electric.love.affair

My general guilt had a swing in the direction of my knowledge of current events today, and I hurriedly found bbc.co.uk in an effort to staunch the flood of ignorance.

I was rewarded. Look at *this* (picture shamelessly lifted from the BBC website):

It’s been described as ‘a sci-fi bassoon’, and that’s not far off to give you a visual idea of how it looks when played. However, the mouthpiece appears to be optional, as you can interact with it in a whole number of ways to create the right effect. The fat square buttons down below are drums, and each little square is a flexible ‘key’ – strokable, movable, and you can see in the video in the link below that the musican seems to be able to apply a ‘bend’ to the key, similar to how you can push a guitar string to wiggle the note slightly.

The idea seems to be that despite electronic music having come a long long way, people still have a problem making it interesting to watch, or generally very compatible with live perfomances.

John Lambert, the creator, states in the BBC article:

“It’s not just the sonic thing – they are visually compelling, and there’s a reason for that – we’ve got pretty fed up with watching people twiddle knobs on stage.

“It was interesting once when we watched Kraftwerk and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark do it back in the 70s and 80s, but it’s not fun in 2009.”

He has a point. Several of my favourite musicians these days rely partially on ‘knob-twiddling’, and even though they have guitars to layer over it, or a very charismatic lead singer to charm you, there is still a element of “is that a bloke with a laptop on the left? Well he’s sorta dancing. Hm.”

Because the Eigenharp can be played like a classical instrument, you can fully throw yourself into it, and behave like a traditional performer. If nothing else, I can imagine this must be fantastically exciting for electronic artists on a individual level because finally they get to develop their own lead guitarist style antics – you could quite feasibly play this thing whilst leaping on top of your cab and doing your best Bruce Dickinson impression.

You can read the BBC article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8294355.stm (watching the video is a MUST.)

And you can look at the official website for the Eigenharp here: http://www.eigenlabs.com/

My housemate, a sound artist, is gonna have a heart attack. I can’t wait to show him.