YEEZY TECH X KANO STEM PLAYER
It feels like a perfectly weighted pebble in your hand. The sound pebble I call it. And when it lights up with all its pretty Christmas tree colours it looks like a more elegant, stream lined version of the alien Mother Ship from Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977). Its four stem panels even recall those fairy-style lights on the space vessel that famously play that iconic, five-note tuba theme.
In fact, if I was head of creative at Yeezy Tech or Kano I might have been tempted to pre-load John Williams's classic theme from Close Encounters just to drive this comparison home. I now far better imagine aliens understanding us humans via a stem player than through our hopeless politicians.
In the digital age, the question is would Orpheus be now more likely to have a stem player than a lyre and would he have even greater control of the music of the spheres with this stylish round orb? Well, I'm sure he'd prefer to have both, but I can only imagine what delights are in store once a stem player can separate all the instruments of an entire 100 piece orchestra for deconstruction. The possibilities for music education to benefit from this innovation are endless. I can anticipate in the future, kids being able to understand better the genius of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen or Louis Armstrong's Potatohead Blues by having their own stem players demonstrate its many separate parts, illuminating the genius design of timeless masterpieces from music history.
Not that present and future popular music won't also benefit greatly from this device. Indeed, currently it seems the Stem Player is most brilliantly utilised for the music of Kanye West as he, along with Alex Klein (Kano Tech) appear to have created this innovation primarily as a vessel for Ye's work, though clearly it can accommodate an individual's personal music uploads as the stem player site offers the ability to split any track for the player.
Having had it only a week, I find it's a bit like having a miniature Rubik's Cube crossed with MB's Simon game from the 1980's. For all its futurist design aesthetics, it also has a reassuringly retro vibe to it, as if it could have been made from the same time as such films as Tron, Back To The Future or Explorers. It even has the touch sensitivity feature of a record scratching effect that is beautifully updated for the 21st century with perfect smoothness for transitions.
Speeding up tracks, slowing them down, creating loops and separating the vocals, instrumental, bass and drums in isolated fashion, there are already endless ways for this thing to keep you entertained. Having shown it to a few younger people also, there is an organic delight in the way they quickly learn to use it. It's quite heartening to see something other than a mobile phone encourage younger people to be creative with sound and light.
Anyway, I better go.
I'm off to have another play with it.
Digital Renegade
5th March 2022