Helping the Children of Ukraine

​The unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Putin is shocking, a tragedy and most likely a crime. However it is easy to fall into the mentality of “us against them” and to succumb to hate directed against the innocent. As Sting has put it so perfectly in his song which he never thought to have to sing again: “The Russians love their children too”. So we should not mistake the madness of one man and his criminal cronies with the people of the country. While the Ukrainians fight for their lives, their freedom and their country against an overwhelming and brutal war machine, so do many Russians risk their freedom and maybe even their lives by protesting against this war on the streets in Moscow, St. Petersburg and many other cities deep within Russia in an increasingly oppressive regime.

How does this affect us as artists, musicians and small manufacturers of electronic instruments? How can we help end this war and how can we give real, meaningful help to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are leaving behind everything they love, their homes, their jobs, their families and their fathers, husbands and brothers who have to stay back to fight against Putin’s army?

In my last blog post I wrote about the filter which I have designed and which was almost ready to go into production but for the fact that its design was inspired by a Russian inventor who also developed the Polivoks synthesizer a long time ago (maybe even when Sting wrote that song?) I asked you, the community, what the name should be for this filter, and the overwhelming majority voted for “KUZMIN” in honour of this great man, an inventor, an artist, a Russian who put his mind not to subdue people, but to give them the tools to express themselves musically, a kind of freedom towards the end of the cold war and the soviet era.​

So here is the new KUZMIN FILTER in honour of Vladimir Kuzmin: It offers a unique sound and some additional features:

• two different resonance characteristics, hard and soft
• an FM function, that adds the input signal to the modulation of the filter
• an optional overdrive for the output, making the sound even more rough and untamed.

And to directly offer my help to the people of Ukraine I will direct 70% of the revenues of this module to UNICEF, especially for the support of children affected by the war.

So please buy this filter, it sounds great, it is inspired by a great heritage and it will make a difference to the children of Ukraine.

You can purchase this module here in our online shop.

Thank you,
Robert.

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