will not stop

16 HP · effect

It learns the part you're playing and won't stop playing it. Stop the clock, pull the cable, go quiet: it carries on, and comes after you. Hit it and its skin burns away, from warm to chrome. Only PRESS kills it.

The WILL NOT STOP panel: black, with a raised hand in gold dots filling it, its fingers spread, and patches of its skin in dull bare circuit board. A round window in the middle finger is the eye. White labels: IN and CLOCK either side of the eye, HUNT under it, SKIN and LIMP down the sides, PRESS on the spine, HIT and PRESS beside it, OUT on the spine, DAMAGE and HEART at the foot. will not stop 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. PRESS is a button to hold: with the pointer, or Space while it's focused.

Your part, the drums and the clock are made in the page as you listen. You hear your part a little to the left, and what comes out of OUT a little to the right.

example patches

The eye, the skin and the sound here are WILL NOT STOP's engine as it's designed, running in your browser: what it learns, how it plays it back, every hit. The basslines, the arpeggio and the drums are a stand-in for the rest of a rack. Each patch starts it fresh.

Learning

Play it a part. It listens until the part comes round the same, one, two or four bars, the shortest that repeats, and once it has gone round twice the eye locks on. From then on it plays its own version, cut into sixteen steps a bar, along with you.

IN: your part, any audio: a bassline, a drum loop, a lead. Up to ten seconds of it.
CLOCK: a pulse a sixteenth, to count the bars by. Without it, it finds the beat and the repeat by ear.
The eye: dark while it waits, a dim breath while it learns, bright and throbbing on its own beat once it's locked on.

The chase

Locked on, it doesn't let go. A new part at IN doesn't change what it plays. Stop the clock, pull the cable or go quiet, and it carries on at the last tempo.

HUNT: while you play, how close it shadows you, from quiet and a little behind to as loud and right in time. When you stop it comes after you: louder, drier, ahead of the beat, doubling its hits, within a bar at full. Fully down it just carries on.
LIMP: its bar loses steps, down to 13 against your 16, so it lurches round against you.
HEART: a trigger at each of its steps, the first of its bar longer.

The skin

Ten patches of skin are lit warm on the panel: eight, and the lowest two its legs. Each hit burns one. It flares white-hot and goes dark, and its playing goes a step from warm to chrome.

SKIN: how much skin it has. Up, it plays warm: late, loose, swung and soft. At zero it's chrome from the start: dead on the grid, metallic, ring-modded against its own notes.
HIT: each rising edge burns a patch. With nothing patched, your loudest notes do.
The legs: once the skin's gone, the next hit takes its low end and its footing; the one after leaves it dragging itself along at half speed.
DAMAGE: 0 to 8 V, how hurt it is. Only PRESS brings it back down.

The press

Nothing else stops it.

PRESS: the button, or a gate at its jack. Held, it's crushed, its pitch and level sinking and the eye dimming, and after four seconds it's dead: silent, its skin whole again, waiting to learn the next part. Let go sooner and it springs back, hurt.

The panel

Sixteen HP, every part on the line's staggered grid and mirrored about the middle. The eye is a round window on the spine with two red lights behind it; the skin is ten patches of bare circuit board, cut through dot by dot and each lit from behind. The art is a hand in gold.

IN and CLOCK either side of the eye; HUNT under it.
SKIN and LIMP down the sides, the PRESS button between them.
HIT and the PRESS gate, OUT on the spine, DAMAGE and HEART at the foot.