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I've been a Sonic Youth fan for quite some time and I read in the Pop - encyclopedia of '86 that the members of Sonic Youth played together with Glenn Branca.
Glenn Branca made some kind of drum guitars with loads of strings.
So I knew about Glenn Branca and Bradford Reed and they became my inspiration to build my own instruments.
I was studying chemical engineering
During my internship it turned out that I was a real klutz,
and chaotic
I dropped everything and forgot the cooking times so I wasn't really suitable for a job in chemical engineering
despite understanding the theoretical side of it .
The influence of physics is essential in my work because I'm not really making music
I 'm actually doing more of an acoustic research
Acoustic is something you can apply the laws of physics to.
So I can use my chemical engineering study for my research to achieve a form of art.
I'm looking for the optimum in volume,You can hear a nice overtone
For comparison this is a normal string
This is how it would sound like on a normal guitar.
This is how it sounds on this instrument
It has an Eastern vibe to it.
This is how it would sound like on a guitar.
You can also do this
This is something I've discoverd after building the instrument
I didn't know that until I finished building it.
I use this to develop new instruments.
I' ve developed a system in which you can build instruments really easily
like Lego or Ikea
I can vary in that. But they use the same building blocks with which I can build anything.
This is the first, second, and third
You can see on this one if carved some lines in with a Stanley knife.
You can see I was looking for what eventually became the colorsystem.
I've worked out the color system into a scale
This one
I' ve worked it out for all the notes, this is a multi-phonic tone, You don't hear one
This is one tone, but here you hear more
You can hear a low but also a high tone.
I worked this out for all the positions you can see here
So when I put this on a quarter I know that the overtone is an E if the open string is an E.
That there is an A on this side and a E on the other side.
This is how I know the chords to all the positions.
I think I' m done for now
I worked at an advertising agency for a year
I didn't really like it there, I wrote a comic about it
Shortly after I started working in a comic book store
So i had a graphic design agency, so i left the comic book store.
Then I started working for a publisher as a freelancer.
In the meantime I followed my artistic ambition and building instruments has been my current job for a couple of years.
I couldn' t have started any younger. I was twenty-eight when I discovered I was skilled at building stuff, when I was working in the comic book store building cabinets
It was a late discovery of one of my talents
If I had started at twenty, I don' t know anybody how does it. It' s an occupation for older men.
Around 2005 I had twenty guitars laying around here which weren' t being used.
So I came up with the idea of building instruments for bands.
I came in contact with Liars, an American underground band who were living in Berlin,
I asked if they had any interest in my instruments.
That became a donation, I was giving them away
By giving them away they could use my instruments and my instruments would travel the world
After Liars I contacted Sonic Youth if I could build something for them
That became this.
This is the model that Ronaldo the guitarist suggested. He wanted some kind of harp guitar,It's a guitar with a up and down construction and an extra string field
I' m not a big fan of the Jimmy page guitar with a double neck, I think that's a bit too macho
I didn' t want my idol to have a wrong guitar on stage so I built it on top of it
You can put your hand between it
You don' t touch the upper strings.
This is the normal guitar..
it' s this pick-up
And now if we go to these pick-ups
I play a note here ...
The sound is coming from here. I' m not touching this but you can hear it in-directly
I' m not really musical gifted
I do have a lot of ideas about sounds but my techniques aren' t that good
I can' t keep time, I can' t write melodies so I can' t really compose songs
My goal was to become a comic book artist, possibly a painter or artist or something like that
But I' ve never really done that. It was mostly graphical arts I was interested in
Much later music came into my life
I' ve always been very serious to make as much room as possible for arts in my life.
Not really trying to make a career with my graphic agency.
I had my graphic agency to make money but I was more focused on my artistic ambition.
I was busy building for bands but it took three or four months before I finished an instrument. I couldn' t really make a business model out of it
The instruments became too expensive and I only could make them for a certain amount of money.
I possibly made around a thousand euro a year from four instruments
Somebody in Belfast contacted me that he wanted a workshop for his festival,something to craft
I made a model that was really simple put together in a couple of hours and would still sound great.
That became the solution to my problem. I could sell this model to other festivals
That' s how building instruments became my fulltime job. The participants do the work and I am the teacher.
I' m mostly active in Europe.
I' ve been to America a couple of times and I could have gone to New Zealand.
But there are all these big oceans inbetween, which you can' t cross with a cargo of wood and without a working permit
You can't just bring wood into New Zealand because of the environmental laws
There are a lot of obstacles to overcome and travel
I' m probably going to Russia, I think that' s a big step foward
From doing the workshop I had some income, it wasn' t a big salary, more of a small student income from building the instruments.
I also had some income from the graphic design I was doing. The graphic design gradually became less and less because my workshops were being sold more often.
Besides the workshop I also started making music with the participants so it became one big participation project
It' s a mix between amateur art and serious music. Sometimes I can be amateurish and sometimes really good if you have some good improvisation musicians.
There was a lot of interest from the festival for the music part. If I wanted to do that it would become too expensive.
I had to transfer twenty people by train...
So I first wanted to do something by myself, That really didn' t work out because I' m not that good with music, I mostly know how to build
So I asked Arnold, he also played in the ensembles, He' s a drummer who also plays guitar and keys
He can play al lot of instruments. With the two of us we started Bismuth.
Great!!
People don' t know a lot about the technical side of drawing comics
When you are drawing a character you have to know how to draw it from the front, side an back
It' s not only the character but also the street you have to drawn from the side and back. Or the room where the character is in
You need to capture the imagination of the reader and that the character and the room he is in are real.
That kind of storyboarding would take you about ten years to master
I' m convinced that the story boarding contributed to my imagination of how an instrument should be build
I' ll start by laying on my bed and think about how I can put that bridge on a piece of wood so the string could go over it
That demands a certain kind of three dimensional thinking. I think you need to be a good artist to be able to do that.
I' ve never really had any doubts that the instrument building wouldn' t be a success
Obviously the first year I had to figure out how to build a instrument that you can play some nice melodies on
I like noise but not everybody likes noise
So I' m quite satisfied with something that make a lot of noise. But it also nice to have something you can play a simple nice tune with.
When I completed that I had to figure out how to sell them, because they were just laying here in the attic
I wasn' t really focused on making music, I focused all my attention on building the instruments.
The ambition to become a comicbook artist became less and less
I think that in your creative course, if you focus all your attention on something, you let go of other certain things
So when you focus on writing you would focus less on film, or if you focus on writing stories you would focus less on poetry
I think it goes naturally.
But when i started working with Sonic youth an Liars i knew this would become a success