For some reason I can only halfway understand, for the past two years I have moved nearly completely away from the computer as a medium of making music. It started when i first received an ancient 4-track, a tascam portastudio. The tape hiss and the degraded audio quality sounded nice, and i began to experiment with making looped tapes, opening the cassettes up, slicing and taping them together to make my own poor man's loop tape. There would always be strange clicks or notes that I couldn't control, and once in a while these would fit in an interesting manner into whatever i was recording, somehow giving my songs a new, unknown and dynamic effect every time i played them off the cassette.
The cassette deck broke sometimes, I had to open it up without any idea of what I was doing and try to repair it. I still have no idea what to do when something jams or breaks but I still somehow manage to fix it with glue or gaffa tape or whatever is at hand, sliced into tiny strips.

I began experimenting with what happens when you hook an audio cable up to a video in-plug on old TVs, the way the screen flickers in a strange way if you jiggle the plug around a bit. I learned how to produce extremely high-pitched tones on my gameboy color running music-making software and somehow, with time, learned the frequencies I needed to hit in order to make the strange lines on the screen beautiful, in different colors and following a strange pattern. They were never the same and I knew if i so much as touched the audio plug the electric impulses in my body would forever ruin that one, perfect picture on the screen. It would be lost forever. I tried to take pictures of the best ones with a camera but the camera is unable to capture the screen as it is flickering far too fast.

I think this is why I love these things. It is the certainty of something going just a little bit wrong every time, something you cannot control, like an invisible band member playing alongside you as if you've made a pact with time in order to create something you yourself perceive as beautiful. In a sense this outdated equipment noone appreciate is timeless, and i believe looking to the past for creating something new is important. There is a simple joy in learning how to manipulate outdated equipment, and i believe a step back for electronic music would be a healthy one, if only just for popular electronic artists to see what they are missing.