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kay five kay
arable land is a woman
but what could be more fruitless
  than a tribute to a machine?
fascinated and terrified
  it is the same old story:
call your mother.


* "Mother Of The Mother" ("k5k") (2007 - 2009)

The mortmain() recording "k5k" is a recording of a particular way of
wasting time.  You turn the synthesizer on and just get it to start
making some sound.  Programmable, digital synthesizers such as the
Kawai K5000 ("k5k") series have a memory in which settings and
parameters may be saved, and they come with this memory filled with
"presets".  Among the presets are usually simulations of pianos,
horns, drums, and synthesizers that are no longer made.  So now that
you have the thing making some noise you just start stepping through
each of these presets, playing it for a bit, then switching to the
next.  On a well made digital synthesizer, k5k among them, the voices
are allocated in such a way that switching to a new preset does not
halt playback of the prior preset, so the sounds of each can overlap
somewhat.  A walk through the presets can therefore sound continuous.
That's what "k5k" was.  I took a recording of yet another session of
myself walking the presets, wasting time, just making whatever changes
to the sound that I liked the most for the least effort, feeling like
I was somehow "playing the synthesizer".  I cut out a few minutes of
this recording, titled it, encoded it as an mp3, and put it up on the
web site.  It is a real abuse of the synthesizer to do this.  Such a
synthesizer is designed to be programmable.  Presets are at most
starting points from which the user is expected to derive their own
sounds.  Furthermore, presets are selected to be of maximum use in
selling the synthesizer, so they're meaningless on top of meaningless,
dressed up like an average tourist would expect a prostitute to look.
All of the canonical prostitute forms are accounted for; naive
distressed school girl next door, naughty nurse secretary waitress,
dominatrix cop teacher, automobile mechanic pizza delivering camera
operator, pop rock, jazz, r and b and hip-hop, church worship, and
even forms that have no clear name, but often fall under more
mysterious labels such as "robot" and "lucky man".  You do not learn
about a synthesizer and its character by playing the presets.  "k5k"
is a kind of blasphemy.

There is nothing remotely similar possible with an analog modular
synthesizer.  Not only are there no presets, there is no memory in
which to hold one's creative settings.  You start from raw material
every time.  There is also no way to switch from one sound to another
without interrupting the existing sound.  The updated version of "k5k"
is played on such an analog modular synthesizer, called an "MOTM".
The name MOTM has an interesting history all its own, and although it
is clearly an acronym for something, nobody knows (or particularly
cares) what.  So, I have adopted the name "Mother Of The Mother" for
it.  The process and means of execution from "k5k" is the same, but
there are no presets, and several passes are made, and edited into a
final recording, to provide overlap.


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