While searching out replacement keys for my ailing Casio SK-1, I've edged up close to several other 80s consumer keyboards. A mint VL-Tone caught my eye and wouldn't let go, and I'm now proudly co-habitating with the first keyboard ever made by Casio. It's in excellent condition: nothing broken, no discoloration, no scratches, and it sounds freshly arrived from 1979.

The VL-Tone's funky rhythm sound was immortalized by Trio in "Da Da Da," and its baby synthesis has been used by Devo, The Fall, The Human League and Moby, among many others.

For me, in my endless analysis of culture and creation as choices building upon themselves, the VL-Tone is a wormhole from the past into the present into the future. Something clicks into proper place in my heart when I source sounds from the past, sounds resonant in collective memory, the foundations of what we now hear everyday. It's a method of time travel, of helping something live in a form it was never conceived for, of growth through punctuated evolution, direct intervention in a sound's chronology.

This little toy keyboard with a built-in calculator was created in a world that had no idea I would someday be processing its sound through an immeasurably more complex Max/MSP patch, on a laptop computer dwarfing the processing power of its day. I reached out to the 70s and 80s, grasped, and pulled it straight into the now.

It has been sleeping in a thin vinyl case for 25 years.

I'm making it young again, here in the modern world.

I can tell, just by the recontextualized blips and bleeps of its output... this tiny synth is grooving on 2006.