Video: dialogue of the two artists and their work
In this video, the artists’ statements are interwoven with clips from their musical practice to create a multilayered dialogue between the artists, their work, and their reflections.
Below you can find the transcript (lightly edited to improve understandability) of the conversation from the video Instrument Building as a Material Semiotic Practice.
KA: But I got some feedback that I’m torturing the instrument. I said, no – actually, I’m trying to understand it.
KA: Hi, my name is Khabat Abas. I’m a cello player. I experiment with the cello, the sound of it, the activity, and everything related to this instrument.
SU: Hi, I’m Sam Underwood and I build predominantly mechanical musical instruments that are mostly intended to be self-running, but also have human players.
SU: I make a lot of instruments where the physical resonance – of a sheet or any kind of structure – is what gives the feedback tone. And then really, really tiny alterations to the loading on that surface, for example, can change the pitch, and also change how it goes off: how loud it is, what sort of timbre it produces, and all of those sorts of things. And those factors are beyond my control.
You can learn which constraints broadly result in which outcomes, but the idea that you could go back to an instrument like that and produce a series of repeatable pitches reliably – that’s not an option. So, I’m very comfortable, in almost all of the instruments I’ve built for my own use over the last fifteen years or so, with having a large area of uncontrollability, essentially.
Approach to Making
SU: I come at this – at my work – from a very experimental standpoint, both in terms of what the musical outcomes are, but also very much in terms of the process of building instruments. I have a studio and workshop where I’m able to fabricate prototype instruments based on some thinking around what I’d like the instrument to do. And then it’s just a very slow and iterative process: building a prototype, testing it, finding out what works and what doesn’t work, and then developing another prototype. That sort of stepwise process is how I tend to arrive at a final instrument design.
KA: The way that I learned music in my country – my background: when you grow up in a war zone, you are constantly in the sound environment. So you have a relationship with sound in a different way. When I learned to play classical cello, my country was under embargo by the US. We didn’t have access to new instruments or … when a string broke, you couldn’t just get a new string. So I had to knot the string and we played classical music – for example, Beethoven – with knotted strings. Just imagine the sound. How it’s perceived. And then, with the outside environment – the sounds from the environment – the [instrument] building came from that too. Because I didn’t have a “normal cello” – sound-wise, not just shape-wise – we had the shape of the instrument, but it was broken, and the strings were broken. So I felt like, because of this relationship, what if I change the materials to those that were part of my life all the time? What if I made sound with those materials? So, the idea of building came from this.
SU: Every instrument has its idiosyncrasies, and it’s probably worth mentioning that my instruments tend not to be – you can’t really think of them as a single instrument. They’re more like a multi-instrument system. They tend to be modular. Different modules have strengths, weaknesses, and roles within the wider instrument system. Two very obvious examples for me are the Mammoth Beat Organ – a large, self-propelling musical machine that Graham Dunning and I built. That instrument has both of us as players in real time. It’s somewhat like an opened-up fairground organ, where all the insides – the pipes, the sequencers, everything – can be manipulated in real time, rather than just feeding in a roll of paper and having it faithfully reproduce some music. That instrument actually spawned my latest instrument, which is called ams. Graham and I both come from a live improv setting, and we play in that setting in other projects quite often. The Mammoth Beat Organ is simultaneously really great and really rubbish at different things. It’s almost incapable of making impulsive, radical changes – like suddenly shifting volume or timbre. It’s very, very difficult to go from super quiet to super loud, really fast, on that instrument, because everything has to get up to speed. It’s a big, lumbering beast of a machine. On the other hand, it’s very good at rhythmic music – it just plays relentlessly, no matter what you do. It keeps the pulse going all the way through. But it won’t do sudden quick changes, and ams is a response to that.
Sound and Indeterminacy
KA: I’m going to discover new techniques, which also have an effect on the sound making. So, what sound comes out when I use this technique? It’s a really interesting process because I always have to be in a position of the unexpected – to be open to getting an unexpected result. For example, with the bombshell: because it’s metal, I expected it to resonate a lot due to the material. But actually, the only cello I need to amplify is the bombshell.
SU: Indeterminacy is definitely core to a lot [of what I do, LR]. I’m very open to it as an aspect of my instruments. It’s actually much easier to build instruments when you don’t want them to always create the same tone. You don’t worry too much about Western tuning systems, etcetera. You’re just more open to broader kinds of sounds and outcomes.
KA: This instrument [cello-ness, LR] was commissioned by the residency in Huddersfield, the ame gallery. With this cello, I’m trying to push the boundary. This body – it’s dominating me. I’m trying to be flexible and to make it do different things. I just felt like I wanted to explode the cello into different parts – like an explosion, where the parts scatter into different places. I used every part of the cello within the frame.
Material Considerations
KA: When I am experimenting with these materials, they always give me possibilities that are unexpected – sometimes, or most of the time, actually. What the instrument gives to me broadens things beyond just building an instrument. I’m not an instrument builder – I don’t build my instruments with my own hands – but I design them. I choose the materials. And I’m not working with a professional instrument maker or a cello maker. I can say cello maker because most of the instruments I make are cellos. For example, I have the bombshell, which I made together with a metal worker. We shaped it, cut it with a laser – things like that. It’s not the environment for instrument-making environment at all; it’s totally different.
SU: I don’t have any formal training in mechanics or instrument building, so all of this comes from trial and error, learning, and years of building things. There will always be lots of technical issues to solve for any instrument I might build. But the bit that I really like is when I’m building instruments for my own use, or for use with collaborators, and I can get lost in the tiniest details – the acoustic sounding of a surface or a cavity, or whatever it might be. From a long time doing it, I have a sense of what is interesting to me sonically and what is interesting to me as a player. So, if I can come up with designs that encapsulate both interesting sounds and the ability to manipulate those sounds in real time – especially when there’s a visible aspect to the playing, not all hidden away (so it’s not all tucked away in so no one can see what’s going on – because I do like that tying in to my instruments) – that’s really rich, fertile ground for exploration. It’s where I prefer to work if I can.
KA: Whatever I use is serving the sound. The material is not just ‘whatever I choose,’ it has a relation with the sound. The important part of those materials that I choose is that they have a big effect on the possibilities of sound. This gives me the opportunity to discover new sounds and new technique all the time.
Relationship With Other Types of Instrumental Practice
KA: As a classical cello player, you have just a few options: bowing the string, pizzicato, and now some extended techniques. Extending technique is adaptive, but I think I discover more when building instruments. For example, with the skin cello, I tried to learn to be a percussionist – because I can use the instrument both as a cello and as a percussion instrument at the same time. So I try to adapt percussion techniques and explore the instrument.
With the metal bombshell, it’s totally different. And with the Tam Tam [that I adapted, LR] – I put strings on it – I have to sit differently. Usually, you sit facing the audience. But with the Tam Tam, I have to sit with my back to the audience, which I never did before. And I have to play upside down – exactly the opposite of how I normally would.
I’m trying to push the boundaries of the instrument and of myself. When you are learning classical music, there’s one big rule: you have to follow it. How you sit, how you hold the instrument, how you use your fingers – everything. And I’m trying to break those rules when making instruments.
SU: I’m very keen on it as a process for people who want to create experimental music. I think being willing to go beyond the instruments that we have, by either adapting or building your own instruments [from scratch, LR] is a fantastic shortcut to arriving at new sounds and new ways of working with sound.
KA: As a classically trained cellist, when I sit, I have a [particular, LR] form; I just hold my instrument. The audience expects to hear the traditional cello sound. But what I’m trying to do is destroy that expectation – to destroy it or search [for a way to do that, LR].
KA: The other thing that happened during the performance – which now I’m using as a new technique for my old instrument – I’m really happy about, because it was something that […] When I was playing, the instrument taught me and then I could just use that technique.
My hand was full of rosin, because I had been playing and touching the strings. When I performed, suddenly my hand just touched the string. I wanted to grab an object from the floor, and when I reached out, my hand made a sound. I really enjoyed it, because I never used this technique before. I never had this technique – I didn’t have the possibility to discover it before. But with this new instrument, I discovered it, which was really […] I enjoyed it. So now, I have another technique that I can adapt even to the normal cello.
KA: All the instruments teach me new things: to be flexible, to grow with them, to have an open mind, and to accept.