that can be routed into the waveforms. Once activated, you archive complex waveforms with it. Sounds like a very sophisticated but still hands-on LFO.
Sosumi
Last, Sosumi is a dual low pass gate based on the Buchla 292 design. It features two identical mild non-resonant channels that utilize vactrols in order to provide simultaneous control over the Amplitude and Frequency of the input signal.
According to Nekyia Circuits, the vactrols are handmade and carefully matched in order to achieve a similar response to the Buchla. I would be interested to know whether their vactrols are allowed in the EU/UK. Vactrols have been banned for a long time and are no longer allowed to be installed in modules. Nekyia Circuits may be using new vactrol designs that are allowed.
If you search for a module that shapes your oscillators into organic plucky or percussive sounds, this could be the right module.
First Impression
The first modules from the new Greek company Nekyia Circuits look very good and have solid features. I wish you good luck.
The new Nekyia Circuits modules are available now: Root Locus (249€), Opal (119€), Opal (199€), and Sosumi (129€).
More information here: Nekyia Circuits
Great article:)
Just to clarify something for anyone wondering!
The vactrols used by Nekyia Circuits are just a LED and a LDR nicely wrapped with a piece of tubing.
All three ingredients of our vactrols are purchased from EU based electronic suppliers which already conform to the rules.
The cadmium in vactrols is a thing of a past anyways since they are indeed new manufacturers (Xvive comes to mind) which sell cadmium-free clones of the originals.