EP-1320 Medieval

Last week I picked up the EP-1320 Medieval and I’ve been tinkering with it all weekend. Besides it’s buck-wild look, it comes with a bunch of expertly recorded medieval samples: flutes, bowed harps, gitterns, reeds, trumpets, bells, battle toms, rowdy peasants, and coconut horse hooves. This makes it sound like a joke, a musical toy that immediately finds itself in the back of your closet, but what I love about this musical machine is how seriously it takes itself. Yes, this is a medieval sampler! Get with the times!

The EP-1320 reminds me of programming, or when I learned how to cd, ls, rm in the command line. You figure out a few helpful words of this scary, foreign language and it opens up a world of possibilities. A new way of thinking quickly reveals itself.

(You program the machine, and the machine programs you.)

So the EP-1320 is not simple. You either learn it’s way of doing things or go to hell. Like computers from before my time, this thing is modes-galore. Much to the horror of Larry Tesler, you’re always in a mode and constantly switching between them: sonus, manus, tempus, codex, claves, pocus (to make matters worse/better, every command and mode is labelled in Latin). There are songs, patterns, groups, and scenes: you must think in a very specific way about music to use the EP-1320. You have to read the guide. Study the icons. Program the samples.

And so, like programming, the EP-1320’s inflexibility , it’s almost complete and absolute stubbornness, is what makes it so charming.

Plus, ya know, the coconut horse hooves.