At Sydney Festival, Gotye and his Ondioline Orchestra will pay homage to one of electronic music’s quirkiest composers, Jean-Jacques Perrey.
Ahead of the shows, Gotye shares his love of unusual, electronic instruments.
1. Jenny Ondioline
The most expressive monophonic electronic instrument I've ever had the pleasure to play.Frenchman Georges Jenny began studying electronics and acoustics in the late 1930s when he was forced to spend a year in a sanatorium having contracted tuberculosis. Over two decades of remarkable design ingenuity and circuit refinement, he hand-crafted a few hundred Ondiolines, most of which are almost entirely non-functional today.
With the expertise of a brilliant New York technician named Stephen Masucci, I've been trying to have a number of Ondiolines restored so that more people can hear and play these unfairly forgotten instruments.
The pioneering electronic pop musician, Jean-Jacques Perrey was Jenny's Ondioline demonstrator for many years and developed a remarkable palette of deft techniques and expressive mastery on the instrument, using it on beloved space-age pop recordings such as the 'The In Sound From Way Out!' and 'Moog Indigo'.
2. The Telharmonium
At the outset of the 20th century, roughly 15 years before electronic amplification was possible, this massive instrument required tonnes of materials, a factory floor's worth of space and huge voltages to generate its polyphonic electronic tones.The creator, Thaddeus Cahill, managed to raise huge sums of investment money to build multiple versions of the instrument in New York over a period of almost 20 years until the advent of radio, and before problems with the business model brought the whole enterprise to a close.
The Telharmonium was the world's first electromechanical musical instrument, and arguably also the world's first music subscription service.
Human performers would play the keyboards at Telharmonic Hall and the sounds they generated on the instrument were piped via telephone lines to subscribers around Manhattan. Some subscribers complained of crosstalk from phone conversations interfering with the delivery of the music on their phone receivers, and likewise ghostly music would sometimes drift into people's calls.
I'm fascinated by this instrument because there are no known recordings of it and recreating it would appear entirely impossible today.
3. The Cowell-Theremin Rhythmicon
Drums are my first instrument and I've always been drawn to rhythmic devices with unique sound palettes that can create unusual rhythms.Celebrated American composer Henry Cowell was very interested in the intersection of polyrhythms and the harmonic series and he charged Leon Theremin, the Russian physicist and inventor of the electronic musical instrument that bears his name, to create a machine that could render the complex rhythmic-harmonic combinations, which were beyond human performers' abilities in 1930s New York.
Theremin created a remarkable electromechanical instrument that used spinning discs intersecting beams of light, these chopped-up beams of light activating a photocell to make the sounds. This allowed polyrhythms like 11 over 5 over 3 to be played simply by pressing a selection of keys on the instrument's keyboard.
Arguably the world's first drum machine, only one of the two Rhythmicons that Theremin made during his time in the US survives, in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum, but it is sadly neither functional nor on display.
A third 'tabletop' instrument was made by Theremin in the 1960s while he was busy crafting incredible surveillance devices for the Russian government, and this surviving instrument is accessible at the Theremin Center in Moscow.
4. Chamberlin Rhythmate
Another drum machine, but the first to use a tape-based sampling approach to provide looping percussive accompaniment to the performing or recording musician. Invented by Harry Chamberlin in Upland, CA in the early 1950s, various versions of the Rhythmate were developed up until the 1980s.Each of them plays back recordings of a live drummer performing a variety of grooves popular in '50s and '60s 'light music' and rock & roll scenes; fox trots and waltzes, bossa novas and sambas, but also unusually named rhythms such as the 'Balboa' and 'Clovis' beats.
There is a unique and attractive quality to rhythms from Rhythmate machines, and I find them inspiring for prompting song ideas.
5. Miessner Rhyth-O-Phone
Recently I've found metronomes to be musical instruments with great potential.Often ignored as merely functional devices to aid rhythmic development (or hinder it, depending on your perspective on how metronomes affect the development of a musician's 'internal rhythm') they have a rich and varied history, from Maelzel's usurping, trademarking and selling of Diedrich Winkel's weighted pendulum concept, to the sonic progression from mechanical (1800s), to electric (early 20th Century) to digital metronomes that are ubiquitous today.
William Otto Miessner was a music educator and composer in the midwest of America who had an ingenious concept for a metronome with greater customisability and educational value.
The Rhyth-O-Phone requires the user to punch holes in circular paper discs, the placement and number of holes corresponding to the rhythm desired. The paper disc is placed on the instrument, and a small sickle-like arm is pulled around it by a spring tension mechanism.
Whenever the arm reaches one of the holes punched in the paper, a circuit is connected and an electric doorbell makes a brash sound, buzzing out the player's rhythm. Definitely the coolest metronome I've ever seen or heard!
