11月 16, 2010
the End-of-Life of legendary Lemur controller
革新的だった楽器がまた一つ消えていく。2000代を代表する楽器の一つである、JazzMutantのLemurが今年一杯で販売中止となる。
カスタマイズできるコントローラという発想自体は古くからあるが、それを当時としては最もスマートな形で実現したのがLemur。高価だったせいか、設定が煩雑だったせいか、Apple iPADのせいか、少なくとも同製品が時代の流れについていけなかったのは事実だ。先進的なもの、面白いもの、すごいものが売れるとは限らない。新しいものを日々考える自分としては改めて考えさせられるものがある。
一つの節目としてLemur動画をアーカイブすることにした。
Jazzmutant Lemur Weird MIDI Sequencer
a lemurized groovebox – test
Jazzmutant Lemur + DBlue Glitch
Lemur Electronic Jazz Instrument vol.02
My first mix with the Lemur
以下、JazzMutantのプレスリリース。
Since 2002, JazzMutant has been a acknowledged pioneer in the field of Creative Computing and Multi-touch technology, being the first-ever company to develop and bring to the market a product featuring a multi-touch screen as early as 2005. Since its market launch, the Lemur has been endorsed by a fascinating community of music and video artists. Nine Inch Nails, Richard Devine, Hot Chip, Ritchie Hawtin, Matthew Herbert, M.I.A, Mike Relm, Alva Noto, Ryuchi Sakamoto, Daft Punk, Bjork, … : The list of prestigious and influent artists who have made the Lemur their favorite pet companion on stage would be way too long to be mentioned here. Its visionary concept and groundbreaking technologies allowed the Lemur to win numerous international press awards and was recently elected “Innovation of the decade” by Future Music.
During five years and despite the new fever surrounding touch technologies, the Lemur remained the only Multi-touch device capable to meet the needs of creative people. From now on, this ecosystem is evolving quickly : powerful consumer tablet devices are becoming mainstream, bringing the power of multi-touch to everyone. In the meantime, JazzMutant, renamed Stantum in 2007, has become a technology-centric company and developed partnerships with tier-one industrial partners to speed up this democratization. As a result, the need for a high-end dedicated hardware is doom to vanish in a near future. This is why Stantum is announcing today that it will close its JazzMutant activity unit and stop selling its legendary Lemur Multi-touch hardware controller end of December. The last batch of Lemurs just came out of the factory. These very last units are now available at a special discounted price from JazzMutant’s webstore and from its authorized distributors and retailers. The Technical support and after sale service will be handled until December 31, 2011. The jazzmutant website will stay online in order to let the user community access support resources and share their projects.
We would like to thank all the people involved in this fantastic adventure: first of all the user community which exceeded our wildest expectations in creating the most amazing templates; our devoted resellers, who helped us to show the Lemurs all over the world; finally music software editors for their support.
