Organs played by blowtorches that shoot flames up 30-foot pipes, guitars made from hockey sticks and crutches, wind instruments controlled by sitting on inflatable cushions: This is the world of Experimental Musical Instruments, a quarterly journal that the writer and musician Bart Hopkin has been publishing in California for 12 years.
His audience has always been small, a group of 600 or so inventors, collectors and enthusiasts. But with his new, alluringly packaged book and CD, "Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones" (Ellipsis Arts), popping up in book and record stores, interest in this obscure synthesis of sculpture and sound may be expanding.The book, with an introduction by Tom Waits, a sometime instrument builder, offers concise, nontechnical essays about and striking photos of such figures as the composer Harry Partsch, the futurist Luigi Russolo and the electronic-music pioneer Leon Theremin. But its real value is in documenting contemporary music's unsung mavericks and tinkerers.
They include Qubais Reed Ghazala, who takes cheap electronic appliances and modifies them visually and acoustically until they look like props from a particularly surreal episode of "Star Trek"; Brian Ransom, who builds meticulous and beautiful ceramic instruments shaped like imaginary deities and played like drums and horns; Arthur Frick, inventor of giant, playful and complex instruments like the Beepmobile, the Stomper and the Tug, and Wendy Mae Chambers, whose version of "New York, New York" played on an organ made of car horns is one of the highlights of the CD.
"The thought behind the collection was that there are beautiful coffee-table books of historical instruments, but there aren't any of modern instruments," Hopkin said.
He said he first became fascinated with nontraditional instruments as a child. "I remember as a kid lining up glasses on the table and filling them with different amounts of water to see how they sounded," he said. "And I used to spend hours in front of a barbed-wire fence near my house, hitting each wire with sticks."
Eventually, Hopkin started building his own instruments, which he described as unremarkable. "Artists are generally self-involved, so I decided I'd start thinking about other people's creative work," he said.