Lack of Humanity

Written and Recorded in 1988

When I first started multi-track recording of my original stuff, I didn’t have a synthesiser but a mini keyboard, which had five or six built-in tones. One day during the autumn of 1988, I thought it would be interesting to write a piece of music that could accommodate all of these built-in tones by using my four-track recorder. I didn’t have any motif to be built upon but began the project with programming the rhythm machine from the scratch. Since all I wanted to do was making something odd, I deliberately chose 7/4 time signature at the very beginning of this programming stage.

As for the keyboard parts, I basically wrote each part layer by layer. To prevent things going too far, the chord progression was set to a repetition of only two chords. At the end, for furnishing the atmosphere of the tune, I added my voice being manually modified by the digital delay pedal.

Unlike my usual stuff, I recognised that the resulted work sounds less human nor organic due to the fact that it consists of the tones pronounced by machines and a human voice modified by a digital device. When it came to thinking about how to call this tune, I must have referred to the words I heard at the end of The Spark of Life, an instrumental tune featured on the album Todd by Todd Rundgren, saying ‘No no no no, a little more humanity please.’