My latest commission was this drone/noise machine for artist and genius Dimitri Simakis http://www.valianteffort.net/ It combines the drones from the strings with the interference/noise from a motor controlled by a PWM circuit. It has inductive and piezo pickup and not a whole lot else!
Category: Commissions
2018 Portfolio of works
I’ve recently updated a quick montage of some of the instruments i’ve made over the past 10 years! enjoy:
Dronitar Commission
My latest commission is finished and sounding rather nice! It’s made from scrap/reclaimed woods, repurposed transformers for pickups, recycled motor parts to create a hum/drone and misc hardware to finish it all off.
HackousticVillage
We (Hackoustic) recently curated the HackousticVillage at the We Are Robots festival at Truman Brewery in London. It was an incredible event full of amazing people. Here is a quick walk-through from our friend Sam Battle, AKA LookMumNoComputer And here is a great breakdown of the event as a whole featuring a few of our…
Newest Dronemachine
My newest commission for Belgian musician Quentin Stinglhamber. It uses the coil of an electric fan as it’s pickup, with an additional piezo pickup at the far end. Two knobs control the levels between the 2 pickups and one for volume. The strings are excited by a small piece of string attached to a motor…
The Schlechte-Bond machine
The latest commission is for composer Chris Schlechte-Bond. It uses electrical interference of various DC motors to create noises and textures in the central pickup. 2 inputs are connected to some pulse width modulation boards to control the speeds of the motors and gives different pitches and textures. The other 4 inputs share a 9v…
Laser Cut Erhu
My latest instrument isn’t strictly speaking recycled, but I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so I’d like to share it. It is cut from a single sheet of 6mm plywood, with piano tuning pins and violin strings. And here is a video of me playing it badly:
Dronitar for Glen
My latest commission was this Dronitar for artist Glen Tomney. The neck is made from a piano lid rest while the body is plywood with a few layers of Shellac ontop. It uses miscellaneous hardware in place of nuts, bridges and saddles etc. The pickup is simply a coil from a small power transformer with…
The Lyre of Doom
My latest commission is a droney Lyre-type instrument made from a chair leg, washing line, miscellaneous hardware. The motor part can be attached to a modified desk lamp neck for handsfree-play. It uses 2 piezo pickups and also a speaker as a pickup. They’re all wired into seperate pots so you can control the volume…
Monster Dronemachine
One of my latest commissions was this monstrous Dronemachine. It’s an unpredictable demonbag of noises, timbres, resonances and textures.
Luke Gottelier’s Painting guitar
I’ve found myself recently in a really fun new role of consulting on instrument building for various people. Recently, I helped Luke Gottelier turn one of his old paintings into a working guitar for an exhibition here in London. From the Press release: Luke Gottelier will be responding to the DOLPH brief by moving into…
Death of Narrative (and Happy Birthdays)
A good friend of mine and collaborator Ryan Cockerham is performing an amazing piece with his comrade Er-Gene Kahng on the 27th of this month at The Great Hall, Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. The piece, “Music on a Long-Thin Wire” by Alvin Lucier, uses a long-string instrument which I gave technical support and theory…
