Your average electronic-music studio is a hodgepodge of hardware: Rack upon rack of synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, effects, and all manner of inscrutable-to-outsiders black boxes—a warren of tangled cables and blinking lights. Things have gotten more streamlined in the digital era, but the packrat behavior prevails; virtual studios like Ableton and Logic, with their endless arrays of synths and plug-ins, encourage it even more. But lately, many electronic musicians have been adopting a less-is-more approach, the better to highlight the strengths—and quirks—of their favorite pieces of gear.

Though they also availed themselves of instruments like drums and electric bass, Mount Kimbie made their last album, Love What Survives, principally using just two synthesizers, the vintage Korg MS-20 and Korg Delta. Nathan Fake says “like 99.9 percent” of the synth parts on his last album, Providence, came from the Korg Prophecy, an “awkward” mid-’90s relic with an unlovely plastic shell but a thick, gorgeous sound. The Italian artist Modula has a new album for Edinburgh’s Firecracker label that was made almost entirely on the Yamaha PSS 780; only the drums were recorded using other machines. And Aphex Twin recently made news with a track recorded principally with a late-model monophonic analog synth; the result, “korg funk 5,” has racked up more than a quarter-million views in a little over three months, quickly distinguishing itself as what surely must be the world’s most popular hardware demo.

There must be something in the air, because a number of musicians have recently taken the impulse even further, recording entire albums using only a single piece of gear. As creative strategies go, it’s a no-brainer: Constraints are wonderful creative springboards to previously unimagined methods and workarounds. As one of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards puts it, “It is quite possible (after all).”

Here are five recent albums whose creators stripped down their kit to just a single machine. It’s as close to unplugged as electronic music gets.

Simon Haydo - The Illusion of an Alternative Choice

Synth of Choice: Korg MS-20

How It Was Made: For a few years, Stockholm’s Simon Haydo used the Korg MS-20, a semi-modular analog synth first released in 1978, in more or less conventional ways, fashioning basslines, chords, and leads with it. Then a friend sent him a link to a tutorial for creating kick-drum sounds on the machine, and a lightbulb turned on. Soon he was using the machine to do practically everything he needed, recording various parts—drums, leads, gravelly noises—into Logic and then arranging tracks on his computer.