eighty eight

a riser that lands in the past

20 HP

A looper whose playhead is a car: you push it, you never set its speed. The bar it just played spins up into a riser, and at 88 it vanishes on the next beat of the clock and lands in the past, two trails of fire burning where it left.

The EIGHTY EIGHT panel: black, with two trails of fire in gold dots on a dark road, running up from OUT L and OUT R at its foot to a point under a two-digit speedometer of bare circuit board reading 88 over MPH, where three light tubes meet. THROTTLE big in the middle between the BRAKE and GO pedals, DATE and TRAILS above them, MASS and LIGHTNING under it; the ins and CVs down the sides, SPEED, JUMP and the outs at the foot. eighty eight at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. GO and BRAKE are pedals: hold GO to floor it, press BRAKE to stop dead. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

Listen plays the patch from its first bar: the car only plays what it has heard. The song is made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The car, its run-ups, jumps and trails and every out here are EIGHTY EIGHT's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The song is a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

Pushing it

It cruises at 22 on its speedometer, the speed of time: what comes in goes out as it is, and it records all of it. Push, and it grabs the bar it just played and laps it, faster and faster, the pitch climbing like a tape spun up: a riser built out of your own music.

THROTTLE: how hard you push, never the speed. At noon it holds at 67, straining; past half past one it makes 88; at full on a light car it shrieks there in a quarter of a second. Let go and it coasts back to 22, swinging a little under before it settles.
GO: floor it while it's held, the pedal or its gate. It glows with the speed, full at 88.
MASS: how heavy the car is, from a skateboard to a locomotive: 22 to 88 at full push in a quarter of a second, or in thirty, a whole section's riser. It also sets how long the landing brakes and how long BRAKE takes.
The CVs: THROTTLE, MASS, DATE and TRAILS each have one, ±5 V, five volts half a turn. A gate into THROTTLE's is a foot on the pedal.

Jumping

At 88 it holds there, screaming two octaves up, until the next pulse at LIGHTNING, so the jump always lands on the beat. It lands DATE back still doing 88, laps the bar it landed in as it brakes, and joins the past's own timeline in time with the present: you're hearing the past, live, until you jump again. Every join is a 10 ms crossfade.

LIGHTNING: the clock. Its pulse is when the jump comes, its period the run-up's length and DATE's step. Unpatched, a two-second run-up and a jump the moment it makes 88.
DATE: how far back the next jump lands: now, then 1, 2, 4, 8 and on to 128 pulses, and at full the oldest thing it holds. At zero it's the way home, and getting home takes a run-up too.

What it leaves behind

Where it left, two trails of fire: the last sixteenth before the jump on the left, the one before it on the right, each a short loop that wanders, crackles and burns down. The two upper tubes burn with them.

TRAILS: how long they burn, from a 50 ms flash to sixteen bars. At full they never go out: they burn under everything until the next jump.

Stopping

BRAKE: slams the brakes, the pedal or its gate: a tape stop, 60 ms on a light car, eight seconds on a heavy one, from any speed, 88 too. It sits stopped and silent until you push again, then winds back up from nothing. It stays lit while it brakes and waits.

In and out

IN L, IN R: the sound, always recorded. IN R is normalled to IN L.
OUT L, OUT R: the car's sound, each trail on its side. While it's in the past, that's all there is.
SPEED: the speedometer as a CV, a tenth of a volt a mph: 2.2 V cruising, 8.8 V at 88. A riser for the rest of the rack.
JUMP: a trigger the instant it jumps.