Instrument no. 01 · Zürich · Edition of 500
Vespera precision instrument for the end of the day
Vesper governs the light and the sound of one room, from the hour before sleep to the minute you wake. It has no screen, no application, and no opinion about your step count.
- Dimensions
- 168 × 74 × 74 mm
1.36 kg, milled solid - Light
- 1,600–4,000 K
0.02–420 lx, 14-bit - Sound
- 22 dB(A) floor
enclosure-coupled - Delivery
- Batch III, March
ten-year warranty
02 — The programme
A night is not one condition.
Vesper divides yours into nine movements and holds each one — dimming by fractions of a lux, folding the room's noise floor down to a whisper, then lifting cold light across the ceiling forty minutes before the alarm you have stopped needing.
Dusk
- Illuminance
- 64 lx
- Colour
- 1,900 K
- Sound field
- 34 dB(A)
- Elapsed
- 0 h 00 m
03 — Craft
Cut, not moulded.
Each enclosure arrives at the mill in Grenchen as 4.1 kg of aluminium and leaves it at 1.36.
Fourteen hours of cutting, a bead-blast, then a warm grey anodise we mix ourselves, because the standard one is the colour of a laptop. The lens is lapped by hand against cast iron until it scatters light without a seam — four passes, forty minutes, one pair of hands. Nothing inside is glued. Everything inside can be replaced with a 2 mm hex key, including the light engine, in the year 2043.
- 01Hand-lapped borosilicateLens · 4 mm
- 02Anodised 6082-T6, bead-blastBody · one billet
- 03Unlacquered brass, 41 detentsDial · ages darker
- 04Undyed wool felt, 3 mmBase · Bern
04 — Sound
Air, moved slowly.
There is no loudspeaker in Vesper. A 60 mm exciter is bolted to the inside of the enclosure, and the aluminium itself does the work.
The result has no centre and no edge; you cannot point at it. At 21:00 the instrument listens to your room for ninety seconds — its cavities, its glazing, the hum of the building — and shapes its field to fill only what is missing. It plays nothing you would call music. It plays the absence of interruption, at 22 dB(A), two metres from the bed.
Fold
Broadband, weighted low. For rooms with a street. The default, and the one nobody changes.
Winter
Air under pressure, six octaves wide. Recorded in a bothy in Sutherland with two ribbon microphones.
Nothing
Silence, actively held. The transducer cancels the enclosure's own resonance and then stops.
05 — Specification
Vesper 01
Every instrument is bench-tested for seventy-two hours in a room in Zürich, then packed by the person who tested it. Their initials are on the card in the box.
- Enclosure
- 6082-T6 aluminium, single billet, bead-blast, warm grey anodise (Halcyon 4-B)
- Dimensions
- 168 × 74 × 74 mm · 1.36 kg
- Lens
- Borosilicate 3.3, hand-lapped, Ø 74 mm × 4 mm
- Light engine
- Nine channels, 1,600–4,000 K, R9 > 92, flicker-free below 0.4 %
- Illuminance
- 0.02–420 lx at 1 m, 14-bit dimming across 9.5 hours
- Transducer
- 60 mm bolted exciter, enclosure-coupled, 22 dB(A) floor at 2 m
- Sensing
- Lux, colour temperature, air temperature, barometric pressure, room impulse (nightly, discarded on wake)
- Control
- One brass dial, 41 detents. One press. That is the interface.
- Programme
- Nine movements, editable by SD card
- Network
- None. No radio of any kind.
- Power
- 24 V DC, 12 W peak, linear supply, 2 m braided cable with magnetic break
- Firmware
- Offline. Posted annually, if at all.
- Service
- Ten years, parts and labour. Openable with a 2 mm hex key.
- Origin
- Designed Zürich · machined Grenchen · assembled and tested Zürich
06 — On making it at all
“We were not trying to help anyone sleep. We were trying to make something worth putting beside the eight hours you spend seeing nothing at all.”
07 — Reserve
Batch III opens in March.
£1,480GBPFifty instruments per batch, each numbered on the base. Join the list and we will write once, in February, with a number held for eight days. A £200 deposit secures it and is refundable until dispatch.
- Edition
- 500 instruments, numbered
- Batch III
- Ships from 14 March
- Included
- Linear supply, braided cable, felt sleeve, programme card, service key
- Shipping
- Insured, two-day, EU · UK · CH · US · JP
- Trial
- Sixty nights. Return it for the full sum, we pay the carrier.