Synth historian Oli Freke will spend big on a good bicycle

Oli Freke is a musician and journalist whose works have appeared in Sound on Sound, The Quietus, and Mixmag. This has included using math to explore the melodic potential of the Western 12-tone scale and deep dives on effects plug-ins. He's even written a book tracing the evolution of the synthesizer from 1963 through 1995, charting the change from analog to digital and back. His new project is Beat Gems, a coffee-table visual history of drum machines from publisher Bjooks. Like other Bjooks…