Yan White: Sound

Unknown Devices in the Atrium, LCC

“LMC was one of the major forces in the development of improvised music and sonic arts. LMC history is particularly richly textured, not only because it contains important evidence (audible, visual and textual) of early improvised music and sonic arts activity in the UK, but also because it intersects with other initiatives of self-determination, collective politics and critical art practice in the 1970s, such as radical publishing, feminism, structural film, dance, performance art, and sonic ecology, along with organisations like Music for Socialism and the post-punk explosion of independent record companies and promoters.” – David Toop

Unknown Devices: the Laptop Orchestra with David Toop. 10 min film excerpt from 30 min performance at CRISAP, LCC London in May 2009. Performed for the opening of Sound Traces, an exhibition of the London Musicians’ Collective legacy. Filmed and edited by Mika Kioussis

Watch out for me punishing my guitar about halfway through the video!

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Bavarian Concert Zither

I picked up this lovely Bavarian Concert Zither on ebay for about £40.

This is the instrument used on the soundtrack for the movie “The Third Man”. It features 5 fretted strings and 27 open strings which are usually tuned in a cycle of fifths. I used my own unison tuning.

One thing that is really interesting about these instruments is that almost every country and culture has some kind of version of the zither, and it’s basically an ancestor of the guitar.

Combined with a fairly crude homemade contact microphone and my standard effect chain (2 DL4’s, Boss PS-2, Blues Driver, Verbzilla, Alesis portable mixer) I was using this setup for the first Unknown Devices sessions with David Toop. The case acts as a resonant chamber/amplifier and picks up lots of great creaks and friction.

I later edited together this quite dark loop-based composition..

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