The Glass Bees and I played a bunch of my homemade instruments last night at Barbès in Brooklyn. (The show was made possible by Bethany Ryker, who brings interesting stuff to Barbès every Wednesday and to wfmu every Sunday.)
Here’s some excerpts from the show– thanks to bee Chris for editing and naming the songs!
You may be able to catch an interview and some more from the show on NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered this Saturday or Sunday. [Update: the interview aired on March 7th and can be read & heard on NPR's site.]
photo: me and two bees with our granny-carts full of junkstruments!
National Public Radio’s All Things Considered did a little feature on odd musical instruments on September 28th, and they were kind enough to feature some of my 29 Noisy Noises along with a bunch of other strange and wonderful instruments. You can hear the segment, and see a slideshow of some of the odd instruments, on the All Things Considered website.
I made a little sound sculpture – a sort of wind-powered banjo – for this weekend’s Figment Festival on Governors Island. Here it is installed on the island’s waterfront by Castle Williams, with a spectacular view of downtown Manhattan. (If you’re in the New York area, come to the festival this weekend – it’s free, and there’s eight million things to see.)
If the wind really picks up, the flowers will spin.
And here’s a video from when I was testing it on my deck.
Thanks to everyone who came to the 29 Noisy Noises party on March 1 and helped me celebrate finishing 29 instruments in 29 days! Lots of great people came over and made a lot of great noise on the 29 instruments — you can hear some of it below.
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“set up a groove”
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coconut & foot
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your branca is leaking
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konono no. 0
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bang on a can
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Here’s LEV, my theremin-playing robot first seen at Artbots 2003, playing a familiar song with the help of the newly built thumpbot and an obsolete synthesizer.
Time Out NY magazine has a small feature about handmade music nights at Etsy Labs, and it includes a little bit about me and a photo of one of my handmade music gadgets.
Etsy Labs, Create Digital Music, and Make Magazine have been holding a series of handmade music nights at Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters, where people share the musical gadgets they’ve made. It’s just been featured in Time Out NY (scan). CDM’s got nice wrapups of the first (with video, including me!) and second events.
Here’s a video of the wind-up noisemaker I made for the second handmade music night:
Misericordiam visited the Figment Festival on Governor’s Island, New York City, this July. For the first time, I suspended the piece from a tree in the open air rather than from an indoor framework. It was a beautiful day to hang accordions in trees. Here’s some video from the festival.
There’s no attempt to create a humanoid with Misericordiam, by Ranjit Bhatnagar, an accordion hung from a rope. It compresses and, thanks to gravity, decompresses with a convulsive abandon. I don’t know if it had any other purpose than humor, but I didn’t feel like I needed more.
Some of my vegevision has been featured in Edible Brooklyn magazine! More information about the project and about purchasing prints from the series can be found on the project page.
MONUMENTAL MOMENT
A playful approach to Tatlin’s Monument
When I heard the title of Flux Factory’s latest show, Response to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International Conceived in the Mood of Ambivalence, or R.T.T.M.T.T.T.I.C.I.T.M.O.A. for short, I thought I was going off to see a ridiculous, pretentious show full of highfalutin communist propaganda.
I’m happy to report that I was completely wrong. [...]
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