Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
SMALL INSTRUMENTS
Small Instruments, the band, was set up in 2005 or 2006.
That's when I decided to return to what you would call "active music".
I used to play the double bass,
I stopped for a couple of years, but music caught up with me again.
I'm into experimental music of different genres
which search for new, interesting sounds.
So, I started to search in what you could call
"inconspicuous sources of sound".
I started to buy these different instruments,
which I knew from the albums of different artists,
I knew they existed.
Later it developed in such a way
that I started to be interested in
all these odd musical inventions.
The ones you can buy,
others which aren't actual instruments
but you can modify them, change them somehow;
and ultimately, instruments that
don't exist at all that you have to construct yourself.
I never learned how to make instruments from anyone,
I'm a self-taught builder, but these instruments
are in no way comparable to the work of a professional luthier.
These instruments aren't meant to be better
than traditional instruments, we aren't even capable
of making such instruments through DIY.
It's about being creative and inventive
not only when it comes to professional sound,
which Small Instruments tends to avoid.
What I do is based on personal experience and experiments.
Of course it's about consuming knowledge
and music which has already been used and performed.
At present, I feel that Small Instruments is a platform
for creativity, which has the primary goal
of allowing true sound to exist.
I feel that there are less and less of these true sounds.
We go for sources of sound that imitate these sounds.
In other words, it's very interesting
and striking that on the small surface where we are now,
there are around 500 physical, mechanical sources of sound.
These sounds are absent from our day-to-day reality.
Fewer and fewer people come across sources of sound from live instruments.
More and more often music reaches us from different
imitation devices or sound reproducers,
we less often encounter real sound.
Hence the need for music to be interesting as resonance,
and hence the idea to supply that idea with a large amount of different sounds.
It also carries the message to swim against the current,
to move away from imitation and pretending,
to instead concentrate on what is real,
even if it isn't really that glamorous from the point of view of
contemporary production.
The sound of these small instruments can sometimes be beautiful,
meticulous and precise, but sometimes
from the production point of view,
they are utterly nonsensical, poor, odd.
But that's the nature of sound.
Sound is not just a beautiful production coming from a speaker.
It's every rustle and stammer of sound matter
which is not only in instruments but surrounds us.
So the next suggestion is the sensitisation of the ear
to the surrounding diversity of sounds.
The point of recording an album on 20 different small grand pianos
and upright pianos is also to hear
how different instruments that aren't necessarily treated seriously can sound.
But it turns out that when we concentrate on the sound,
an entire new spectrum is unveiled.
I think another goal of Small Instruments
is raising awareness about the phenomenon
of the culture of instruments.