Mister Norton, Poetics and Principles, Chapter 2, My Other Faces

The ferret comes at night and chews my wires.

I'm a technician, it’s a devil,

So i make ultrasound techno.

creating tools to modulate country animals.

 

My backwoods friend JIM still has a tube of me in his shed, covered in poison ivy. He still makes simple class A circuits with a yellowed 70s manual about me. They are a little smaller than BILLs class B circuits. He uses me for swine management.

BILL still wears plastic shirts from the 70s. But BILL has moved on from his old manual and now builds modular synths. His special sauce is to use transistors and a secret chip from the 70s. It is the 90s.

BILL also uses me for swine management, in an art gallery in the city. See, his circuit has control inputs, and he creates a web of bubblegum colored cords around a wooden pod, for his art. The name of his art is GWYNNDAMUFFIN.

Country sounds are twangy. Twangy is a sound that easily echoes off the hills, and vibrates over the corn with amateur (movable, flexible tuning, dissonance) techniques. Fast banjo also has a sort of rascal nature, like the shenanigans of bunnies and creek hops.






Faces are important in electronics. The old Mister Norton, ridgid, with a plastic shirt, focusing on class A circuits, which are simple resistor things and bric-a-brac capacitors. The new Mister Norton has transistors in his dreamy eyes. At the very end of the datasheet (Application Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments), is a hint that you can hack a differential pair onto the two inputs of the Norton, thus expanding it to all the sorts of arp and serge mechanisms. Class AB is a pragmatic mix of simple resistors and the newer transistor installations.