I’ve been pacing, back and forth in a loose secondary structure motif between desire and outrage and bargaining and calm and acceptance and then desire again. The poor rug under my feet.

The master idea-set concept is great: that it’s the centerpiece of a series of related, yet discrete approaches to music, the exploration of which would certainly bring joy & with her joy’s closest relatives: the generation of an abundance of material & a general unwillingness to make concise decisions while in the moment, thus rendering all of that mania largely inoperable after the fact.

Functionally appealing is yes the analogue signal path under tight digital control (the thought of an audiorate trill out of one of Mark Fell’s Max patches pushing this thing into absolute glubber feels apocalyptic & will assuredly sound great) & the sampler’s finer peculiarities (the bit with the timestretched breaks in one of the many, many, many demos by people that will never stand in front of an audience feels like the sort of misplaced-nostalgia regression that fuels every crisis-of-conscience). I haven’t even grappled with it as an “Analogue Effects Box” (as, come on; you could buy any number of studio-grade processors for the asking here) nor a sequencer for other boxes as I’m sure that’s all fairly cut & dry.

Hefty; physically imposing (Height: 4.92″ Width: 19.13″ Depth: 12.24″ Weight: 12.12 lbs). While one could hypothetically fit this in a backpack and zoot off to places where people aggregate to hear things like this, loud, it would need a more commitment-based transport-solution that would also mean commitment itself (I once went on tour with someone who transported an 808 from squat to squat in, essentially, a tote bag and I think often in abject horror about how frequently it banged against TGV doors, etc.) And that’s the operative principle here; you’d need to commit to this hardware device that is both somehow more expensive than a top-tier MacBook Pro (with all that this entails!) and is physically imposing to the point of having to butterfly-wing essentially a bowling ball through those winding, dimly lit backstage-lanes rife with jutting wood-work.

That said; a rock-solid metal-thing that ostensibly does not ding nor cease against hard cement club floors after falling a standardized bar-table-height of 40 inches (100 centimeters) feels warranted in critical environments, yet will universally fall into hands that cannot begin to fathom to wager the transaction of issuing self, and will sit forever lit yet paused in the war chests of the elite.