Requiem for CS70 and Strings
Floating Points
The CS70 is a Yamaha polyphonic synthesizer from 1976 — an instrument of considerable age and character, known for its brass and string patches that carry particular warmth and slight instability, the sound of analog circuits showing their age with grace. "Requiem for CS70 and Strings" is literally an elegy: a mourning piece for a specific machine's voice, paired with the acoustic string family that the CS70 spent its life imitating. The collision of original and simulation creates a harmonic uncanny valley that becomes the track's central emotional tension — which voice is authentic, which is remembrance, which is the original and which the echo? The piece unfolds slowly, in the processional tempo of genuine requiem music, with none of the urgency of dance music or the clockwork regularity of minimalism. Instead it breathes with the tempo of grief — not constant, not regular, but expanding and contracting around specific moments of intensity. The string writing is lush without becoming sentimental, the synthesis adds timbral depth that acoustic instruments alone couldn't achieve, and together they create a meditation on obsolescence and preservation that feels genuinely philosophical rather than merely nostalgic.
very slow
2010s
warm, uncanny, resonant
British
Electronic, Classical. Neoclassical analog synthesis. Melancholic, Contemplative. Opens in quiet mourning and slowly deepens through harmonic tension between synthetic and acoustic voices, settling into philosophical acceptance without resolution. energy 2. very slow. danceability 1. valence 3. vocals: instrumental. production: analog synthesis, string ensemble, sparse layering, atmospheric depth. texture: warm, uncanny, resonant. acousticness 5. era: 2010s. British. Late-night solitary contemplation for listeners drawn to questions of obsolescence, memory, and the boundary between original and imitation.