[Imogen Heap] is well-known for performing with DIY and cobbled-together instruments, and now she’s teaming up with another famous DIY instrument musician for a world tour. That’s the cool part, now here’s the awesome part: they want to take your DIY musical instrument on tour for a scrapyard symphony.
Both [Imogen] and [Leafcutter] are semi-regular Hackaday features, with [Leafcutter] building hydrophones and [Imogen] doing some crazy stuff turning gestures into music. They’re both known for their strange and esoteric sounds that sends Rolling Stone writers scrambling for a thesaurus, and now they want your disused or discarded music machines to use live on their world tour.
The team is looking for video submissions of any musical creatures you’d like to send around the world. The only real guideline on what they’re looking for is, ‘the weirder the better’, with an apparent slight emphasis on physical machines over the purely electronic.
Video of the duo below.
I once pooped in a bag and send it to stratosphere with a weather baloon. Fun times.
sent*, a typo.
A great place to source such instruments is the annual New Instrument Competition http://guthman.gatech.edu/ at Gerogia Tech. It always brings out the weird in force.
You can’t beat les luthiers at the “weird/awesome instruments” category. They have 40 years of trajectory and they only get sharper and better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJUV8rYg90A
I think this awkwardness can easily be beaten by non-generic proper music. ( I cannot emphasize enough my loathing and hatred for circus acts like this.)
That’s your opinion and I respect you for it, but I feel the need to remark that the purpose of the post was to look for weird and unusual instruments, and they are rarely used in more serious genre, so it is to be expected (as I’m sure you must’ve already know) to see cirquesque acts. Either way, the point in case was to propose and/or inspire with such instruments, and in that aspect, the sheer creativity and originality is, in my opinion, brilliant.
Perhaps I should have elaborated on this a bit further. I do not dislike alternative forms of music or instruments at all. Besides being train in “normal” instruments like piano, guitar and various percussion instruments, I also like more “unconventional” instruments like my beloved Moog theremin. Using home-made stomp-boxes and percussion instruments from beer-caps also isn’t beyond me.
I just do not think that putting “anything-that-makes-a-noise” into a clavier like equal temperament tuning makes for something brilliant, just something obscenely superficial in this case.
It’s really gimmicky and not really new, so I don’t think that an original and radical experimenter like Imogen Heap has any business for a fart-piano of a belch-organ.
I would not even consider Blue Man Group, but compared to this video, those guys are pushing the envelope…
@voxnulla
Oh no, music that isn’t *serious.* God forbid any frivolity be allowed into this solemn and ceremonious art form.
I bet you’re fun at parties.
^how i dance
That is a bloody fantastic idea. Especially because Imogen Heap is involved. She makes music I can’t help but adore.
For some reason, James Taylor’s DIY drum machine (used on “Slap Leather”) comes to mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9A_G_IYc0o
All -my- ‘musical creatures’ are refusing to go with this nauseatingly whimsical and slightly condescending pair of creativity-blaggers.
Indeed, musical creatures are sometimes like that. Choosing the path of least resistance, sticking with the boring talentless hack that build them rather than going to make a proper musical statement with artists who actually work at it and are successful.
They do have trenchant criticisms of my talent and enterprise, but they are still not interested in joining the Imogen chorus of “Give me the attention my trust fund cannot buy.”
I so thought it was Austin Powers in the first shot