By now enough people have seen this photo that some have begun to ask: “What the Hell is all that stuff?”
This, my friends, is where “Cyberpunk” really began. If we had streaming video, this would be a slow pan around the room, but since we don’t, you’ll just have to imagine it. Going clockwise, starting from the lower left:
Yes, this all makes perfect sense to me, and no, this is by no means everything. This is just the minimum I needed to have set up in a corner of the basement to maintain my sanity while the destruction/construction project was in progress.
If you’re wondering what this hardware sounds like, try this: “Fanfare for the Post-Singularity Man.”
[Please note that this was one of a series of video notes from a work in development, shot live and in real time in one take using my phone’s mic, hence the overmodulation, keyboard noise, and generally sloppy playing.]
If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with “Cyberpunk,” we need to set the Wayback Machine to, oh, late 1978 or early 1979, I think, and take a closer look at what I was doing then.
Wow. I still had curly hair then, and still fit into Levi’s with a 32-inch waist. And I was already working on the set of ideas that would in 1980 become the short story, “Cyberpunk,” but at the time this photo was taken, print fiction was the last thing on my mind. When I began putting together the ideas that would eventually become “Cyberpunk,” I was working on my would-be magnum opus: a sci-fi punk rock stage musical, entitled—
INVASION of the DISCODROIDS!
Oy vey.
(...to be continued...)
About Bruce Bethke: In the early spring of 1980 Bruce wrote a little short story about a
gang of teenage hackers. From the very first draft the story had a
one-word title—a new word, one that he’d made up in a deliberate
attempt to grok the interface between the emerging high technology scene
and teenage punk attitudes, and this word was—
Oh, surely you can guess.
Half a lifetime later Bruce is still getting questions about this story, so rather than answer them privately and one at a time, he’s decided to make answering questions about cyberpunk a regular feature on this site. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask him, post it in the comments here, IM him on Facebook, or email it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. He can’t guarantee he’ll answer, but will certainly give it a good try.
3 comments:
That is a truly impressive blend of vintage mixers, synths, and other electronic musical gizmos, some of which I haven't seen since the 70s.
You know, today there's an app for that.
My son is a sound recording engineer. He is working on collecting as much of this as he can, and figuring out how to replace the defunct power source on one particularly delicious mixing board. He uses the computer equivalents when he has to, but he much prefers the original equipment.
Maybe that's the next stage of Cyberpunk: the rebellion of the "app" generation against the old-school hackers, and the ensuing culture clash. Who produces the better sound vs. who can fit it all into a tiny stick.
Thanks!
> how to replace the defunct power source
A lot of the old stuff used tantalum capacitors in the power supply, and sometimes in the signal path, too. Tantalum caps were state-of-the-art 50+ years ago but do have a limited lifespan, and replacement parts can be difficult to source now. Not expensive, but hard to find.
I've owned and used most of the 1970s vintage stuff since I bought it in the 1970s. I got the DX7 in the 1980s, when I worked for a company doing OEM software development work for Yamaha. I call the rack-mounted beast in the center photo the "ARPenstein," as it's my effort to replicate and expand upon the functionality of the ARP 2500, seen in the bottom photo, using modern Eurorack components. I do miss the matrix switches used on the 2500, but no one makes those anymore, so I'm having to make do with patch cords and passive multiples. LOTS of passive multiples.
I'm very familiar with the apps; I just don't like 'em. I have a much better sense of control over what I'm doing when I'm using actual physical controls. I've had the ability to do *precisely* what I want under computer control since the early 1980s. I go out of my way to introduce randomness now, to make the resulting sounds more organic.
> Maybe that's the next stage of Cyberpunk
That clash is already in progress, at least in the music world.
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