Joy Of A Toy

…the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
   unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
                A. R. Ammons, "Gravelly Run"

What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of
   
being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us…
          W. H. Auden, "Archaeology"

I won't abjure it anymore. It is even a theme I wish to take up with more serious intent (that is, with the goal of achieving more permanent argumentative results) elsewhere. For my recent experience has only reinforced to me a sense I've long harbored that there is something touching about abandoned technology, albeit inexplicably so. Many of the substances from which we fashion implements -- iron, steel, brass, wood (in block and in pulp), ivory, lacquer -- age as much as we do, and a pathetic response to such things' deterioration is not far-fetched, even when they are examples of mass production. But there is no real warmth to plastic. Its ubiquity in the contemporary world means our eyes slide ride off plastic's surfaces much as our touch does, the latter a comet whose head is a fingerprint and whose tail is just a smear of sebaceous cling and unwanted salts.

I was 14 years old in 1986, a freshman at the Catholic, co-ed Bishop Lynch High School (our mascot: The Fighting Friars) in East Dallas. My prized possessions were cassettes of The Cult's Love, The Cure's Pornography, a dub of the 2-LP Ralph Records "best of" I had received in exchange for 2 USD and, IIRC, some stamps, P.I.L.'s Second Edition and Pete Townsend's Scoop, the last of which I had purchased as a case-punched $2.99 "cut-out" at the Sound Warehouse on Fitzhugh and Cole Avenues. The Cult album only confirmed my faith in psychedelic music. A gringo in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, the off-kilter Latin orchestrations on Forever Changes and Buffalo Springfield Again really spoke to the 6th grader in me. If I had its tunes quietly singing in a medley of memorization in my head as I took bicycle tours down Lower Greenville Avenue, the Love LP in particular made the squat buildings around me -- The Goody-Goody liquor store, a gutted church, pawn shops, an organic grocer's, and highly competitive auto detailing garages -- team with insane, slow-motion life. Meanwhile, in pubescent winter, The Cure were as therapeutic as a palmful of mentholated Vaseline rubbed on a phlegm-rattling chest. And the Ralph stuff fanned the flame my inner weirdness, not the least for including The Residents' brilliant vinyl de/re-construction "Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life". But it was the Townsend record, ultimately, that inspired me insofar as it pricked up the ears of my discontent with remaining a mere listener. Suddenly, rock-star fantasies and soft-pedaled observings would no longer do. Yep; Pete Townsend led me to believe that I could learn to make music just by dicking around. In the liner notes to Scoop, Pete talks abut developing "synthesizer-itis", and while it is true that I loved tracks like "Melancholia", "For Barney Kessell", and "Mary" (A Lifehouse reject) the most, I would listen to "Initial Machine Experiments", suddenly, very badly, want to suffer from the same syndrome. My case was not helped at all by the fact that I had just read a history of electronic music and was simultaneously hunting high and low for examples of musique concrète, as well as records by Stockhausen, Silver Apples, Morton Subotnick, and Suicide.

So when I first saw advertisements for the Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard in the fall of 1986, I decided that I would raid the savings account my parents, grandparents and various aunts and uncles had tended for me -- 5 bucks for a birthday here, 10 for Christmas there; the stray denomination that, once given, demarcated the end of an unscheduled visit as bills were passed from a breast pocket dusted with twigs and curls of tobacco and transferred to the inner folds of a pair of blue jeans where the harmonica and a couple of pink chunks of bubblegum rode close to the thigh -- to buy one. Remember, this was a time when the proto-crunk sounds of Licensed To Ill were brand new, and Ferris Bueller's keyboard-enhanced gross-out pranks (he wanted a car, not a computer) defined the triumph of youth culture cool over parental cluelessness. Reagan's children all, we thought the technology belonged to us, you understand, when it had simply been handed over to us, and not without strings attached. But I knew as well as any kid who had grown up marveling at the guy who held down the high score on Defender -- which is Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" turned into a video game -- about sprites and hand-eye coordination, about machines as opponents to beat ("turn over"). And so I thought it was as if the musical skills I needed were soldered into the keyboard's motherboard, and that if I could work the keys in the proper sequences, feed the CPU the right input, I could make the of talent's pattern surrender themselves in a stream of illuminated, coded bytes. I could, I thought, find the oversight or flaw in human engineering that I could exploit for outrageous results every time I manipulated the SK-1. You see how little I comprehended about the mysteries of sound, much less those of systems. (It bears noting at this point that the SK-1 is a veritable Holy Grail in the circuit bending community and it is a "community" for real. The SK-1 and trivialities like it may not have the capacity to heal the world, but they are bringing a diverse group of individuals together in new and intriguing ways that have little to do, finally, with global capitalism.)

Over the years, I misplaced a series of conflicting stories I told my mother about how I "lost" the SK-1 that had cost me almost 70 dollars. But, by the end of my sophomore year at BL, the Casio was certainly gone. And, by the time my junior year began, my extra-curricular interests had experienced continental drift, and, as that autumn wore I on, I found myself stranded on a land bridge as sea level rose all around me. I had new trauma to store in the old memory banks, you know? No room for childish things. Yet I recognized the sliders and the convex oblongs of the keyboard's buttons (yellow, blue, and a few shades of gray) the moment I saw the SK-1 this June amid the cast-off, odd-sized shirts, dirty ultramarine ice-cube trays, one-armed action figures, and Reader's Digest Condensed Books laid out on a neighborhood church rummage sale table.

As the cliché goes, it all came back to me. I had lent my old SK-1 to a classmate named Dale. I'm somewhat surprised now to think that I would have let any of my classmates know I owned an SK-1. Had I actually been consumed by status in those years? Dale certainly had. He always wore his school tie loosened by one button, and he had a broken-nosed charm and a mole-punctuated smirk that drove the girls who lifted cigarettes from the 7-11 down the street and made posters and buttons for their friends who were running for student council go crazy. Dale had sat in front of me in Algebra I, seventh period, freshman year -- the year school ran until 3:30 every afternoon -- but we hade no classes together after that. But he had enrolled in a different section of the same Theater Arts course that I took as an elective sophomore year. Dale asked to borrow my keyboard the winter of 1987 so he could score a short film he and his project group were required to complete for credit. I even remember seeing the final cut of the thing, and recognizing the droning, atmospheric loops of which the SK-1 was capable as they crept underneath footage of a mysterious, chubby-cheeked, safety-goggled figure descending the concrete and red brick stairwell that led from the back door of the school library down to the hallway behind the cafeteria and its echoey expanse of tables and huge, wheel-able trash-cans. Dale never returned the SK-1 to me, despite the fact that my mother nagged me about it almost every late April, early May morning and afternoon that she had to drive me to school. As well, despite the fact that, with the passive-aggressive force that only smart-ass teenagers can muster, I tried to co-opt and then transform this nagging into an original, hard-ass persona whenever I saw Dale socializing as far away as possible from my negative charisma. The congestion of topsiders, polyester pants and plaid skirts waned, willy-nilly, during the passing period between classes, and I never got any closer to my classmate and erstwhile bud than a cold, accusatory stare. Maybe this was due less to my fear than to my being embarrassed, chumped. Perhaps it was that I heard how someone else had mastered my toy, and I had given up on it; subconsciously, I understood the SK-1, as if it were some unique entity and not something I could in theory replace off-the-shelf, were no longer mine. I had heard specific electronic sounds in my head, and I could even draw some classic wave-forms (they cropped up in the little doodling I did at that time, but I never had a desire to turn them into tattoos), but I could never tease them out of that keyboard.

Except that, with the help of my on-again / off-again (she put up the cash), the Casio SK-1 is mine once more. I knew without pulling the price tag -- "$2.50", written in fat pencil -- back from where it covered the model number that what I found at the garage sale was an SK-1, and, in fact, it was THE VERY SAME ONE I had been so lax with more than a decade ago. Yes, I could tell standing there in the electric bath of Saturday morning sunshine that the keyboard had been accorded favorable treatment for over the years, that all the working parts were in order. At the same time, I could care less about its private odyssey. Sure, sure, factor in the likelihood that Dale lived in this lake-adjacent neighborhood to which I've moved, close as it is to my alma mater. Maybe his parents had given the SK-1 away when they disposed of Dale's many other personal effects after he left for college, or was sent to jail, or was just booted out on his craven ass. Which would have served the thieving little punk right... One can have an attachment to old belongings that is not sentimental. Right?

Sans its contingent of 5 AA batteries, there is something so familiar in the imbalance -- left-hand speaker like an iron lung, right-hand side microphone as light as a single contact lens -- of the SK-1's heft. Yes, I think remember too how that faint arc of black ball-point ink making a stick-man smile from the middle A to the high G key came to be there, a mark that anyone other than its former owner would mistake for a scratch. Could it be... the same machine that, at various times, captured, held and transformed 1.4 seconds of my grandmother's saying, querulously but with affection, "Hello Joseph"... a note from the Norma guitar, the one Frances and I re-strung two years later when she came back from the Madeira School with her composition books full of poetry and her big gushing collages of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young records, the guitar my mother had been given by her "baby cousin" when Patty and her husband split, the ne'er-do-well who lost an eye in a bar fight, and Patty made her way back to Colorado Springs (and not before we also somewhere lost a Siamese / tabby mix she had entrusted to us)... stray radio static, bristling now who knows where in the solar system... various tappings and scrapings of the built-in microphone, a silvery little grill (9.38 kHz)... an October afternoon exhalation through a red plastic nose-flute when I should be doing my Latin declensions (3rd)... Vince Ely's drum lick from the opening of The Psychedelic Furs' "Wedding Song"... the clatter of runcible spoon and butter knife... a thump on an emptied margarine tub, the pluck of a soda pop can tab... cigarette-pack cellophane being crumpled...

Sitting with the thing at home, snapping my fingers over it, hearing again that "brass ensemble" synth voice that I feel even to this day resembles, and in a cool, not eerie, way, the keyboard sound on Led Zeppelin's "Carouselambra" -- can I find those two notes again? -- I realize that what makes the SK-1 so special, I almost want to say "dear" is also what makes it so loathsome. I mean, what sounds could I coax from this thing other than those I heard back when I first bargained on it, at 14? This machine is an engine that converts mimesis into allusion. Yes, the SK-1 is lucky enough to lose all its memory -- samples and sequences -- once its power supply is cut. I should not have mentioned all those old sounds, because, sensuous detail aside, there's no hooking savor there. It is the process, the processing, that remains. Math never mortifies. The basic principles around which the SK-1's recondite circuits close are constant. Not so the noisome emanations of relatives and bodily functions and long-discarded kitchen finds, then; rather the hissing (a modest roar, really) of air streaming into the SK-1's microphone, carrying the instrument's unique acoustics within its flow. To change the pitch of a sampled tone, the SK-1 simply repeats the captured information at a different speed. Loop the sound, even of one's fingers snapping, and hit three keys at once: non-tempered sounds are not magically transformed into chords, but drones do emerge from the paralleling of each repeated harmonic's internal rhythms. And these battering dislocations expand the longer, that is, the more obnoxiously, you hold the keys down. The transition from a higher note to the next lowest note in always introduced by the sound of something grinding the wheels of its own cessation, giving up the ghost, or being whisked away by the forces of cosmic entropy. Because, in sampling, and no matter how noisy the sample, tiny, embedded switches, more minuscule even than transistors but switches nevertheless, are being thrown, generating a flip-flop buzz so faint it feels like mere ambiance. Multiply this by SK-1 speaker distortion, and you end up with phantom, whistling, truly tempered overtones clinging to each sample. All samples are the property of the machine. Wait a moment. Does consciousness actually move faster than artificial intelligence can? What's really inside this SK-1? Not a grab-bag of wires and capacitors and LED's and touch-sensitive rubber. Rather, there is a whole set of adolescent habits relating to my positioning myself proximate to random events; more specifically, my tendency to inject randomness into events which, in fact, unfold with a deadly purpose. At 14, I did not hear my parents bicker as often as I had as a pre-schooler but I had found an old audio tape my mother made while she was still pregnant with me, a recording of daily minutiae to be sent to her parents in lieu of a letter. And, like so many Residents fans who never really dug The Big Bubble, I am already dismissive of MIDI, eyes closed as the telephone samples of Kraftwerk's Electric Cafe click through near-infinite cycles on my old Walkman, the moon is up, I can smell the smoke from the fireplace fires burning in the restaurants a few blocks away, I'm sitting on a felled tree rotting in the backyard, it will be years before it returns to the soil completely, The Young Ones comes on before 120 Minutes, Frances' mildly dyslexic letters arrive on Senator Paul Simon's Senate stationary, and I've only just discovered The Crying Of Lot 49 from a reference in the instruction manual to a strategy game based on the concept of the Illuminati (Steve Jackson Games, makers of GURPS). Even if it while be a long time before I comprehend the formula, its sum is already present, if not ever-present: a matter of recognition, not creation. There's a junk drawer open in a bureau against a wall in my new home. I bend to blow over the SK-1's microphone. But I cannot. Involuntarily, I hold my breath until I it is impossible to hold it anymore. The SK-1 beeps cheerily to know that it has completed its task. Apply the tremolo I envelope -- no, wait the "long release with sustain, slow decay when key[s] released". , not . Set the loop. Turn on the sequencer. Might as well listen. I'm still a big believer in the virtues of trial and error. Clumsy, whooshing dragon-breath, and not exactly tape loops flaking into desiccation 's oblivion while the World Trade Center implodes (Basinski's Disintegration Loops), but, hey, what do you expect... And yet, in the unvarying over and over again of the SK-1's roar, I still feel something receding, but only so it can build up a new head of steam, gather the momentum it needs to crash its snaking amplitude right through me. Hell take control; it's always outdoing itself. It's always wiping me out.

~ Joe Milazzo