On the off chance that anyone reads this often enough to notice, the spastar will be making its debut appearance this wednesday at the dual plover nightmare that is club consolador de dos caras.
Don’t be put off by the fact that the flyer says 28th May, it really is this week, the 4th of June. Honest.
Here’s what i sent them for the website.
lieutenant colonel spastic howitzer
2003 phase 1: fit inducing post breakcore plunderphonic mess
2004 phase 2: heavily treated saxophone added for additional mirth and pain
2008 phase 3: enter the spastar
Woke up xmas morning to discover that jazz legend Oscar Peterson had died. Bummer.
But it does mean i can run this great picture…….
Here it is. Completed.
After inital testing i discovered that the springs needed to be much, much closer to a pickup and so i had to relocate the central pickup. By using the central pickup i still have the option of including the springs in both the 2 and 4 positions on the 5 way selector, which is nice.
So now i have to learn to play the thing. It seems very good at generating extreme noise (surprise, surprise) but is also capable of some really tasty slide styles where the amount of metal things involved is lending a resonator-ish quality to the sound.
There has also been significant progress with the other instrument as well.
This is a real protoprototype, it’s currently an ergonomic disgrace and made me feel quite light headed after playing only a few notes. It is exactly what it seems: a clarinet missing a bunch of keys with a few metres of extra tubing inserted along the way. It still sounds like a clarinet, just a very, very low one. As in lower than a contrabass. As in you can almost count the wave form oscillations. Of course the extension of the overall body without a proportional redistribution of the keys means it only really has quartertones (or closer) at each keyed section with overblowing only really working on the lower segment. When amplified it sounds somewhat terrifying.
After a sudden blur of activity it’s almost finished. My fingers are covered in cuts and scratches and my hands are uncharacteristically bruised and calloused, but here it is.
I still need to complete the keywork where the three spikes hit the strings, but it’s almost completed and yes, it does sound as wrong as it looks.
The only major job left is to name it. So far the list of possibilities includes:
The Degenetron
The Spastar
The Howitztar
The Guitzer
About a month ago i had a strange and unusually vivid (possibly lucid) dream in which i was constructing a bizarre sort of guitar hybrid. Unusually i managed to retain almost all of the detail regarding the construction and mechanics of the design and so now i’m going to build the as yet unnamed thing. In essence it remains a normal electric guitar, but with the addition of a three keyed system of levers or pins to strike the strings instead of normal right hand techniques, and a keyed damper system to function in the style of a sustain pedal on a piano.The original also had a pair of long drone strings constructed from springs running from a bolt running out of the headstock down to the body itself which were played with a separate key system to be thumb operated. However whilst this idea provided great opportunities for getting some serious strangeness and the ability to tune said springs, the tension placed on the truss rod and neck would be so extreme as to make tuning the regular strings redundant, and there’s also the small matter of getting smacked in the face by a spring stretched out far beyond it’s intended limits, and having to reposition a pickup. Instead i’ve decided on a pair of smaller springs running across the body from the upper horn, still to be played by a system of thumb keys.
Of course the instrument in the dream was a beautifully machined, fully realized production model that will bear scant resemblance to the brutally ugly prototype i’m planning on assembling. So far i’ve bought myself a cheap guitar and am about to buy a cheap clarinet for the key system (and hopefully have enough bits left over for some sort of weird Roland Kirk drone instrument/brown noise generator). I’ve pretty much completed my planning/thinking stage - i’ve got an acceptable plan for the main keys, a good plan for the springs and associated keys, and a rough idea of how to implement the damper - so it’s almost time to get going.
First step will be cutting some bits off the scratchplate for better access and then attaching the springs. Then once i have the clarinet i can add the key systems and prepare for mayhem.
Pictures and updates will follow once the carnage begins.
Once again with all the unpredictability of sunrise, a major company has indulged in some very lazy sampling of a lesser known musician for the shilling of their dispicable wares. This time around aware but not alarmed listeners can hear lengthy unadorned loops of Manu Chao being used to sell Domino’s pizzas, and whilst obviously at this level the samples are either cleared or have wormed their way through a legal loophole, the contempt shown is nothing short of staggering.
This is the sort of thing that gives sampling and appropriation a bad name - cheap, lazy and not very interesting.
Something is bugging me about Eurovision this year.
It’s not the fact that the thoroughly bewildering Ukranian entry failed to win, nor is it the fact that the British entry somehow escaped the ignominy of “null points”. My brain was even eventually able to cope with the Hungarian blues entry and the cocktail jazz stylings of the German entry, whilst Terry Wogan’s whimsically surreal heckling seemed if anything surprisingly honest…..
No, the thing which has totally done my head in is the fact that the contest would appear to have been won by Ricky Wong from the ABC’s “We Can be Heroes”.
Chris Lilley as “Ricky Wong”
Serbian Eurovision winner Marija Serifovic
oh, and there was also the small matter of what appeared to be a quotation of material from the Residents album “Tweedles” in both the introduction to the Belarus entry as well as during the break in France’s effort…….i swear i heard it, although it may have just been Eurovision eroding my brainstem
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