Here are some acts of woodworking (literally)
- "Electro-acoustic Improvisation", Ipek Eglini
There is almost nothing that excites me more of late than when I find some YouTube video in which someone is performing music which they clearly put a whole lot of work and preparation into and it has like, 38 views. I'm about to hear the rawest shit. I'm about to experience so much of this artist in their creation.
In this video a woman in Doc Martens has driven wooden stakes into a piano, turning it into a percussion instrument. She then tortures it by banging the keys and (literally, with a hammer) the strings inside, while making bird noises into a headset mic. Then she turns to a bank of electronics she's been ignoring, and DJ-scratches her own bangs and chirps. Then she does both these things at once. Pure ecstatic sound, no notes.
4 minutes of spooky atmosphere from a prepared wooden box the musician handmade by sticking pieces of metal wire directly into a guitar pickup. With a few layers of enormous echo, these simple sounds become coherent, meaningful, dramatic.
This link skips the first 42 seconds of the video, in which the musician explains his setup in German. If you speak German, feel free to rewind.
- "If I Had a Heart", Fever Ray (cover by Ebanisteria Musicale C.M. Ferrari)
Are you, or have you ever been, goth? How goth? Because unless your answer is "I handbuilt a 14th-century string instrument that looks like a guillotine, then covered Fever Ray on it while dressed in black sitting on a couch decorated in dying leaves" you are/were not as goth as this lady. The dread-soaked original is dragged out even slower and lower in this cover, a sleep paralysis dream.
This YouTube account is run by a studio that makes and sells musical instruments, and all their videos are just showing the instruments off. "Ebanisteria Musicale" means "Musical Cabinet-Making"; apparently in Italy "cabinet-making" is just a generic term for custom woodworking. Judging from the backgrounds of the YouTube videos I think she may have also made the cabinets she stores her stock in but she doesn't seem to sell them.
- "Drone Commander", Eric Archer
Eric Archer is a synth designer now selling modules under the name "Rare Waves"; in this 2009 video he shows off his first creation, a knobs-only chaotic drone unit built into an ammunition canister and named the "Grendel Drone Commander". Here he's running four in parallel, each moaning its own strange song with its own structure; each oscillator interrupts itself with wobbles and clicks, which in the broader choir form complex, cross-interacting rhythms. A symphony of backward guitar solos.
- "06-29-2020-Grone", H.R. Terror
Created on the Grone, the previously-mentioned creepy synth module that my friend J.Z. may have accidentally summoned into being from the Noosphere, this is 35 minutes of hiss and distant barely-heard echoey sounds blending together into a terrifying/soothing ambiance. Good focus music for tasks such as exploring an aeons-abandoned alien spaceship never certain if a fell shadow stalks you through the corridors.
⬇️ Click below for more drone and more from the goth cabinetmaking lady ⬇️
- "LYRA8+T Resonator improvisation", Arkady Marto
Some things this song makes me think of: Street construction; industrial dishwashers; inscrutable machines at unidentified factories filmed by David Lynch in the 1970s; a sump pulling sewage out of a hole in the street; distant alarms going off. If it is not clear, these are all things I love. Created on SOMA's drone synth and Jomox's desktop filter box. Note, contains some high-pitched sounds.
- "Herr Mannelig (with personal variations)", Ebanisteria Musicale C.M. Ferrari
This is the goth "musical cabinetmaking" lady I linked above, doing a complete multi-instrumental performance on handmade folk instruments in which she performs (and possibly built?) each part. Really compelling stuff, makes me think of Dead Can Dance or Loreena McKennitt, a folksong with the energy of rock.
Wikipedia says the song is about a troll queen proposing marriage.