Aging & Wisdom Quote by Geoff Downes

Downes hangs the origin story of his curiosity on a neat little contradiction: the spark is "ironically" rooted in the past, yet it ignites a forward-looking obsession with a new tool. That one adverb does a lot of cultural work. It signals a musician who grew up in the era when synthesizers were accused of killing "real" music, now celebrating a machine precisely because it can resurrect the grainy, cranky textures of earlier electronic gear. The future, in other words, is being used as a time machine.

The NOAH (a modern, modular synth platform) becomes more than a piece of hardware here; it's a permission slip. "Old weird and wonderful sounds" isn’t technical talk, it's a value system: imperfection as identity, oddness as charm, circuitry as personality. Downes is defending a particular kind of listening where the best tones aren’t clean, they’re haunted - slightly unstable, eccentric, full of quirks that recall prog rock’s maximalism and new wave’s synthetic sheen.

The subtext is also an argument against nostalgia as mere museum work. He’s not collecting vintage gear for authenticity points; he’s chasing the creative friction those sounds produce when filtered through contemporary control and precision. "Capable of creating" frames the NOAH as generative, not archival: it can remake the past into fresh compositions. Downes positions himself as both caretaker and hacker of electronic history, insisting that novelty often comes from reanimating the strange stuff everyone else left behind.