The KazooKeylele Guy

Genius:

Which is a lo-fi version of this:

which comes from a company that is making modular musical instruments…

We believe that the industrial world could become truly collaborative only by democratizing the creative process. With Zoybar, you don’t need to be a huge corporation to develop or promote your special effects application. We’ve done all the heavy lifting, and your application can be easily attached to the Zoybar platform, just by adding and changing its position across the profile grooves with common bolts
and screws.

As part of the design and production process, the Zoybar Hardware is manufactured only by demand, with no over production and minimum waste.
Our decentralized production process and the modular components system were designed to accommodate flexible productions scales with variety of solutions.

So they’d appear to be absolutely spot-on there then.

As a musician mind (and I will go off-topic here) I think this is a fairly good reflection of the fact that you can get too knob-orientated when it comes to music. It isn’t about creating new shapes, it’s about creating new sounds, and a physically (and historically) resonant way of weilding those notes. I mean Freur/underworld made a video playing brooms.

It’s not about mime (and making wackily shaped instruments is to a degree about mime), the instrument needs to be a physical manifestation of the sound. It needs to make your body a physical manifestation of the sound. The electric guitar is the size and shape it is for a reason. Bo Diddley’s oblong guitars didn’t catch on for a reason. Headless guitars didn’t really catch on for a reason.

Still, if you like this…

ie, playing over your own echo, you’ll like this… from Camille, who is a genuis:

She writes lyrics as a rhythm instrument, and the tune is beautiful. Incredibly clever, though being the jazz-purist that I am, I inevitably prefer her earlier stuff. Web-designer nerds should check her site out. Interesting navigation.

Anyway, she also does things with wool, for which I have a minor, unacountable fixation.