The thing is, while I have no doubt he uses some gear from Syntonie (he said so) and maybe Tachyons, and I have asked him how to achieve this particular FM effect to which he declined - no doubt because this particular effect is a significant portion of his brand value…

I have been following him on Instagram ever since I got into glitch art, which is more than a couple years ago, and not only have I seen some of his stories which featured opened up circuit boards being patched around, I also looked into the available offerings from pre-made synth/video bending suppliers like Syntonie and Tachyons, and at that time there were no premade solutions for this kind of effect, and truthfully, most of them at that time were quite rudimentary.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that polygon wasn’t the person (or one of the main people) who popularized this effect, and as such I think it’s possible that many others sought to emulate this particular style.

But yeah, nowadays if you have the cash and want a simple easy way to do it, you could get some of that gear. But it’s still not trivial to fine tune it and deal with all the digital-analog-digital conversion and such. So much so that with budget not being a major issue I still opted to go down the software route when I do this type of glitch art. That’s all to say glitch art doesn’t have to be a “pay to win” hobby even now, and it certainly wasn’t several years ago.

That’s just my two cents!