Plinth's antique music machine tunes

Plinth's "Collected Machine Music" is the latest from Aquarius-beloved label Time Released Sound, whose releases are as much art as music, an insane amount of time and energy put into the packaging for every release. This one comes from an artist called Plinth, whose strange and wondrous music is created using a collection of calliopes and Victorian music boxes, antique sound makers and wheezing creaking mechanisms from way back when.

Haunting and mysterious, chiming melodies are laid over the whir of strange machines, it's almost like the soundtrack to some bizarre mechanical workshop, a steam punk wonderland, where all the sounds are created via gears, and automatons, a Rube Goldberg-like world of contraptions that create melodies, unfurling whirring textures, and the clicking and creaking of clockwork music boxes, the sound of the machines as much a part of the recordings as the music the machines are making. Dreamy and otherworldly, every song here like some old-timey lullaby, broadcast via wireless from another dimension, the sound of faded memories and lost childhoods, soundtracks to dreams and visions of what once was, bells and chimes, tinkling melodies, all wreathed in static and crackle, as if captured directly off the Victrola, or straight out of the music box, recorded onto a wax cylinder and played back by candlelight in the parlor. So lovely.

Plinth: "Collected Machine Music"

• [taras]

  See also: Danish experimental musician Goodiepal’s ‘mechanical bird’ and music box experiments back in the mid-2000s.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NOn9nSFk0Q
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxLeyAIlpnQ – Icon Dub from the albums ‘Narc Beacon’ and ‘Nag Nag Bacon’ is particularly lovely.

  • [David Pescovitz]

    Wow, fantastic. Thanks!

• [Boundegar]

  Weird and lovely.

• [swlabr]

  Such Excellent Musics. There’s a cat meowing in there somewhere, so we’ll just presume it got fed nice crunchies and got petted and told it was pretty. 

• [kiptw]

  Those interested in the rather steampunkish world of automatic musical instruments can look into the doings of the Mechanical Music Digest (easily searchable by that name), which carries the postings of largely older hobbyists wondering where the next generation of technicians will come from to keep the band organs, player pianos, violinolas, and music boxes going. I can’t help think that there’s a generation that would be happy to get into the intricate, exquisite music-making hardware that lurks inside those highly ornamented cases.