Last month, we reported that Australian psych-rock artist Kevin Parker - better known as Tame Impala - appeared to have set up a music technology brand called Telepathic Instruments.
The company's newly-launched Instagram account has shared a handful of cryptic teaser posts featuring pixellated animations, circuit diagrams and bitcrushed sounds, but we've been given no concrete information regarding a debut product - until today.
Telepathic Instruments posted a video last night that shows Parker playing what is presumably the brand's first instrument. Sporting a faintly retro aesthetic, the modestly-sized keyboard instrument has a one-octave keyboard on its right side, along with two jog wheels, an array of knobs and buttons, and a small screen that looks as if it could be displaying an oscilloscope, à la Korg Minilogue.
Judging from the melodies we can hear in the video - which span multiple octaves and don't match up with Parker's playing - it appears that Parker is using the keyboard to select notes that are being sent through an onboard arpeggiator, that's then being tweaked using the jog wheel in the centre with his left hand.
On account of the diminutive keyboard, it's possible that this is an instrument specifically built for arpeggiation - perhaps the jog wheels can be used to define the range, scale, or arpeggiation mode, or perhaps the buttons on the left-hand side can be used to recall pre-defined chords? Is this Tame Impala's take on the Nopia?
Considering the heavily lo-fi sounds we heard in Telepathic's other teaser posts, we were surprised that the tones present in today's video sounded so clean; the patch Parker plays in the video sounds downright dreamy. "It's giving mystical fairy forest bjork impala," as one IG commenter put it.
When we know more, so will you.
