bridge – Like You've Got Something Better To Do

This new video features music from my album: Nightmare Castle. Like all of the music on that album, I composed Enter the Underworld using a collection of unique musical instruments I created from recycled materials and found objects I call “The Orchestra of the Unwanted.” Most of these instruments have very quiet voices that I amplify using piezoelectric transducers. Piezoelectric transducers turn vibrations in solid objects into electrical signals that amplifiers and speakers then turn into sound. Still, the sound retains the qualities of a vibrating solid object, with completely different resonance characteristics than if the instrument were recorded acoustically, with a microphone.

A solid object is its own world, acoustically. The vibrations inside a solid object are not affected by room acoustics. When we hear the vibrations in solid objects, it gives us a sense of what it might feel like to be a solid object. That sense of being within a solid object, I think, gives electro-acoustic music in general, and my album, Nightmare Castle, in specific, an other-worldly and under-worldly quality. Enter the Underworld invites you enter the world of solid objects.

I shot the video for Enter the Underworld in Slovenia. The Dragon in the title shot adorns a bridge in the capital city, Ljubljana, and I shot the rest of the footage underground, mostly from a moving train in the dimly lit caverns of Postojnska Jama, possibly Slovenia’s most popular tourist attraction. Slovenia has thousands of caves, and they discover a couple hundred new ones every year, but Postojnska Jama has become the Disneyland of Slovenian caves.

Above ground, they’ve capitalized and merchandised to the hilt. They’ve even turned one of the species discovered living there, the blind cave olm, a pasty, beige, eyeless salamander, into their own “Mickey Mouse,” and you can find its likeness on every imaginable kind of swag. Instead of fake ears that make you look like the famous cartoon rat, they sell fake gills that make you look more like a pallid amphibious troglodyte.

They offer tours every half-hour, seven days a week, in three languages. The tour took us underground, through several miles of amazing rock formations, by train, to a grand gallery deep in the mountain where we got out and walked for about a mile to see some of the largest stalactite and stalagmite formations. After that, we got back on the train and returned to the surface.

It made my jaw drop. Despite the extreme commercialism above ground, the natural beauty of Postojnska Jama, underground, totally blew my mind. I would recommend it to anyone. The video I shot there does not do it justice. However, I really like the visual texture, and the disorienting, nightmarish quality of the footage I took at Postojnska Jama. I think it matches the mood evoked by this music. I hope you enjoy this little video, but I also hope you get to see Postojnska Jama for yourself.

I just finished building myself a new guitar. In itself, I don’t think that sets any new records, except perhaps for some personal records for myself. For instance: This new guitar, with four strings, has more strings than any instrument I’ve built so far. I don’t expect that record to last long, because I’ve already begun work on a crude electric harp. This is also the first stringed instrument I’ve built that has a fret-board, although I didn’t set the frets, and it’s the first electric stringed instrument I’ve built that has a built-in amplifier.

Aside from these personal records, I can’t even claim to have recorded any new records with this guitar. I just finished building it, after all. I’m just getting to know the instrument. I wanted to build an instrument with a unique sound, and I’ve achieved that, but I expect it will take a while before I learn to speak its language fluently enough to compose music for it. Although it has a unique sound, I can’t say it’s uniqueness breaks any records.

You could see my new guitar as a kind of phoenix, rising from the ashes of an older, if not unique, at least unusual guitar. My new guitar began with an listing on the SoHum Buy-Sell-Trade Facebook page where I let people know that I was looking for junk guitar parts, especially tuning machines. Felix Omai responded to my ad by generously offering to give me the remains of an old Harmony brand arch-top, four-string, tenor guitar. I was delighted to receive it.

The guitar was in pretty sad shape. It’s arch had fallen, the back of the body had come off, the front of the body detached from the sides, and the fret-board fell off of the neck. One of the tuning pegs turned to dust between my fingers as I tried, for obviously the first time in many years, to turn it.

I googled the guitar online, and found a nice picture of what it must have looked like in its heyday, and I have to admit that it was a pretty sharp-looking guitar, considering that it retailed for $79.00 in the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. Even in 1962, that was a pretty cheap guitar.

The online reviews, however, all panned the guitar’s sound as “muddy,” “undefined,” and “bottom-heavy,” so I didn’t feel bad about salvaging the parts I could use to make a new and unique instrument. After I reattached the fret-board to the neck, and replaced the broken tuning peg with a little slab of deer antler, I salvaged the whole neck assembly, as well as the tailpiece and part of the rosewood bridge.

I replaced the body with a crude rectangle of wood I salvaged from a shipping pallet. I built an electric pickup of my own design using an upcycled mint tin, a piezoelectric disc I salvaged from an electronic toy, some compression springs I got at Scrap Humboldt, and the rosewood string saddles from the bridge of the old Harmony. This unique acoustic-electric bridge pickup, with built-in spring reverb gives the guitar its unique sound, at least partially.

My new guitar’s other secret weapon is its on-board amplifier, with a speaker mounted directly beneath the strings. I built the amplifier around an LM386 8-pin amplifier chip, and powered it with a 9-volt battery.

The amplifier has an on-off switch, input volume, and gain control, which allows me to play it as an “acoustic’ instrument, that is, without plugging it into an external amplifiers, and to overdrive the amplifier producing distortion and feedback, whether it is plugged into an external amplifier or not.

Still, I did have to break two records to build this guitar, and no one will ever listen to this copy of Iron Butterfly’s 1960’s rock anthem, Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida,