Last weekend I passed on my old music gear to a young friend. The feeling is something akin to relief. The gear is a sort of who's who of middling ancient synths.

• Item 1: Yamaha CS-5. Monophonic, 1979. Better model: CS10, CS80.
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• Item 2: Yamaha DX100. FM synthesis, 1985. Better model: the redoubtable DX7.


• Item 3: Roland CR-8000. Rhumba patterns. Better model: Roland TR77.

Now don't get me wrong, I have a lot of affection for this gear and I got a lot of use out of them. It's just that I've been all digital for most of this decade and these brave mechanisms have been cluttering up my attic.

There is something to be said for old gear, and I don't mean that in a gear-head, hi-fi dick, "it just doesn't sound the same" sort of way. More the tactile experience, the solidity of the object. I feel much affection for the drum machine, because even though I didn't use it as much as the other devices, and had less history with it, as a physical object it was beautiful, like some futuristic typewriter.

Anyway, you can't feel the same about software. The digital domain is infinitely more powerful, but very much less affecting, as a tool to work with. Nonetheless, convenience significantly trumps sentimentality - for me anyway, so my bog-standard PC remains my tool of choice, over the more idiosyncratic instruments of an earlier age.

(A couple of years back we briefly shared a sort of gig with a bunch of students who seemed intent on emulating Human League c. 1981. They had half a dozen ancient synths and were all dolled up in thin ties and whatever. Took them ages to set up. Michael had a laptop; I had a midi controller plugged into his laptop. The contrast was very comic. Hard to say who was worse in a way - we, all too pragmatic and dull, or them, almost fetishistic with their dated hardware and style.)

I went through a period a while back, listening to the glories of the tape-era BBC Radiophonic Workshop, feeling that audio technology had kind of killed electronic music. The rationale being that we had it all too easy now, so it was hard to get up the gumption to do anything new. The folly of this argument is due largely to projecting my own laziness, but also confusing horse with cart. Technology is merely a facilitator, it is up to the imagination to manipulate it. And by imagination I don't mean that we must wrest some musical idea out of our heads and elaborate it into some glorious masterpiece; many of my favourite tracks are by people who barely knew what they were doing, but had enough vision to manifest their ideas in some uniquely compelling way. Instead, I think we need to be motivated by some temporal equivalent of a genius locii to inspire us to make the right tracks at the right time. Lots of good music has been made in the past ten years, but none of it has seemed to me to be part of a proper movement where everyone was ploughing the same new ground at the same time. I think that the ease with which we can explore the culture of all locations at any time in the past century has meant it's hard to contribute anything new, or hear over the noise. To some extent I've just gone with the flow, plundering youtube artefacts and ploughing them back into the mix. I still think though that it would be nice at some point for something new to happen.