ECSTASEQUENCE
ECSTASEQUENCE is a portable performance sampler and step sequencer designed in Berlin in 2019 by Nicolai Toma as his final product design thesis, with Vanessa Marino on the design team, and now listed by the studio issue among its work. Toma's starting point, in his own words: "there is a growing desire for physical electronic musical instruments in order to experience focus and limitation in a creative process". Each knob sets the pitch of a step in the sequence and pushes in to switch that step on or off, and in octave mode the tops of the knobs are played like piano keys. When a knob is off it sinks into the housing, so "In addition, the rotary knobs are protected for transport and cannot break off.", and it rises again at a touch, since "this version of a retractable knob works through electromagnetic fields" rather than a mechanical push lock. The ports are a 3.5 mm jack, MIDI, CV, gate and USB-C, and the form was shaped by twelve user interviews, half women and half men, across seven nationalities. It was prototyped and tested with users and published as renders; nothing loaded shows it ever went on sale.
The card is the studio's own render, the first of the eight frames of the post it was seen through: the black slab seen from above at an angle, its rows of round knobs with two amber buttons at the lower left, the dark screen carrying the stencilled wordmark and its menu labels, and the studio's watermark in the corner, all on a seamless grey ground.
issue
issue is a Berlin industrial design studio for consumer electronics and music hardware, product design from Germany and Japan in its own words, whose clients include Yamaha, Elektron and Nonlinear Labs; ECSTASEQUENCE began as the graduation thesis of one of its two principals.
Design Nicolai Toma, with Vanessa Marino. Studio issue (@issue.design). Seen via @minimal_lemonade.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.