This is a summary of the process for Christina and Jeff’s recent radio show / live performance on the Lot Radio, a “radio drama” of sorts.

Christina and Dylan began by sampling the E-mu Drumulator, an 80s era drum machine famously used by the Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, and more. The machine was loaned by the Synth Library NYC (thank you!). It can be sequenced by step or by recording hits in real time with a metronome. It is the color blue and very heavy.

The samples were then taken and used to produce a handful of 16 bar loops. Jeff also made a command line script used to trim the silence for each sample: drumulator_drums_trimmed

“It is interesting to work with old, rudimentary (not meant to come across disparagingly) sounds. Something about the old adage that creativity comes from constraints, blah blah blah… For me sometimes it is more about how you process those sounds, and the quality of the sample.” - me

All the samples and loops can be found here: Google Drive

Christina loaded the samples onto the Elektron Oktotrack and played for a while with ways of layering and sequence them, creating various scenes to move between.

Christina has wonderful friends who know her well and validate her love for musical gadgets and cassette tapes. In honor of her most recent birthday, Luming gifted her this modified cassette player:

I improvised on the guitar and semi modular noise pedal, Hikari Monos, and recorded it to tape to be played through the mods.

Christina and I both like movies, and began thinking about the future and desire through voice. Christina recorded some audio clips from banging dialogue to tape. She overlaid the clips on a recording she did of her Cafe OTO setup recently (radio symposium).

The recording begins with the following dialogue from the film Flirt (1996):

And weaves through the tapes played back through two mods, and sequencing the drumulator loops at various stages.

The output was run through two Meris pedals (Hydra and Polymoon). The final setup looked something like this:

As with most live things, technical issues were had during the set, particularly around the monitoring of one of the tape machines as it was being run through the Octotrak.

For some reason, straight direct has failed me twice at the Lot (the first time with guitar in early 2025). I actually don’t know why this happens. The solution was to use a Thru machine and put a trig on the pattern. I didn’t do this beforehand so anytime I switched patterns, I had to add a new trig on the Thru track.

— Christina

All in all it was very fun and we’re happy with both the result and the process embarked upon to create it. While packing up the gear before the show, Christina ate a fortune cookie with this note inside.

The full recordings are archived below on YouTube and SoundCloud: