Herbs and Stones Seeds - Noise from the Edges of Logic
There's something quietly satisfying about a synth that shouldn't work the way it does. Seeds, from Herbs and Stones, is built around exactly that idea. It's a small, battery-powered noise machine that coaxes sound out of CMOS logic chips - the kind of integrated circuits designed for Boolean operations, not audio. By starving these chips of current and pushing their inputs past their normal limits, Seeds finds a strange, organic space where digital technology starts behaving in decidedly non-digital ways.
Wrong in the Right Way
The technical description on the Herbs and Stones website puts it well: Seeds exploits "the improper use of primitive CMOS digital technology". That phrase says a lot. CMOS logic chips are meant to deal in ones and zeroes - clean, predictable, binary. But when you treat them like analogue components, deny them the voltage they expect, and jam signals into their inputs that they were never meant to handle, something interesting happens. They start producing sounds that are organic, unpredictable, and - crucially - never the same twice.
This is a tradition with real roots. Circuit bending, lo-fi electronics, and the broader world of noise music have been squeezing unexpected character out of cheap digital chips for decades. What Herbs and Stones have done with Seeds is package this approach in a compact, intentional way - not a hacked toy but a purpose-built instrument that starts from the same principle.
The output is a stereo TRS minijack, and power comes from four AA batteries included in the kit. There's no screen, no MIDI, no presets. Just the circuit doing its thing.
Building It Yourself
Seeds is available through a workshop, and that's an important part of the concept. You show up, pay €50 on-site, and spend the session assembling your own unit. Herbs and Stones pre-solder the more fiddly components so the workshop is genuinely accessible to beginners - you don't need prior electronics experience to walk away with a working instrument.
Starting with a brief explanation of how the circuit actually operates, the session gives you just enough theory to understand what you're putting together before moving into assembly and testing. There's something valuable about knowing the inside of your instrument before you start playing it. With Seeds, that knowledge is built into the process.
What Kind of Sounds?
Noise synthesisers can mean a lot of things. Some are controlled chaos - structured, rhythmic, responsive. Seeds sits closer to the wild end of that spectrum. The sounds it makes are described as organic and never-replicable, which is a polite way of saying you won't get the same result twice. That's not a limitation - it's a feature for anyone interested in textural sound, ambient work, or just the pleasure of having an instrument that surprises you.
Herbs and Stones have been making unusual, handcrafted electronic instruments for a while now - things like the Liquid Foam and Mousse, which occupy similar spaces between structured synthesis and pure experimentation. Seeds fits that ethos well: stripped down, idiosyncratic, and built around a specific sonic character rather than versatility.
If you get a chance to attend one of their workshops, it's worth going. Coming home with something you assembled yourself - something this weird and this alive - has a different quality to simply buying a synth off a shelf.
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