Tiki Spoon Cello

A couple of weeks ago, I found this giant wooden spoon in an Arcata thrift store. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what to do with it. It’s practically a ready-made string instrument, so the question became: how many and what kind? I have quite a few string instruments in my “Orchestra of the Unwanted.” I’ve got harps, lyres, zithers, fiddles, guitars and basses, but I don’t have much that sounds like a cello.

I like the sound of a cello, so I strung this spoon with a pair of pretty beefy (1mm) stainless steel strings, mounted a piezoelectric pickup on the bridge and a quarter-inch jack on the bowl of the spoon, and now it does a pretty good impersonation of a cello. It has a ton of upper harmonic response, that can easily get out of hand, but if you can keep it from squealing, it sings with depth and clarity.

In this piece, you can hear how the deep cello voice anchors the quartet of recycled instruments.

You can find much more music by Tin Can Luminary and the Orchestra of the Unwanted at: http://www.johnhardin.bandcamp.com and you can find pictures of all of the instruments, along with demonstration videos at: http://www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com

Sky Harp

One of my early musical influences, and one that ignited my interest in building unusual musical instruments was Francesco Lupico’s Cosmic Beam Experience. The Cosmic Beam was the first long-string instrument I had ever seen, and the sound it made blew my mind. The fact that he built it from the channel beam of a flat-bed semi truck trailer also appealed to me.

Ever since then, I’ve wanted to build a long-string instrument, but the logistics of such a thing proved challenging. Where would I put it? I don’t have room for anything ten feet long, anywhere indoors, regardless of its other dimensions.

A couple of weeks ago, I stood a fir pole on end, and tied it to the corner of my woodshed. I had used the top and bottom of the pole to make a small keyboard stand for my circuit-bent toy keyboards,

…but I had this piece of fir sapling, about 15 ft long, left over, so I stood it up on end, and tied it to the corner of my woodshed, like a flagpole. I stood there looking at it for a while, wondering what I could do with it, when an idea flashed in my mind, and I saw this fir pole in a whole new light: as the backbone of a vertical (at least for storage), outdoor, long-string instrument. Then it occurred to me that a vertical, outdoor, long-string instrument, just might function as a wind-harp too.

I love wind harps. You don’t see them very often. When you do, it is usually in the window sill of the home of someone with money and taste, an extremely rare combination these days. I’ve been meaning to build one of those too.

Suddenly, I had a vision of a vertical, outdoor, electro-acoustic, long-string wind harp with radio antenna aesthetics. Once I had that vision, even swarms of hungry mosquitoes couldn’t prevent me from building it.

Now that it exists, I get to hear exactly what it sounds like, and to find its voice. I played it a bit in the vertical position, and I got it to make some cool sounds, but I couldn’t reach very far up the strings, which I found limiting. However, when I let the wind play it, it sang! Beautifully! I may just let the wind play it from now on.

Life Might be Smarter Than You Think

So, I’m looking at a piece of junk mail I got the other day from AAA, encouraging me to reactivate my expired membership, and then something caught my eye from the bottom of the page. Two normal words juxtaposed as to form a sentence, but instead of a period at the end of it, there was a “™” indicating a trademark, but the message it conveyed just blew me away as the single most blasphemous, arrogant, irresponsible and stupid thing I ever read in my life. In fact, it so perfectly concentrated all those qualities in such purity, so concisely, that the profundity of it stunned me. This is what it said:

Outsmart Life™

If this ever sounds like a good idea to you, I suggest you take a good hard look at your life and what you are trying to accomplish, because you just might be completely nuts.

Personally, I take great comfort in the knowledge that life is far wiser than I, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to explore and appreciate as much of her as I can, but I dare not presume that I know better than she. After all, she’s been here at least 500 million years, eternity maybe, while I am, let’s just say, “considerably younger.” She’s been everything that ever was, and will be, and done everything that’s ever been done, or will ever happen. My life, on the other hand, has had a much narrower focus. No, I wouldn’t dream of trying to “Outsmart Life™,” and the one thing I have complete trust in, is that life knows what she is doing.

Drone music reminds us of the awesome power and infinite wisdom of life. That’s probably why there’s so little drone music in Western Culture. My drone music always begins with the didgeridoo, and it always feels like a prayer. By itself, the didgeridoo sounds very earthy, pure and spiritual. When I add the voices of some of my homemade instruments from the Orchestra of the Unwanted, the sound takes on a darker dimension.

I think my instruments reflect the trauma of being forged in the violence of consumer capitalism, and outliving their usefulness. They all sound as though they might be better at something else, but they add a certain Gothic, sci-fi quality that, I think, reflects the spirit of our age. I plan to release an album of drone music in the near future. Here’s a piece I recorded recently that might be on it.

The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg

I made this little horror movie/music video to highlight some of the recordings I made recently with the Orchestra of the Unwanted. The Orchestra of the Unwanted is a growing collection of eccentric musical instruments I built from recycled materials and found objects. You can see pictures and demonstrations of the instruments by following this link.

The unique sounds of these crude instruments inspires the music I make with them. A lot of the music I make with the Orchestra of the Unwanted sounds like it belongs in a horror movie, so I got the idea to make a video to accompany this new album that had the look of a classic black and white horror movie from the ‘50s.

Then I remembered Rothenburg. In the summer of 2019 I visited Rothenburg, a medieval walled village in Germany. It is a beautiful place with cobblestone streets and 500 year old houses. They have a castle and a cathedral with some of the very best German woodcarving, but they also have a monster.

I saw it, and took pictures of it. It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen, and the image of it has haunted me ever since. I realized that Rothenburg had everything I needed to make a horror movie.

I shot the Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg almost entirely, on location, in Rothenburg, Germany, as an unwitting tourist, no doubt saving myself thousands of Euros in permit fees. The movie tells the story of a doomed love affair, a treacherous play for power that brings down an empire, and a bloodthirsty monster’s 500 year reign of terror. Although the story, and all of the characters portrayed in The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg are completely fictional, the monster is REAL.

The whole movie is only 11 minutes long, but it includes excerpts of all 8 tracks of my new 53 plus minute long album, also titled The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg by Tin Can Luminary and the Orchestra of the Unwanted. I hope you enjoy the movie, and that you like the music in it enough to check out the album, and make it the soundtrack to your own horror movie.

Enter the Underworld

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.