*2022 stock. Limited edition of 100 copies.* Witness the common phenomenon of feedback such as produced inadvertently through poorly configured microphones and loudspeakers in public amplification situations: the sound coming from the speakers finds its way back into the microphones and produces an uncomfortable squealing sound. The component elements are electronic and acoustic, the latter involving air movement and vibration of physical objects. But internal electronic feedback is quite a curious animal, something distinct from electroacoustic feedback. It can operate – feed back – eternally, but make no sound; vibrate no air, reach no ears. It is this silent marching of electrons, antlike, about some elaborate roadway perhaps only known to themselves which is so fascinating to an artist.

The introduction of the early guitar effects devices was the real opening of an interest in sound and music for me. The initial impression of an Echoplex tape-delay (ca. 1966) still reverberates, as it were – I put down my guitar and focused on this thing itself; who needed a guitar now? A sound goes in one end and comes out the other, somehow transformed into a modified clone of itself; partially the same, but evolved. And it is significant that this transformation is a manipulation of the sound’s time-path. Most audio effects boxes – and all of those which interest me most – are based on manipulations of time, that strange entity which even the most advanced scientific analyses have yet to explain convincingly. Since childhood this inexplicable thing called time has puzzled and excited me, and in the effects device the question comes forth along with a satisfying aesthetic pleasure. Further, the concepts of time manipulation and feedback come together in the ancient ourobouros symbol which was intended to speak of several things at once: self-referral (consciousness), recurrence, and eternity. Feedback is far more than a public address system in misalignment; it is a core principle of universal importance.