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The MIDI-fied Large Hot Pipe Organ
Ant writes:
The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world's only MIDI
controlled, propane-powered explosion organ. The
LHPO's pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will
throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty
and make you realize what 'Industrial Music'
REALLY means!" I don't know about dance-ifying my booty, but I would love to play with this thing for a few days.
About 15 years ago, I attended a very weird lecture sponsored by the "Visual Music Alliance" in Los Angeles. The presenter was a very eccentric UCLA professor who studied the history of "visual music." He traced the history back as far as the ancient Greeks, who had concerts accompanied by a "light organ" which had little candles behind colored pieces of glass with a shutter, to project colors on a screen. But the one thing of this lecture that most impressed me was his tales about the Flame Organ. Apparently, back in the 19th century, in the heyday of pipe organs, there were quite a few flame organs. These were usually made with transparent glass tubes, and flammable gasses would be fed into the tubes, ignited by a sparking electrode under the organist's control. Different gasses that burned in different colors would be used in different tubes, the effect was as much visual as musical, and the colors were said to be quite vivid. He says that Wagner was particularly enamored by the flame organ, and there is still one remaining vintage flame organ, Wagner's personal machine, in the Wagner museum (wherever the hell that is). Considering the long history of this device, I'm not impressed with the new "hot pipe organ." Stuff like this has been done before, and better, by groups like Survival Research Labs. Its just another huge emitter of greenhouse gasses.
A french artist has a site describing his own fire organ, you'll find some impressive pics there. He has several instruments (including drums) working this way. The site is :
http://perso.club-internet.fr/orguafeu (there's an english version)
And you'll find there a picture of the 1st fire organ, created in the 18th century !
This would certainly change my church service.
The anti-salmon