I woke up to a tone of A-440.
You can play this on your Minimoog.
There’s a little toggle switch that you switch
from down to up (I think) and then you hear this tone.
It sounds like the tone you hear when your doctor is about to draw blood.
When you are three years old and trying to look out the window but can’t.
Also the sound you hear that protects you from other sounds: like someone
who says: “She doesn’t have much time left.” Or “the body was never found”
even when it was. And then you hear the sound: somewhere between a hornet
and a honey bee.
It’s also the sound of Rachmaninoff, the man with the large hands, who had
troubles in life, many troubles, but nice big hands that made him play things
that others simply could not play SO THERE he said in a manner of speaking.
Rachmaninoff with a capital A. Hey. I shouldn’t forget the Minimoog in all this.
Or the splendid EMS AKS “Suitcase” synthesizer or the ARP 2600 synthesizer
which sounds like it was named after a frisky dog and is a joke but I assure you
it was not. And were it not for Moog we wouldn’t have the beautiful sounds of
Abbey Road (or they wouldn’t be as beautiful). And without ARP we wouldn’t
have the beauty of Baba (Teenage Wasteland) and Pete Townsend playing in a way
that was not at all wasty. Syd Barrett would never have heard Dark Side of the Moon,
although he never did, probably, and never played on it anyway. By then, young Syd
had walked the long walk from London to Cambridge, settled down in a tiny house
and now was old, his hair no longer matted with Mandrax and Brylcreem, the girls no
longer chasing the elf who would lock them in a closet and feed them biscuits. No,
A-440 brings a tuning to our life, but a tuning we cannot fully trust, like Syd, living
in a simpler world painting sorrowful paintings and riding a small bicycle to the store
for tobacco, and then back to a small beige room for the remainder of his quiet days.
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