In 2019, Vancouver artist Kristen Roos came across a floppy disk for sale on eBay containing the Commodore Amiga version of Laurie Spiegel’s ‘Music Mouse’. This was one of the first intelligent instruments for personal computers, created by Spiegel in 1985 as an interactive and playable MIDI sequencer for the 68k era of Macintosh computers. Curious, he bid on the item and ended up winning it for a few dollars. Upon investigation, the simple and intuitive nature of its interface appealed to him, especially in comparison to the dense ‘menus within menus’ design of contemporary DAWs, and he soon began to seek out other programs from this ‘first wave’ of music software development.

The result of over a year of study, experimentation, and creation (often involving direct correspondence with the software creators themselves), ‘Universal Synthesizer Interface’ is Roos’s homage to this early era of algorithmic music making. From the delicately unfolding beauty of Midi Draw, to the wavelike pulses of Interactive Phrase, each of these tracks was composed and sequenced with a single piece of vintage MIDI software. The result is a stunning two-volume collection (VOL II arriving later this year) of electronic music that melds the technology of the past with the current sensibilities of one of Vancouver’s most talented creators.