The name alone is a statement. False Memory is the kind of title Boards of Canada would choose if they made plugins, and the connection is not accidental. The Scottish duo built an entire aesthetic around audio that feels like it has been recorded, shelved for two decades, and rediscovered half-erased — pitch-drifting melodies, degraded tape wobble, sounds poised between recollection and dissolution. Stephan Bolch, releasing under the All the Machines imprint, has built an AUv3 effect for iPhone and iPad that occupies exactly that territory. False Memory does not do reverb or delay. It degrades. It disintegrates. And it does this in ways that stay musically useful rather than collapsing into pure noise, which is a harder problem to solve than it sounds.
The core of the plugin is a single Analog/Digital slider, and the range it covers is wider than any single control has a right to be. At the analog end: cassette wobble, reel-to-reel saturation, VHS tracking errors that drift and lurch. At the digital end: lo-fi aliasing, circuit-bent glitching, data-mosh artifacts that cut hard and stutter. A Drift parameter runs underneath both, handling pitch and timing destabilization. Low Drift breathes gently. High Drift loses its grip on pitch coherence entirely. Two secondary engines do the real work. Fog smears the frequency spectrum into inharmonic clouds, with tonal, inharmonic, and evolving sub-modes. Ghosts lets past audio bleed back through the present signal in echo, imprint, and granular scatter modes, so the history of a sound leaks into its present. Hiss and crackle sliders operate independently from the main degradation engine, adding vinyl surface noise or a roaring noise floor without touching the core character. Pushing the damage controls too hard does cross into extreme noise territory, but that is where the Evolve timer matters: set it anywhere from 1 to 64 minutes and the plugin deepens the destruction automatically, without touching any controls, over the duration of your session. A track that starts clean slowly loses its footing. By the time you finish recording other elements, whatever passed through False Memory has aged on its own terms.
For producers chasing the Boards of Canada sound specifically, False Memory is one of the closest tools the iOS ecosystem has produced. The combination of analog pitch drift, spectral smearing, and granular ghost echoes is exactly the processing that makes tracks like Roygbiv or Pete Standing Alone feel like memories of things that never happened. In AUM, it works well as a send effect — insert it on a return channel, feed synth pads or melodic loops through it at varying mix levels, and let sessions accumulate character without committing everything to full degradation. In Loopy Pro, the Randomize function is exposed as an AUv3 automatable parameter, meaning you can map it to a MIDI controller or a pattern-based automation lane and let the plugin’s character shift unpredictably during a live set. The Loopy Pro community response at launch was immediately positive — one producer noted losing an hour exploring False Memory alongside Ambiotica and Exosphere, finding that the three together cover most of the ambient and disintegration territory a mobile setup needs. At $3.99 with no in-app purchases, this is a considered tool for a specific kind of producer, and a cheap one.
Key features:
- Analog/Digital Slider: Single continuous control blending warm analog decay (tape wobble, reel-to-reel saturation, VHS tracking errors) through to cold digital corruption (lo-fi aliasing, circuit-bent glitching, data-mosh artifacts)
- Drift: Pitch and timing destabilization — from gentle breath at low settings to complete loss of pitch coherence at the extreme
- Fog Engine: Spectral smearing into inharmonic clouds, with tonal, inharmonic, and evolving modes
- Ghost Engine: Past audio bleeds back through the present signal in echo, imprint, and granular scatter modes
- Texture Layers: Independent hiss and crackle sliders for vinyl surface noise or roaring noise floor, separate from the main degradation engine
- Evolve Mode: Integrated timer from 1 to 64 minutes that deepens the sonic destruction automatically over time, without manual intervention
- AUv3 Automatable Randomize: The randomize button is exposed as a full AUv3 parameter, mappable to MIDI controllers or pattern automation inside any compatible host
- Universal AUv3 and standalone on iPhone and iPad. No in-app purchases. Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
App price: $3.99. No in-app purchases.
Original release: June 25, 2026 | Latest update: June 28, 2026 (v1.0.2)
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