For fifteen years Sam Okereke made records louder because that is what he was paid for. Now there is a clause in his contract that says he will not. We went to Deptford to hear the confession.
The expensive synth will still be there in three years. The one that teaches you anything is the one with four knobs, one oscillator and no menu to hide inside.
Once a month, in a tiled room that has not held water since 2011, thirty people plug their machines into one another and find out what the building will allow.
Four notes, played wrong on a borrowed bass synth in 1983, have since carried electro-funk, house, jungle, garage, grime and one very good synth-pop record. A biography of a figure that refuses to be retired.
Indeterminacy, generative form, scores that never play the same way twice. Concert programmers largely stopped paying for that. A twelve-person studio making a diving game is paying for it now.
Ten pop songs written on a 1981 polysynth that goes out of tune as it warms up. Nadia Volt sequenced the album by temperature and kept the takes where the machine wins.
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