Pipe Thumb Piano

 After seeing the band Neptune play at the Aquarium in Fargo and talking to them about their instruments I was inspired to build my own thumb piano, in imitation of theirs. The main body is made of metal pipe and the keys are broken streetsweeper bristles salvaged from the gutter.

Self-Playing Music

 There's something enticing about the idea of setting up a system and watching it run through it's program without intervention, something satisfying about creating it. Like imagining one of Rube Goldberg's machines satisfying it's function, or watching a long arrangement of dominoes cascading in sequence. Like plugging wires into modular (or mini-modular) systems and listening to the way that they change the oscillation of a circuit, or arranging a sequence in a tracker (ImpulseTracker or ModPlug, for example), or making a feedback loop. Human minds love patterns and they especially love believing that they have figured out the limits of variations in the repetition of patterns. We love to believe that we are smart. I have made a series of videos about patterns, and I continue, with variations, to make them.