We spent three nights in a cabin in the woods with one hundred grams of Oya’s near black beans, a 707, a monosynth and a bag of marshmallows.

For me, this was a much needed retreat into multiple states of simplicity and commitment. No masters, no manuals, no real polyphony, no keys, no undo, and only the crudest affordances of save:

• a small notebook
• ninety minutes on a portable audio recorder
• one set of sixteen notes on a sequencer
• sixteen sets of sixteen notes on the 707’s memory
• a digital camera

I started each session with a melody approaching random, tuned notes up into major or down into minor, muted superfluous ones, shaved off uninteresting frequencies, added a thin sheet of noise, and finally captured a single performance to tape. I snapped a few shots of the song’s state and jotted down a few sequencing notes.

While not quite Moses Asch simple, this set up nudged me into letting each motif linger a while longer in the ears, before accepting the limitations of what I had made, by zeroing out the equipment to start again.