After three and a half weeks of frantic forum e-mails, unfruitful police reports and desperate phone calls to local pawnshops, thesis student Carlos Larrauri’s drum machine remains missing.
Larrauri reported the drum machine absent from the band room via a Sept. 27 e-mail to the student listserv. In an interview with the Catalyst, he recounted his experience of loss.
“After Fuck Wall … I went to the band room and played some music. I made some really, really, really nice stuff … “ he says. “It sounds like crazy talk, but you know when you really get to a new awareness, or a new threshold, a new way of approaching music –– that happened.”
Next day in the early afternoon, Larrauri went back to the band room. “I was really excited about what I had done the night before, so I wanted to see if I could recreate the process and the subsequent product that was what I would call beautiful. But it was stolen.”
Laraurri has received virtually no response from the student body or the New College police department pointing to the whereabouts of his drum machine. He nevertheless believes a member of the New College community made off with it.
“I trust my instincts … that it’s someone on campus, that it’s a student,” he asserts. “I don’t necessarily think it’s an off-campus person.”
Larrauri reports he left the band room door open while he worked. “I like to leave the door open for people. Maybe I need to be less open for some people,” he admits. He also admits that his memory is “a little fuzzy” as to whether or not he locked up when he when home for the night.
With his drum machine gone, Larrauri loses over six months of hard work and the capacity to put on his unique brand of spiritual performance art, dubbed “The “Cosmic Space Fuzz Love Prophecy.”
I’m trying to keep positive, I’m trying to stay hopeful,” he says, “but it hurts, just to be honest to God. It’s not the best situation to be in.”
Larrauri still plans to make music for the New College community, but feels he faces an enormous personal struggle without this critical piece of equipment: “ … in terms of my individual art, my individual development, where I was as a person, as a soul, as a being, I’m kind of set back due to losing this one technical item.”