Fictional Interviews IV / tachikoma / soundtracksforjason

Tachikoma is sitting on the swinging bench with me at dusk when I bring up the subject of the film soundtrack he's working on.

BAI: This is the first sustained session of production you've done in a while eh?
T: True dat. I had my hands full.
BAI: So tell me about the kind of music you've been putting together.
T: The film is a documentary set in Nairobi: so for a long time I had trouble concieving of a kind of electronic music that would work.... I did a lot of programming on my Nord Micro Modular synth, generative stuff.... random patterns.... aleatory modal stuff.... sounded like that live album "turntables and computers" kinda.... and the main problem was it was all coming out too brittle and dry.
BAI: Then you got a thumb piano.
T: Well, I borrowed one.... it belongs to The Drunken Boats.
BAI: I didn't know you knew how to play the thumb piano.
T: Neither did I, but now I know, and knowing is 48% of the battle.
BAI: So what was the connection? Why did a thumb piano work so well w/ your Nord Micro?
T: They both have limited sonic parameters.... so many of my NMM patches were just little randomly percolative percussive devices, clicking away like synthetic birds and insects, and then I had these tracks of thumb piano I'd recorded, and I was trying to get one to sound like the other.... and then it hit me.
BAI: What?
T: Grains. The thumb piano and the NMM both made short, metallic, melodic, arrthymic tones.... perfect to drop into NI's Spektral Delay and GRM's Delays plugins.... they turned the patterns into clouds of sounds....

Tachikoma plays one of the soundtrack compositions for me.

BAI: Wow. I thought it was gonna sound more like "congotronics" than Shuttle358.
T: But you were wrong sir.
BAI: True dat.

Tachikoma plays another of the soundtrack compositions. He hands me a glass of green tea as a cloud slips from the path of the sun and the afternoon rays lighten the room by 13%.