Animal Factory Asura is a new portable 6-voice hybrid wavetable polysynth that takes you on the dark, evil side of sound design.
Animal Factory Amplifications, a boutique guitar pedal and Eurorack company from India, is known for products that explore the dark, aggressive, and devilish side of sound.
Three years ago, at Superbooth 2023, founder Aditya Nandwana showcased Asura, a prototype of the company’s first standalone synth. It took them more than three years to finalize this project. Today, Animal Factory officially released the Asura Synthesizer.
Animal Factory Asura
Asura is a new portable 6-voice polyphonic wavetable Synthesizer made in collaboration with Indian musician Sanjay Das, aka Philtersoup. They worked on it for over five years.
According to Animal Factory, the name Asura comes from Indian and other Asian mythologies: “Asuras are depicted as celestial beings of immense power; sometimes benevolent, sometimes evil, and in opposition to the Gods”.
The synth comes in a compact format, reminding me somewhat of earlier small Modal Electronics synths like the CraftSynth 2. The interface features 20 backlit knobs, touch-sensitive function buttons, and a touch keyboard with integrated functions.
Lovely: the engine is color-coded. Each layer has its own color—as do the modulators—so you know exactly what you’re assigning.
Yes, Asura is another wavetable synth, but it’s not comparable to the classic ones from Waldorf and others. The engine features exciting twists straight out of the devil’s box.
Hybrid Engine With Evil Factor
At its core is a newly developed hybrid 6-voice polyphonic wavetable engine that doesn’t emulate or mimic any specific classic. It aims to be a new standalone synth. It offers various voice modes, such as one with only three voices and four oscillators per voice.
Asura features two wavetable oscillators with seven built-in wavetables, two banks, and a user bank for importing your own. You can tweak the oscillators with classic controls like the wavetable selection, master pitch, pitch offset, and more.
With the Shift function, you can access more in-depth parameters such as detune, melt (which introduces voice fluctuations modeled on analog synth non-linearities), FM, and glide.
In a standard wavetable synth, the next stage is the filter. Not here! Animal Factory does their own thing in the Asura synth and bypasses the filter completely. Instead, the signal goes into a special delay.
It’s a custom-designed dual-headed granular delay that can go forward and backward. It’s modeled on analog and dirty-sounding digital delays. In forward, the higher the delay, the more it reduces the delay sample rate and introduces lovely artifacts in the sound.
Go counter-clockwise; you can achieve reverse delays. It also includes feedback, an all-bass filter-based diffusion that gives you almost smearing-like reverbs and tape-style flutter. It’s a delay that covers a wide range of sounds.
In the next stage of the sound engine, it’s time to open the gateway to sound hell. The devil is already waiting for the wavetables.
Evil Analog Heat
The signal travels from the delay into an analog fuzz circuit. Here, too, Animal Factory does its own thing: instead of the usual setup of placing distortion before the delay, they reverse the order.
It is a custom analog fuzz distortion that can warm up the sound—or tear it apart in a wonderful way. You can control the input level and the internal circuit level separately.
It includes some unique features like a strange passive filter (Krodha – blood), a gate that acts like pulse-width modulation (Soma), as well as negative and positive feedback. It’s a fabulous-sounding distortion unit.
This section shows that Animal Factory are distortion specialists, as it catapults the Asura sound in a completely own sonic direction. It moves the sound away from the usual colder wavetables toward brutal, dark, and evil sounds that fit perfectly into an apocalyptic soundtrack.
For plenty of movement, it comes with seven modulation sources: two monophonic multiwave LFOs, two polyphonic envelopes (ADSR), keyboard pressure, two CV inputs, plus support for CV, gate, and clock.
As mentioned before, each modulator is color-coded, so you can easily see what you assign, and you make assignments using the touch buttons and the knobs.
More Motion
Part of the Animal Factory Asura engine is also a multimode arpeggiator with subdivisions and a sequence with eight steps and full parameter automation/locks. This is perfect to infuse complexity and playfulness in the 8 steps
Also onboard is a randomizer system that works with pressure. Too many parameters to remember in this little synth? Don’t worry—the developers ship it with a web editor that lets you see all the parameters at a glance.
On the back, it has MIDI connectivity, bi-directional USB, a main output, and analog connectivity (CV, gate, sync).
Animal Factory Asura First Impression
When I saw the synth as a prototype three years ago, I was already really impressed by the evil sound and the concept. Back then, however, it was still a very early prototype. Since then, I’ve hoped the final version would be revealed at the next Superbooth.
It took longer than expected, but from what I’ve heard so far, the wait was worth it. It looks like an exciting new wavetable polysynth that sounds unlike any other. Fans of noise, experimental, and brutal soundscapes will certainly get a lot of enjoyment out of this synth.
Animal Factory Asura is available now for pre-order at an early price of Rs. 47,698.94 (+/433€) until October 15, 2026. Asura is currently in production and starts shipping from India on October 31, 2026. It will also be available from retailers worldwide.
More information here: Animal Factory Amplifications
Super psyched for this! As an owner of some of their effects modules, I can say they always have top notch build quality and you can tell they really care about the sounds produced! Gonna be a fun Halloween this year!