Gamelan, Pringles and Toys: November 2015

We had an amazing session this month with great attendance and some wonderful projects on display.

First up was Charles Matthews who was taking time out from running his brand new sonic arts course at City Lit to give us a demonstration and talk about his Augemented Gamelan instrument. The sounds were beautiful and the setup fascinating. He showed us the software he’s developed to drive the instruments as well as the scores he uses for performing with traditional Gamelan musicians. He also outlined where he’s going with the instrument in the future – we can’t wait to see the results! You can find out more about the project here.

We then had the Tom Fox of Vulpestruments showing us how to make the simplest possible tunable instrument in about 10 minutes out of a nail, a piece of wire and a Pringles can. Once we’d polished off all the Pringles all that was left to do was to make the instruments! Loads of fun 🙂

Finally we had circuit bending maestro Tasos Stamou demonstrating his brand new electromechanical automata orchestra project. Tasos showed us some work he’d done in the past on these kind of instruments which are both quirky and beautiful. He then gave us a preview of ambitious plans for a performance set up he’s in the process of developing for controlling multiple automata from a central unit. It’s a really exciting and imaginative project and we’re really looking forward to seeing it fully realised. It’s great to see projects like these at early stages of development so we can see share in the initial vision of the artist and then see how they evolve over time.

As well as these we had the usual diddley bows, coat hangers and toys, as well as Tim Yates’ new automated glockenspiel prototype and Lucia Naidu’s high voltage experiments. Add percussion jams and circuit bent Casio keyboards into the mix and you have an idea of all the great stuff that went on. We’re looking forward to having many more sessions like this in the future so make sure you don’t miss them!