Made In Japan Retrospective-Track 9 “Collapse”


I owe Mark Chadwick a lot for putting collapse on the album. This is a small clip of a fairly brief recording I made in Japan of my OP-1 low on battery’s playing a sequence I had made. I had set up the sequence to record it but must have left my OP-1 for several hours forgetting to switch it off. When I plugged my headphones back into the OP-1 again I was quite fearful that I had broken the device listening back to the audio it was playing out but decided to record it into my field recorder before powering the OP-1 Down to charge it back up.

I genuinely thought that the OP-1 had come to the end of its life or something had damaged it during transport. Luckily charging it back to full fixed the issue and I haven’t come across it since. I found these odd sounds fascinating. They sounded like a synthesizer breaking and seemed so random in their nature that they were almost natural as if coming from a living creature.

I tried to make a deeper track out of the longer recording but it was far to erratic to control or put into something more structured so I left it to one side.


When we had finished the mix of all the music on the album and Mark was looking for things to fill over the transitions he asked me if I had any suggestions and I pointed him to this recording but I wasn’t sure if it was usable.

He took the section of it you hear on the album and treated it with a bit of reverb to create the track now. It works well as a marker between the previous tracks that were OP-1 lead and the next collection of tracks that use a larger collection of synthesizers and instrumentation.