Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their monome company and project this week. For anyone moved by their creations over the years, there will be no escape from the feels in this gallery — and, of course, I couldn’t resist adding some extra memories from that era.
If I had to pick just one project to sum up the last couple of decades of writing for this site, it’d be hard to top the monome. Everything the monome crew did was at the nexus of so many other ideas: physical interaction with digital music, open-source and community-based development, user customization via patching, discussions about scale and sustainability … and the iconic grid of their best-known tool, which came to embody a whole epoch of music-making.
And the fact that it was a small, humble project, that we all got to know Brian and Kelli and each member of the community — that’s kind of the point. As Kelli writes:
This week marks 20 years of monome- our small, esoteric music instrument company that would not exist without the curiosity, support and encouragement of many of you out there, thank you! One photo cannot capture the accumulation of its history but something about this dusty illumination hanging over possibility feels a worthy summation. Music and music making brought us together and the rhythm will forever be our pattern, light, time keeper. May it continue to bring us together and keep us together. If you’re interested in time travel we have assembled a selection of photos from the archives, complete with the language of dreamers. Still dreaming.
I mean, “small and esoteric” could kind of be this site’s “democracy darkness in darkness,” so I can see a certain affinity, but I don’t want to rip off your words, Kelli!
Do have a look at the gorgeous photobook. I almost wish this were a print yearbook so you could get a bunch of the people involved to sign it.
But yeah, I can’t resist adding some of my own. (It feels a little weird having some of the pics in monome’s own gallery feel so familiar, but then these ones really do.)
I missed the monome’s debut, but picked up on the news on April 24, 2006, the first-ever monome story on CDM. (There’s more in the comments than the story. It was a different time.) Vlad Spears’ original report is archived on Internet Archive. He wrote:
The Monome is pure, minimal functionalism at your fingertips. A blank canvas for your controller desires, the pads and indicator lights are decoupled for access to the full range of this device as both manipulator and indicator.
In May 2007, I had my first encounter with Daedelus, wailing on his pre-monome 40h prototype, at San Francisco’s Robotspeak — captured by none other than Donald Bell aka Chachi Jones. Brian himself showed up to explain the monome.
Long before this design was adopted (ahem) by Novation, Akai, Ableton, and others, here’s Brian talking about the idea when it was all fresh. We were all also, uh, much younger. (I played the same event. I was … much younger then, I guess.)
In August of that year, at the second MusicMakers (by then dubbed Handmade Music), Brian and Kelli came, with Kelli also showing her wonderful soft circuits project. (That’s the fuzzy calculator!) It was a relaxed get-together in the early offices of Etsy, with the crew from Make.
I’ll just leave you with those pics.
It’s fun looking back at these — like maybe it’s time to dust off some old gear (and old Macs) and make some fuzzy things again, too.
But on another level, this is no time for nostalgia. The kind of human scale that monome represented, the approach to openness and repairability, is more vital in 2026 than ever. So it’s great to look back at these moments for some inspiration to do more now, in this moment — appreciating some of the shoulders we’re all standing on.