But before we get to the future, Iwai, the inventor of Tenori-on gave the assembled crowd of artists, producers, DJs, jazzers, techno nuts, music geeks and a few journos a short presentation on the history of the project.

Toshio’s background is in media art but the way he explained the progress from his need to provide soundtrack music to producing a fully functioning commercial product out of one of the biggest electronic empires in Japan.

Like most things, the idea was simple. Taking an old fashioned music box that was fed a paper card, the crank handle played ‘Happy Birthday’. With the glint in his eye of naughty schoolboy, he imagined what it would sound like fed the opposite way. The ‘wrong’ way, ‘Happy Birthday’ loses its instantaneously recognisable upbeat and transforms into something quite sullen. Iwai named it, ‘Unhappy Birthday’.

This was back in his university days and he was as interested in the beauty of the patterns of holes in the card as the music it produced. His interest in visual arts as a non-musician led to creating a Nintendo ‘version’ of drawing stars on a night sky.

This looks very basic today and the next generation was far superior as “bugs” were added to a colouring game that gave a directional element (effectively these were looped samples).

Taking the concept into a more hands-on direction, in 1995/6 there was a visual work for 4 people in a game of sound ‘chess’ with identical spheres for the pieces triggering off sound when moved.

He also went back to look at the music box scroll where he combined a virtual visual scroll and a real grand piano.

But what’s all this got to do with this new piece of musical hardware? The answer being, the concepts have all gone into the actual finished version that started out as a proto-type in 2001 when Yamaha agreed to help in the development. The 2nd Version even had a hand-crank on it, “just in case”.

The 3rd version looks pretty much like the actual model but he says the 4th Version was a break-through as the outer frame was completed which meant you could see the ‘screen’ from the front and back. This makes sense to him as he’s a “visual” person. He seemed just as excited to show us a video of the man in the factory at Yamaha teaching a machine how to polish the frame.

The final product, that’s going to be sold only in a few selected stores, has the look and feel of a game boy crossed with Daedelus’ box of tricks (see Cargo/Banquet Records).

But what does it do and how easy is it to play? It’s very easy to play and anyone can get a noise out of it. The sound generator traverses over the 16×16 grid on buttons and produces a sound when it hits an ‘active’ button. There are function buttons on the frame where you can choose the mode; score, random, draw, bounce and push. Then there are Level functions so you can have numerous levels of sound and you choose from a menu of actions, like record, save, delete, from a screen on the bottom of the frame controlled by a revolving knob; Iwai had showed us many of the drawings of eliminated ideas for this knob in his presentation. No wonder it has taken so long to come to the shops with this attention to detail.

The DJ that was playing Tenori-on before the presentation, and indeed Iwai, started out much like I did when I had a go on the consoles they’d set up. You build up the sound gradually (in my case, until I got to over the top) and what surprised me, you do get as interested in the patterns of lights on the screen. Similar to Korg’s Kaoss Pad 3 but that screen is very much for the eyes of the user only. Tenori-on far more visual than that and Robert Lippok (To Rococo Rot, Domino Records), who had flown in from Berlin to perform on one, had set it up very much as a screen (with some ugly g-clamps) for the crowd to see what was going on.

This machine is ideal for his type of experimental minimal tech house. Also there was Capracara (Warp as of 3 weeks ago) who told me that he’d be playing when everyone had gone home, but you can see how this bit of kit would appeal to the guy who brought us Microsolutions To Megaproblems, the electronic sub label of Soul jazz Records, with AmmonContact, Hu-Vibrational and Sutekh.

Ten years ago Yamaha’s big PC sound generator was the DB50XG. What with a couple of versions of Rebirth (from those Propellerheads) and I was making some serious noise in the bedroom. Now you can dump the PC and just have the Tenori-on (albeit, like a midi file), you can email your recordings as though they were midi files.

I’m sure smarter people than me will see the potential here, from the outer borders of hip hop territories to leftfield avant-garde ambiance. Note, Lippok’s fellow Domino Records whiz of the electronica, Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) was in the house and looked suitable impressed.

Can’t close without mentioning the cost. How much you say? Well we were told with some authority that it’s going to be £600.00. Some discussion on whether that was too expensive or cheap. As ever, I suspect some folks will absorb it very quickly and find ways to get the most out of it. There wasn’t a Q&A session but why the guy from Kerrang wanted to know how to plug it into an electric guitar was beyond me. Perhaps that’s the next future?

Ideal for the DIY culture and I’ll bet it’ll be available by Christmas. Check out the web site for all the details.

Links:
www.tenori-on.co.uk
www.myspace.com/capracara
Robert Lippok
www.fourtet.net
www.myspace.com/fourtetkieranhebden
phonicarecords.co.uk
LA Times — “Monome, oh my — Avant-beatmaker and noise experimentalist Daedelus ties the knot” monome.org:3000 Forums
Korg — Kaoss Pad
Turnkey turnkey.co.uk
Yamaha DB50XG
www.propellerheads.se
news.myspace.com/home/diy
DIY — THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENT MUSIC INDUSTRY AFTER PUNK (Soul Jazz Records)
The Russian Revelation: Baltika - classic beer since 1992 www.baltika.co.uk