Trigger Warning: What follows is a short meditation on why I bought the Arturia Microfreak synthesizer instead of just making music on my computer or not even bothering and listening to music somebody else made or not even getting out of bed in the first place.
Once upon a time, no one had a phone in their pocket. When you left the house it was as much a mystery to others as to yourself where you might end up and whether or not you might return. I suppose it’s still a mystery if you’ll return, but at least now we’ll have footage and data about the tragedies you may or may not have encountered. That is, unless you turn your phone off or leave it at home.
Madness, I know! Think of all the important marketing messages, misinformation, and scam calls you might miss!
Grab your NASA blanket and follow me back to the 80s, way back to that hellscape of peace and quiet. Back to when I was eight years old and my grandmother’s sister—whose name I will not share to protect the dead—asked me what my goals were for the New Year. In retrospect, it was a strange question to ask an eight-year-old, but I replied very seriously, “I want to become a translator.” Apparently, I thought a year was a sufficient amount of time to achieve this goal. But, my not-so-great great-aunt was kind enough to disabuse me of the delusion.
“What a waste of time. They’re just gonna have computers translate everything in the future.”
I’ve always remembered that experience. Not because it dampened my mood about that goal or New Year’s goals in general—this not-so-great great-aunt wasn’t known for tact or even common sense. The experience stuck with me because of what it said about the world I was living in.
Keep in mind, computers were basically expensive doorstops that could print a sentence like “Please don’t fart in the hallway”—if you work in an office you’ll understand the utility of that sentence—through a pre-MS Word software package that required you to essentially code the page. Safe to say the singularity wasn’t on the horizon. But she’d no doubt heard about the Terminator. She knew what’s up!
My not-so-great great-aunt was expressing two basic ideas that have a lot of caché in America.
First, that technology is basically magic and will solve all problems in space and time while you yawn, scratch your cheek, and press a button.
Second, that nothing that can be done cheaper, faster, or by someone or something else is worth your doing! Remember, you’re busy! You’ve got an ass to sit on and space to stare into!
I sometimes try to imagine this world. Clearly it’s some people’s utopia and there’s no app to send me there which tells me it’s worth the mental effort required. It’s a magical place where everything is done for you. You simply lay on your back somewhere doing nothing, saying nothing. Why would you need to speak? Robots can speak, after all. So why bother? All of your desires are catered to immediately anyway. You’re evolved. You’ve harnessed the power of tech to merge human and machine, to become something greater! Almost like a human black hole inhaling the universe and crushing it out of existence with the black nothingness deep inside you. Sounds awesome!
But maybe you’re thinking, “Hold your horses, world-destroyer! What about fun?”
You must be some kind of evolutionary reject who can’t understand that the marketing scam of false-convenience should rob you of all of life’s joys so that strangers can make money off of you. Hm.
Fair enough, I admit it. I bought the Arturia Microfreak because I wanted to have fun. And worse than that, I don’t find trying to click nobs on a virtual synthesizer with a trackpad or mouse to be fun. In fact, when I sit in front of an actual computer, I feel like I’m at work and I keep having this paranoia that someone has farted in the hallway or was that the smell of someone eating over-boiled, low-quality eggs with their office door open?
The Microfreak is also an aesthetic choice for me. I like the French company that produces the unit; the sounds of the presets are to my liking. The unit has an unusual flat keyboard that I’m pretty excited about, and it’s small enough and reasonably priced enough that if I decide to abandon my aspirations to make unstructured noise after a couple of months, it won’t take a lot of space and I won’t feel like I’ve bankrupted myself.
I have yet to decided whether or not I’ll post tutorial videos or jams. I’m still trying to decide which seems to be the most quintessentially middle-aged behavior. But if I do either type of video, I’ll likely post them on my YouTube channel.