Music of the Spares…
Electric Western is a collaboration between husband and wife, Lorin Edwin Parker (a teacher of sound design at the Art Institute of California in Los Angeles) and Sarah Seeling, “dedicated to the creative use of technology from tubes to germanium & steam to solar… saving the world from flat digital sound and pretentious audiophilia.”
Among their (entirely hand-made) creations, a “Stynth” (a steam-powered synthesizer); a tube-and-coil Theremin (lovingly recreating the original); and “the Electro-Sparklavier” (an all-tube synth in which “sound is generated by the ionization of gases within the neon bulbs and thyratron tubes and mixed in various computer triodes”). Photos and videos of each are available at the links above and/or here.
As we practice our scales, we might scribble a birthday scene for George Bernard Shaw, playwright and Nobel Laureate, born this date in 1856.
You see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I dream things as they never were and ask, “Why not?”
– George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1921)
