Many people consider the click-clack of mechanical keyboards to be a necessary evil, something to be tolerated. Other people, it seems, absolutely love the sound of mechanical keyboards, or at least find the sound interesting, to the extent that there's now a vinyl LP dedicated to collecting the sounds of a whole swathe of vintage and custom made mechanical keyboard types.
Released on Trunk Records, which specialises in all matter of vintage curiosities, Mechanical Keyboards Sounds is exactly what its name implies: it collects 13 keyboards, and captures the sound of each in action for roughly four minutes.
Stuart London, aka Futurecrime, and member of metal group Bad Guys, pitched the idea to Trunk Records founder and owner Jonny Trunk, who immediately took to the idea. London sent Trunk a link to a YouTube video of an unspecified mechanical keyboard in action, and the rest is history.
"As soon as I clicked, watched and listened I was hooked," Trunk writes on the label's website. "And I really don’t know why. It was a video of someone typing in close up. The keyboard looked beautiful. The amplified noise was unusual to say the least, certainly as close to “whisper porn” (or ASMR – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) as I’d heard that day. It made hairs on my body do odd things. I felt some kind of peculiar, possibly glandular, reaction."
It's worth reading Stuart London's write-up in full: he goes into a bit of detail about the custom made mechanical keyboard hobby groups that are floating around the web. "The keyboards on this record are a mixture of classic old models from the 80s and 90s," he writes, "which are generally just cleaned up and retain all their original parts, and very modern high-end custom boards from some of the best designers around, with carefully tuned switches, built to spec."
As for the actual composer and performer on these records, that would be Taeha Types, aka Taeha Kim, who operates a YouTube and Twitch channel dedicated to unbridled mechanical keyboard enthusiasm. Trunk Records has also released ASMR: Recordings Of Typing On Bespoke And Luxury Keyboards. So, y'know, there's a niche for everyone.
Check out some audio samples on Boomkat, or, watch Taeha Kim unbox the vinyl below.
