EMI News: What's New from Experimental Musical Instruments

New from Experimental Musical Instruments: Wind Chimes: Design and Construction. It's a book and audio CD with complete how-to on the making of this most accessible of musical instruments. Descriptions, instructions, photos and sounds of a great many diverse types, from the familiar to the very unusual. More information

And another new product: we now have a magnetic spot pickup. Magnetic pickups are the sort commonly used in electric guitars and basses. They'll work in any instrument with sounding elements of steel. Our spot pickup is just 5/8" wide; small enough (and affordable enough) that you could, for instance, put one under each tube of your steel conduit tubulon -- or any of a hundred other applications. As far as I know, this is the only place you'll find such a thing. Just what you've been looking for?

And one more new product: in addition to the various sizes of flexible piezo film that we've long carried, we now have piezo cable. This is the material that is commonly used to make under-saddle pickups in guitars.

Our recently released wind chimes book is the first in a series-to-be of how-to books on the making of various instruments. We're now at work on the second in the series: a book & CD on marimbas and other free-bar instruments. EMI's main author, Bart Hopkin, is joined on this one by the expert marimba maker Carl Dean as co-author. When will the free-bar book be finished and ready? Well, it will be a a few months yet, but we're working steadily.

If all goes as planned, topics for future books in the series will include ocarinas, plosive aerophones (that is, slap tubes, stamping tubes and such), lamellaphones (kalimbas, mbiras and such), simple flutes, and ... well, and whatever else seems like a promising candidate for such treatment. Like the chimes book and the coming free-bar book, each of these publications will be something under a hundred pages and will include an audio CD. Typically they'll be authored by Bart Hopkin and a co-author chosen for his or her expertise with the instrument in question. Each book will present basic principles for design and construction along with sets of plans ranging from simple to moderately difficult.

The Jamaican bamboo saxophone maker and player Sugar Belly Walker was featured in the Experimental Musical Instruments book-and-CD compendium Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones. His irresistable tune "Shake Up Adina" has been one of the most popular on that CD. I recently got a call from Sugar Belly's granddaughter, now living in the United States, who pointed out some misinformation in the account appearing in the book. Most importantly, Sugar Belly's given was not William, but Wilfred -- Wilfred Fitzgerald Walker, to be complete. He was born in Highgate, St. Mary in the island of Jamaica. The unidentified young man in the photograph that appears in the book is his son. Many thanks to Ms. Harvey for bringing the corrections to our attention, and for her gracious manner in doing so.

Tragedy! The original, full-sized version of Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones is now sold out and no longer available. Fortunately, we still have the abridged version on hand and available. (Details: In 1996 Experimental Musical Instruments, working with Ellipsis Arts publishers, came out with the book and CD collection of great musical instruments from makers around the world called Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones. In 1998 Ellipsis Arts released the abridged version of the same set, in the form of a hardbound, CD-sized 96-page book with the CD in the back. It's the smaller [and more affordable] version that remains available.)

Reed has finally written a book! Reed Ghazala's book Circuit-Bending: Build your Own Alien Instruments has just come out from Wiley Publishing. Followers of the Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly journal will recall that Reed wrote for us an extensive series of articles on circuit bending, which is the surprising and fertile art of deliberately miswiring inexpensive audio components in search of undiscovered sounds.At 400 pages the new book has enough room to cover the topic in depth. There are plenty of b&w photos of Reed's own handsomely retro-futuristic instruments -- a pleasure to look at -- but the emphasis of the book is in equipping others to join in the exploration. Decades of experience and know-how have gone into the making of this book, not to mention that essential underlying component, imagination. It's a suitable compendium for an impressive legacy.

Mitchell Clark, who wrote a great deal for the Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly journal in its day, has for the last few years been a research fellow in the Department of Musical Instruments at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Mitch was one of the main forces behind the current MFA exhibit "Sounds of the Silk Road: Musical Instruments of Asia" (running until January 5, 2006). In connection with the exhibit he has authored a book of the same name, just released. I've called it a book rather than an exhibit catalog because it is unmistakably a full-sized and fully researched volume in its own right. It's beautifully done, and lavishly illustrated in color with extensive historic iconographic material as well as photos of the instruments themselves. It's published by MFA publications, and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers.
Congratulations, Mitch, on a fine piece of work.

CDs we've recently seen from various artists:
A set of four CDs of improvised music has recently appeared from the Recorded LLC label out of Baltimore (www.recorded.com). Recorded specializes in experimental music, including lots of stuff with new instruments. John Berndt and Neil Feather, each of whose work appeared in the Experimental Musical Instruments journal several times over the years, are among the Recorded regulars. Three of the new CDs are from the 2003 and 2004 editions of the Baltimore’s High Zero Festival. Patience Tryouts (Michael Johnson with seven additional players in various combinations), and Zeppelins Erste Grosse Fahrt (Todd Whitman with eight additional players in various combinations) are sound and space explorations, for the most part eschewing conventional musical parameters of meter and melody. They mix conventional and unconventional instruments, but with the conventional ones mostly working in non-standard, extended playing techniques. These pieces very much have the feel of free group improvisation, with inspired and fortuitous passages interspersed among longer passages of stasis or search.

Concentration (Susan Alcorn with eight others) has, to my ears, a different feel, primarily due to Susan’s pedal steel guitar. Her playing is characterized by both an extraordinary presence and an extraordinary restraint which lend a distinct coloration to everything else in the mix. There are some very beautiful pieces here.

The fourth CD, called Tripod Mind, isn’t from the High Zero Festival; it’s a recording of the group THUS (Neil Feather and John Berndt) at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum. The THUS instrumentarium is wonderful: Nondo, Melocipde, Vibro-Wheel Array, Venetian Glass Nephew, and Ultra Hodge are among the instruments, all of their own design, that they play here. The sounds of these instruments are full of character and flavor, while the playing here has the qualities of musicality and awareness that make free improv at its best uniquely alive.

Jon Brumit did an artist-in-residency at the municipal garbage dump in San Francisco in 2002, and did a lot of sound work with the refuse that he found there. From that residency comes a CD titled pileDRIVER: Recordings form the san francisco dump. It consists of sounds produced with items from the dump presented without any effects processing, but sequenced and looped into rhythmic and textural grooves. The two basic things to be said about this CD are: 1) Jon came up with great sounds. 2) He did a killer job of sequencing them into irresistible, gritty grooves. The contact address is byobw@hotmail.com

Tschiritsch’s Urwerk #3 , from Austrian instrument maker Hans Tschiritsch, is currently my favorite CD in the world. (OK, tomorrow I’ll probably have a different favorite, but still…) Hans plays a variety of his own oddities including Klang-Trag (foot-noodle), Teufelsgeige (devil’s fiddle), Singende Sage (musical saw), Obertondrehleier (overtone something-or-other; my German fails me) and more. He’s accompanied by the other five members of his septet playing mostly conventional instruments. The tunes are full of odd time signatures (“I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in 7/4, but that’s just the most obvious example), all with an irresistible, manically alive feeling. Many of the pieces have a carnival tinge of calypso or salsa. Some of the compositions come from Hans; others from classical, traditional, or pop sources. All are presented in carefully wrought, virtuosic and precisely executed arrangements – but never stiff. This CD will stretch you, and at the same time it’s so much fun. Hans' web site is http://members.chello.at/tschiritsch/default.htm. The CD label is GECO Tonwaren H 185; vertrieb@hoanzl.at.

Ray Brunelle is a sound effects artist and drummer from New Hampshire . His CD Thresher has just three long compositions on it, made from processing and sequencing sounds from variety of sources both electronic and acoustic: a pane of glass, trashed piano samples, a cookie tin, a squeeze toy, a slinky, shortwave radio dialog, etc., plus oddities taken from drum machines and synths. There are strong pulses, and clear, if asymmetric, grooves, but the feel is stretched out, timeless, moody, evolving. On the CD jacket is this recommendation: “Best experienced in a dark, quiet environment.” Contact rumble@metrocast.net.

New Zealand sound artist Phil Dadson recently sent me his Sound Tracks, a collection of solo improvisations. This CD has a number of short pieces, being improvisations on various of Phil’s instruments, plus two longer pieces. In the longer pieces (and some of the shorter ones as well), Phil moves from instrument to instrument, using (I surmise – correct me if I’m wrong, Phil), a looper to bring different elements together simultaneously in his solo playing. The instruments include gloopdrum, nundrum, long-string zitherum, song stones, and ostifans. hese are not described in the liner notes, but that won’t stop you from getting into the character of the sounds. The long piece entitled “To a Circular Mirror” is particularly eye-opening. Through a spacious, fluid, evolving structure, it traverses a landscape as strange and beautiful as reality itself.

As all mail-order and online retailers must, we add shipping costs to all orders from the Experimental Musical Instruments catalog. Ours is the simplest possible system: a flat rate of $4.00 for all orders shipped within the United States; $5 for destinations in Canada, and $10 elsewhere. Delivery is by first class or priority mail in the U.S.; air mail elsewhere. Notice that with the flat rate shipping you'll get the most for your money with larger orders..

Are you tired of all this online stuff? Experimental Musical Instruments has a 20-page print catalog. It's not as extensive as this web site, but it does have all the pertinent information on what we have available and how to get it. We update this catalog regularly and are trying to spread it around to those people (and there are many) who aren't crazy about looking at the glowing screen all the time. If you'd like a copy, send us your name and address and we'll put one in the mail to you.