We are all familiar with the effects of echo and delay. These are undoubtedly among the oldest and most common sound processing techniques. During my studies to become a sound engineer, using old magnetic tapes, I found great enjoyment in creating increasingly intricate and extended delays and loops.

It is almost unnecessary to emphasize that tape imparts a unique character to the sound of delay, one that is markedly different from its digital counterpart. It’s something that we easily appreciate. This is likely because the ear tends to favor imperfections, perceiving them as natural, in contrast to the machine precision of digital sound. Nevertheless, tape-based delays and loops come with various limitations that inevitably impose constraints on our work. Beyond the obvious physicality of the tape medium—which demands space, costs, and maintenance—magnetic tape does not easily allow for manipulation of time.

Yet, as Stockhausen taught us, time is an essential and incredibly complex parameter of music.

We are not uncovering anything new, of course. What I am discussing is well-established history. However, the manipulation of time remains, even in the 21st century, a vast field of musical exploration. The reason lies in digital technology, which allows us for example, to create delays (or loops) of significant lengths—indeed, lengths that would be nearly impossible to achieve with magnetic tape without considerable effort.

Nakama has eight signal processors (delay/loop) capable of recording and delaying an audio signal from one millisecond to one hour. This capability, rare even among modern digital delays, is further enhanced by the fact that everything occurs in a spatial context. I envisioned Nakama primarily for those artists who increasingly perform in surround sound settings. While Nakama can certainly be used in a stereo configuration within a home studio, its foundational concept is to exploit large-scale delays and loops within a surround sound environment, in 4 or 8 channels.

One of the most fascinating aspects of delay is the principle of feedback. Essentially, the musician controls the number of repetitions of a delayed signal by adjusting an amplifier that connects the delay’s output back to its input. Each time the signal is feed back to the delay input, its volume typically decreases (an increase would spell trouble for the speakers). This seemingly simple feature of delays sparked my curiosity. I found it intriguing that the sound changes in some way with each iteration. But what if I didn’t limit this change to just the volume?

In tape echoes, due to purely physical reasons, the volume changes in parallel with the sound’s timbre. The amplifiers, as well as the processes of writing to and reading from the tape (or metal drum), especially in tape echo machines—not hi-fi recorders—do not reproduce exactly the same sound but gradually filter it more with each repetition. Add to this, the imperfections in the motor’s rotation. But wait, there’s more, much more… indulge me in this short digression.

One of my most dangerous passions (for my wallet) unrelated to music, is the collection of intaglios on semi-precious stones from the Assyrian, Roman, and Greco-Egyptian periods. The Romans were avid collectors of rings adorned with gems, engraved with depictions of deities, mythological themes, or amulets bearing magical inscriptions. In a sense, for the Romans, signet rings were a kind of social network of the time. First of all, they were widespread across all strata of the population (there were glass pastes for those who could not afford a stone carving), secondly, they defined social status, and finally, they represented the ideas with which the ring’s owner identified. It is precisely during the Imperial period that Western civilization began to collect art.

The stones I collect in my glyptotheque are ancient, spanning tens of centuries; some even date back to a thousand years before Christ. I also own modern rings with engraved gems, which I oftern wear, crafted using the same techniques and materials as those of the Hellenic era. I always observe them and feel an indescribable sense of vertigo. They will outlast me, and in 20 or 30 centuries, they will likely remain practically intact—who knows, perhaps they will be displayed in a museum or in the home of another collector.

Why am I sharing this story about rings with you? Because it has led me to reflect deeply on how much of the art we produce today is destined for oblivion. There is no art more fragile and impermanent than technological art—installations, CDs, web art, music on streaming platforms or vinyl, photography, short films etc, 3D… They are all on borrowed time, and that time is indeed brief.

So, if technological art is intrinsically fragile and short-lived, let us embrace and emphasize this fragility. Let us play with accelerating time and observe the inevitable transformation. Let the mutation be the message. After all, it is entirely natural for things to change over time.
Time is a powerful agent of change. Let’s put this change into sound.

I think there exists a fascinating and subtle thread connecting the issues of digital archiving, the concepts of “lossyness” and “hauntology,” the practices of artists like Alvin Lucier, William Basinski, Max Neuhaus, Robert Rauschenberg (to name a few) and the post-digital visions of Kim Cascone1. On one hand, significant efforts are dedicated to the preservation of digital and analog media. Digital “storage” in any form is not eternal. Hard drives have a limited lifespan, as do SD cards and CDs. This is why millennial formats like M-Discs, Microsoft Silica, or HoloMem have been developed and why significant archives (such as the Beatles’ discography) are continuously updated. However, these storage systems raise more questions than answers. The reliance on electrical power, artificial intelligence, dedicated software, and hardware provides no guarantee of millennial longevity; at best, one can speak of perspectives and hypotheses.

Interestingly (and perhaps predictably), art has at times sought to navigate in the opposite direction, incorporating the loss of information as a deontological practice. In some instances, artistic research has transformed into a voluntary pursuit of loss, embedding within the message the mark of a transformative impermanence. The slow and progressive alteration of the original material to the point of unrecognizability, and the lo-fi subculture, are fundamentally reactions to the pursuit of fidelity and, fundamentally, the eternalization of art.

For those who have studied physics, the model of sound processing I’ve added in Nakama’s feedback signal flow, might evoke memories of lectures on entropy. In a sense, that is the case. Starting from a system of low entropy and high information, Nakama slowly (or not so slowly) transforms the sound, increasing its entropy and thus reducing the amount of information. Eventually, after a certain number of iterations, what was once an orderly and crystalline sequence of synth or guitar notes (or whatever you like, also any audio file) becomes a shapeless bubbling matmos of sound. To this concept, I have added four granular processors, to extend the instrument’s syntax with a different kind of sound repetition.

Nakama is designed specifically for live performances and improvisation, where asynchronous sound is not a disturbance but a fundamental characteristic. This small software is intended to create a 360° sonic experience (although, of course, it can also perform perfectly well in a standard stereo setup). However, Nakama does not simulate surround sound through binaural algorithms; therefore, I encourage young musicians to consider a four-speaker setup for their home studios. They will discover immense potential in this little upgrade.

No-Fi is not a plugin and no other software is needed, it’s standalone:
Simplicity here is paramount.
Plug-in, record and mix, just like the real hardware.
You have one mixer, five cassette loopers, one handy reverb and one delay. That’s it!

TRY THE TEMO AND GET INFO IN THE SOFTWARE PAGE

The history of what we call electronic music, not merely understood as music created using technology but as an entirely new form of music endowed with its own syntax and symbolism, where the creation of new sounds evolves side to side with a new way of organizing sound, begins in the 1951 in Europe at the radio studios of WDR in Cologne and in 1954 at RAI in Milan, almost coinciding with the birth of musique concrète at the GRMC in Paris. Almost at the same time, other radio studios and university institutions began to take an interest in this new music, including those in the United States, Poland, the Soviet Union, Japan, and later, the United Kingdom.