Molasses Industries is a studio in Richmond, Virginia, and it is one person: Will Mullany. He builds electronic instruments, but against the grain of how that trade normally works. The clearest case is the Generator Organ, an off-grid analog organ with a hand crank set into its side. Every watt it needs to sound is produced in real time by that crank; the body amplifies itself, so it needs no PA and no wall socket. Volume and timbre are not set with knobs, they are cranked — turn faster or slower and the sound follows. The circuitry is entirely analog, with polyphony from a top-octave division scheme. The organ is currently out of production; the website follows that word with "for now." A second body of work, Embodied Electronics, wires the human body in as a circuit element rather than an operator of one: variations in conductivity, impedance and grounding perturb the circuit directly, so the system behaves contingently, unstably, and resists precise calibration.

One thing has to be cleared out of the way first, or none of the rest holds. The handmade-synth look is already construct. Wooden enclosures, knobs, silkscreen, lo-fi, circuit bending, noise albums on Bandcamp, workbench photos on Instagram — all of it has been thoroughly digested, with a market, an audience and a reproducible visual grammar. It is sediment left by a chisel-construct cycle that closed some time ago. Its beauty is real, but it is the beauty of construct, not a living remainder. If Mullany's value were just "handmade synths that sound dirty," this entry should not exist.

The difference is not in appearance. It is in which layer the chisel lands on. The design tradition of electronic instruments is itself an extremely long chisel: first define what counts as signal, then identify everything that does not — supply ripple, component tolerance, thermal drift, impedance variation, the noise a human hand introduces — as remainder, and eliminate it item by item. Circuit bending rebels against that tradition, but its chisel lands on the finished surface: it modifies something somebody else already completed, and it yields a known kind of surprise. Mullany's chisel goes lower. The Generator Organ does not operate on the timbre layer at all. It operates on power. In any definition of an electronic instrument, power is the most complete form of "not music": it is supposed to be stable, silent, unheard, the precondition for playing rather than any part of what is played. And behind every synthesizer stands an entire uncounted infrastructure — the grid, an amplifier, a room. That infrastructure is the remainder this definition leaves behind, and nobody ever settles the account. He settles it: the power goes into the instrument, and the instrument goes into a hand. Once counted, it becomes playable.

The consequence is concrete. The player's arm becomes the power plant, so fatigue enters the music. How long a phrase can be held depends on how long an arm can keep turning; louder requires more force, and more force means shorter. That is a real compositional constraint, and no existing category has a name for it. Embodied Electronics performs the same operation one layer up. Conventional interface design treats the body as external, issuing discrete control states through switches, with the body's own electrical properties classified as interference to be isolated. He wires that interference in as the circuit itself, at which point "won't calibrate" stops being a defect and becomes the entire content of the object. His own account of the method is bottom-up: rather than starting from a desired outcome and taming the circuit into producing it, he follows the circuit and lets its quirks become something the user has to contend with.

The remainder is still alive because no name catches it. Circuit bending is wrong: he draws his own PCBs and has them fabricated; he is not modifying somebody's finished product. Sound art is wrong: it presumes the gallery is the destination, whereas his main output is built in limited runs, boxed and shipped to strangers, after which he hears nothing — he says he has no real idea who buys these things or why. Instrument making is wrong: it presumes instruments serve music that already exists, whereas his objects are, in his own description, systems that stand on their own for play and sustained interaction. Noise is wrong too: noise is a style of listening, and what is happening here is a structural redrawing of a boundary. Four names, and not one of them covers the sentence "the infrastructure is the interface." That gap in coverage is the evidence that the remainder has not yet become construct.

Why seeing it now matters more than seeing it later: the naming pressure has already started, and it is dated. In October 2024 Yale's CCAM ran a workshop with him on his design and manufacturing process. In 2025 he was in APOSSIBLE's Applied Experiment cohort. His name is on the artist roster for Dystopia Berlin 2026. More dangerous still, he has already written the sentence himself — "controlled technological failure" is his own phrase. The moment that phrase begins circulating as a genre label, the work becomes construct: you will be able to buy the aesthetic without buying the risk. Right now the risk is real. The Generator Organ is out of production, the instruments are made in small runs, and the failures are still failures. There is also a contradiction he has not resolved. He makes radically singular objects, yet says what he actually longs for is a tradition like Appalachian old-time music — a set of rules people can step into and out of, where individual expression slots naturally into collective work, rather than a technoculture organized around individuality and innovation. A man who has taken one-off making to its limit wants a common code. He offers no resolution. No resolution means it is still growing.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics