The modules I've personally used that are particularly effective for harsh noise music are:

E352 Cloud Terrarium, a wavetable oscillator from Synthesis Technology with some extremely chaotic transforms it can perform. You can also load your own wavetables using a MicroSD card if you want to dig into it further.

Interstellar Radio from Schlappi Engineering, which can either act on it's own or transform an input source. It can sound like a completely unhinged oscillator or like radio tuning sounds.

Ruina Versio, a multifaceted stereo distortion module from Noise Engineering that has a lot of different controls for getting different kinds of distortion. You can get lots of different distortion sounds out of it. Plus, not all types of distortion are as effective with different kinds of source sounds, and RV has enough variety that it can mangle anything I've tried it with.

Beyond those, the next item on my harsh noise wishlist is either an Invisible Friend or Liquid Glitcher from Error Instruments -- Liquid Glitcher is a subset of Invisible Friend. Either can make all kinds of chaotic sounds in terms of both drones and percussive noise.

For modulation, there are a lot of different options. I personally use a quad function generator called QARV from After Later Audio. Zadar from Xaoc is a quad envelope/LFO generator that can use a lot of different complex shapes to keep the modulation from being too predictable.


I have an Erica Synths Pico Out, which is a small 3hp module that does exactly what you're asking about. It has a headphone jack with a volume knob and a separate line out jack without one. I think they're like $90. It's stereo, but if you only send one channel to the left input, it will output through both sides.

Simple but effective.


Here are some things you might consider for drum modules:
* Sample Drum only plays 2 drum samples and is designed more for playing whole drum breaks than sequencing drums
* QD can play 4 drum samples and a lot of features that make sequencing drums easy effective
* Queen of Pentacles and LXR are even more powerful and LXR contains the engine from LXR-02

Here are some things that you might want to consider for sequencing:
* Pamela's New Workout can do Euclidean sequencing but everything is accessible through menus
* Euclidean Circles gives you the same capability but with hands-on controls (it needs an external clock, though)
* Steppy lets you do x0x style sequencing (like the LXR-02) for up to 4 channels -- use 2 if you need more drums than that. This gives you direct control over your drum sequencing instead of using Euclidean patterns (also requires an external clock)

For effects, Monsoon probably isn't what you're looking for. Granular processing can be an interesting effect on drums, but there are other effects that can be more useful. FX Aid is a good effect, but maybe not the ideal one. For example, Ghost gives you a whole suite of useful tools including delay, reverb, and compression with sidechaining. If you're not sure what you need, it will have what you need.

Something like this might be a good choice:
ModularGrid Rack