This Teenage Engineering KO II is pretty sweet. I have the OG KO and love it. As is generally the case with these multi-track samplers, I wonder why different tracks can’t run at independent BPMs. When I asked TE’s Jens Rudberg this, about the OP-1, he had an interesting answer that had to do with the virtual tape format underlying the system. But that does not appear to apply to the KO II. Not a hill I’ll die on, but one I sit on and ponder. I asked a question along these lines about tiny MIDI controllers, and then Tom Whitwell developed one. So … I can dream.
Sometimes when I ask this BPM question, someone asks why, and then I say that this long after Steve Reich’s phase music, and the rise of generative music and sound art and ambient music — well, that’s, in essence, my answer to the question.