Nearly every electronic instrument, no matter how experimental, still assumes a stable power source underneath it — a battery, a wall adapter, a Eurorack bus board. Forever Grouse, the newest release in instrument builder Daniel Fishkin’s Solar Sounder series under his MONAD project, drops that assumption entirely: it runs on nothing but direct sunlight, and the light itself becomes part of the performance.
An instrument that plays the weather
Fishkin describes a Solar Sounder as “a synthesizer played by sunlight,” built to work in the opposite direction from most circuits — rather than regulating voltage to keep behavior consistent regardless of power conditions, these instruments let fluctuating solar input directly shape the sound. Clouds passing overhead, a hand casting a shadow, the angle of the sun through the day: all of it becomes an audible variable. Fishkin has been explicit about the design philosophy behind the series: “the goal is not to conserve charge, but to make music,” built to make a listener attend to “the nuances of their surroundings” rather than treat the environment as something to be engineered around.
Forever Grouse specifically integrates its own onboard loudspeaker, powered directly by its solar panels, with banana-plug jacks for patching it into other gear. Rather than a full panel of knobs, it’s controlled by two: a pitch/rhythm knob for scaling the instrument’s behavior, and a volume knob that doubles as what Fishkin’s own materials call a “bentness” control — blurring the line between loudness and the instrument’s degree of circuit-bent distortion in one gesture.
Part of a stranger family
Forever Grouse joins a growing lineup of Solar Sounder instruments with names as unconventional as their circuits: Fluffernuts, a cluster of relaxation oscillators modulated by their own power rail; SoulLute, a speaker-amplified build with aleatoric (chance-based) elements; Woodcock, a modular synth built to simulate marshland bird calls; and Frogs at Night, stackable frog-oscillator modules mounted on lily-pad-shaped circuit boards. Several instruments in the series ship in curved walnut or catalpa wood enclosures rather than conventional project boxes, some paired with wooden “chicken coop” shades to control how much direct light reaches the solar cells.
Buying and building one
Forever Grouse is sold as a DIY kit through MONAD’s storefront, with an entry-level variant starting at $70 and pricier options depending on how much assembly work is already done — the boards ship with surface-mount components pre-assembled, leaving intermediate through-hole soldering for the builder to finish. Availability is limited; CDM’s coverage described current stock as low.