Sometimes I feel like it's a bit of a shame, the way that Eurorack modules only have the fronts showing once they're all racked up. Some manufacturers put so much extra care into the design of the circuit layout that it borders on artistry. Certainly Peter Blasser's Ciat-Lonbarde instruments, with their PCBs laid out to look like suburbs or cities, or Ritual Electronics, with their occasional mildly disturbing, yet interesting, images on the back of the PCB (one, of a guy getting sawed in half, for example) are good examples of this. Netherland's Cosmotronic is another. Matthijs Munnik (Waveform, #10) builds sturdy modules that showcase his attention to detail. A light artist as well as a Eurorack company owner, Munnik incorporates interesting lighting techniques to outfit his modules using a combination of light up areas surrounding pots along with the square, austere light up pushbuttons, giving his modules a thoughtful, classy, and unique look. And he's got cool outer space graphics on the back…which, of course, nobody can see once it's racked up, but they're there. Like I said…a shame.
Aphelion is Cosmotronic's latest release, an all-analog stereo distortion with a DJ-like bi-polar filter. Stereo distortions aren't too common in Eurorack, so it's a welcome addition, and with five controls: Level, Cutoff, Character, Drive, and Mix—all pretty self-explanatory—you can shape your sound, sculpt your tone, and really fine tune your distortion any way you'd like, not always a given when it comes to sound destruction. There are three types of distortion on offer here; soft overdrive, a saturating wavefolder, and distortion inspired by the ProCo Rat. The Character knob can morph between the three distortions (you can also CV this), so you can get a myriad of mix combinations between them and interpolate through them quickly as an effect in and of itself. The Drive control lets you dial in the right amount, and there's a dual low-cut/+12dB gain switch, which lets you get the input into overdrive territory or get rid of the rumble that will muddy up your distortion. There's also a filter bypass switch, which is pretty uncommon to see, but an interesting idea. I do wish you could CV the bypass; it could create all sorts of rhythmic and synced up possibilities, but you can CV the low pass, high pass, and Drive as well, so there are plenty of opportunities to get complex.
In practice, Aphelion can go from subtle saturation to full on blitzkrieg, and CVing the Character control and you can create some really cool quasi-phasing effects. With a slightly out-of-phase stereo signal in/out, distorted, buzzy phasing, you can get something like the Haas effect (which is a subtle shifting in a channel's timing to beef it up in a mix), which is kind of perfect for live Eurorack applications as you won't get the phased out mix problems that the Haas effect can bring about in recorded music. The inter-tonalities of morphing together two of the three distortions at times brought about fold-y, slightly distorted tones, and at other times were beautifully fuzzed out. There were a lot of sweet spots to be had, and when teamed up with filtering, and more so, modulating the filter, the movement of sound was excellent. I know I can't be the only one when it comes to distortion who somehow always ends up with every control fully CW, but here I found myself again, testing, listening to the outer limits that Aphelion could go. I liked that no matter how far away from my signal source I became, home was never too distant, it never became all about the distortion.
I really like the addition of the filter Bypass button; it handles fast pressing well and is a great tool for doing that DJ thing of dropping off frequencies and instantly bringing the party back to full strength.
CVing the Filter and Drive, I noticed Aphelion could turn into a VCA, depending on the settings. This makes sense if you're able to block all frequencies at any point of a modulation cycle, but I was still surprised that doing the same with Drive could take me there as well. This opens up all sorts of weird cross modulation possibilities, like using out of sync and offsetting CV to modulate both. Even cooler was when the filter wouldn't close off entirely, but Drive would when the CV hit. Need further versatility? Axe the distortion completely and use Aphelion as a killer stereo filter. There's no resonance control, but the filter sounds excellent in both LPF and HPF (they're 2 pole types), and with separate CV ins for each, can get really wild. Just for kicks, I threw in offset voltage into each to try and get a bandpass filter and was successful in doing so. I'm nerdy that way, I guess. I'm not sure how the independent CV ins work with a filter that has only one control, but whatever magic Cosmotronic uses to conceive this is fine with me. I found it interesting that with the filter bypassed, the CV ins for it still had an effect on the output, though diminished. The filter, as is Aphelion itself, is a lot of fun to play with and experiment on.
I always know that a new Cosmotronic release is going to be solid, and Aphelion delivers. I love the morphing capabilities, the filter, and the trem/VCA effects you can get with it. Aphelion has so many sweet spots it seemed like no matter how it was configured it sounded great, not to mention that it's stereo, so it works well at the end of a signal chain. All in all, like the rest of the Cosmotronic line, there's a lot to like here.

Price: $249

cosmotronic.nl