Swedish soft synth engineers MHC announced the Extreme VST, a synth with unique and dark characteristics aimed at those looking to break out of a rut in synth programming. Extreme's demo clip MP3s show a palette of tones that are part horror and part techno, part organic wheezes and part mechanical klanking. Let's put it this way: if robots could come down with asthma, the resulting sound would be in Extreme's ballpark.

Acoustically speaking, results this dark-sounding have to be related to special treatment of low frequencies, and sure enough, Extreme's most unusual feature is a fourth-order resonant lowpass filter on each voice, a kind of grumble generator added to what otherwise might be called a traditional soft synth signal matrix (albeit with a nice "ensemble" section for multiplying a signal into six simultaneous oscillators for fatness.)

Extreme Hybrid has a free limited demo available and runs about $140 USD for the full version.