game over

16 HP · effect

It remembers everything you play and tags the moments as they happen. Press REVEAL and it cuts them back in over what's playing, each cut shorter than the last, a white flash between them, faster and faster, then slams the door: dead silence.

The GAME OVER panel: black, with two old saws in gold hanging either side of the middle, their blades long windows of bare circuit board. A ring of sixty thin windows round the big MEMORY knob near the top, the REVEAL button and LENGTH under it, CV below, and a thin slit near the foot. White labels: IN L and IN R at the top corners, FLASH and SLAM, CLOCK and REVEAL, CUT and SHUT, OUT L and OUT R down the sides. game over 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. REVEAL is a button to press.

The set is made in the page as you listen and goes through GAME OVER. Its first two minutes were played into the memory before the page began, as if it had been listening all along.

example patches

The lights and the sound here are GAME OVER's engine as it's designed, running in your browser: the memory, the moments, every cut, the door. The set is a stand-in for the rest of a rack. This page keeps ten minutes; the module keeps an hour.

Remembering

Everything that comes in is kept, and passes straight through untouched. As it plays, the moments are tagged: a hit well above everything around it, a new part coming in and staying, a bar unlike the bars before it.

IN L and IN R: your set, in stereo, recorded all the time.
MEMORY: how far back the flashbacks reach, from the last minute to the whole hour. Turn it up mid-reveal and the cuts come from further and further back.
The clock: sixty minutes round MEMORY, now at twelve, the past running back anticlockwise. A tick lights for every minute held, brighter within MEMORY's reach, brightest where a moment was tagged.

The twist

Press REVEAL and the flashbacks start: tagged moments cut in over what's playing, walking from the far end of the reach towards now, the biggest hit saved for last. Each cut is shorter than the last: a bar, half a bar, a beat, an eighth, a sixteenth, then stutters faster and faster. Underneath, the live set keeps going, ducked further as it builds.

REVEAL: the button, or a gate. It starts the twist on the next bar; pressed again it slams at once; while the door is shut it opens it.
LENGTH: how many bars the twist builds over, from 1 (a snap of stutters) to 32 (a long montage). CV adds to it.
CLOCK: a pulse a beat. Unpatched, it keeps the last tempo it was given.
FLASH: between cuts, a white zip, a whoosh and a camera-flash pop. Fully down, bare hard cuts; full, pops louder than the music.

The door

When the twist runs out, everything stops dead, and one heavy door slams in the silence. The slit under the door lights while it's shut, shrinking to its middle as the silence runs out. It goes on remembering behind the door.

SLAM: fully down, a light click and a beat of quiet; up, an iron door in a huge room and eight bars of silence; at the top, shut until the next REVEAL.
SHUT: a gate, high while the door is shut. Patch it to the rest of the rack's VCAs and everything goes dead with it.

What comes out

OUT L and OUT R: the set, then the twist, then the silence.
CUT: a trigger on every cut and one on the slam. Patch it to a drum and the drum cuts with it.

The panel

Sixteen HP, every part on the line's staggered grid and mirrored about the middle. Two old saws hang either side of the spine in gold; their blades are windows of bare circuit board, lit white from behind with every flash.

Down the spine: MEMORY in its clock, REVEAL, LENGTH, its CV, and the slit under the door.
IN L and IN R at the top, FLASH and SLAM, CLOCK and the REVEAL gate, CUT and SHUT, then OUT L and OUT R at the foot.