The figurative threshold—of risk, of sorrow, of heroic suspension—suggests the voltage at the edge of signal in a machine, just before the circuit gives way to silence, or catastrophe, or perhaps, a metamorphosis. In the history of electronic music, specific devices seem to inhabit this threshold of their own: the REVOX B77 tape recorder, for instance, with its capstan driven at precisely 19.05cm per second, generates a tension between what can be preserved and what fades in each recirculation of the magnetic oxide. As a recording device, its bureaucratic reliability belies the eerie vulnerability of the medium. With each pass, partial erasure, bleed-through, and hiss accumulate—audible ghosts that reveal the porousness of any boundary, be it musical, historical or even moral.

It is telling that so many ambient composers—from Brian Eno to William Basinski—chose the B77 as their vessel. Its elegant meters and rugged casing promise authority, but the tape reels are always subject to entropy. The more a loop is replayed, the less of its original outline endures, at once documenting and erasing memory. This is not accidental, but a manner of artistic listening: a cultivation of receptivity to change and loss, rather than the fantasy of fidelity. The tape machine ceases to be neutral; it shapes the sensibility of the music, forcing attention toward the fragile, shimmering edge between presence and absence.

In this, devices become more than tools—they are partners in the slow revelation and attenuation of meaning. The REVOX’s biases become, in the hands of an attentive artist, echoes of self-sacrifice: something offered, something shed, so that another resonance—new, uncertain, beautiful in its evanescence—might be heard.