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Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II The EP-133 K.O. II brings the spontaneous sampling concept of the PO-33 K.O.! into a larger, more stylish, and significantly more versatile format with plenty of retro charm. An internal microphone, built-in speaker, battery operation, stereo input and output, MIDI I/O, USB-C, 9 velocity-sensitive pressure-sensitive pads, 12 voices, and 12 tracks for samples and MIDI make it a mobile idea-capturing machine for beats, loops, and quirky one-shots. This is exactly where its strength lies: record whatever is around you, assign it to pads, sequence it, manipulate it, and do it all without first creating a project in a DAW. In practice, it excels at field recordings, quick drum kits, lo-fi percussion, short sample hooks, or even polyphonic pads built from individual synth notes. Samples can…

The first car I loved was already old when it became ours. Its paint had faded unevenly, the passenger window needed both hands, and the engine turned cold mornings into negotiations. We gave it time, a little throttle and the sort of encouragement usually reserved for nervous animals. It smelled of warm vinyl, gasoline and the peppermint sweets my mother kept in the glovebox. The radio lost stations whenever we crossed the county line, so we sang through the static. No one would have called it advanced. On certain hills, no one would have called it reliable. Yet I remember that car with a tenderness I have never felt toward a flawless machine. It carried our imperfections visibly: a dent from the supermarket, sand beneath the mats, a pale mark…

Even on a monitor screen via a flickering video call, Dan Marshall brings to our conversation a cheerful, comfortable kind of presence, his energy an unlikely blend of head boy and class clown. It’s hard to imagine him saying anything too out of left field. And then he hits us with it: “I don’t really like playing adventure games.” He laughs. “I haven’t played any in forever.” This is the same Dan Marshall who’s been making and releasing adventure games ever since he first started coding, the Dan Marshall behind such games as Ben There, Dan That, Time Gentlemen, Please! and Earth Must Die. Through his one-person label, Size Five Games, over the past 20 years he’s become inextricably linked to the adventure genre – but how can that possibly…