Kinetic, psychotropic visual soundscapes. Give me a second to catch my breath, but that’s the best description I can come up with for what musician/sculptor Felix Thorn does. It seems that ever since someone published the first review, people have been referring to art pieces as musical, and music as having been sculpted. But that type of rhetoric seems heavy-handed once you’re seen Thorn’s creations at play.Thorn has turned his pieces into the music. His process alternates between building a kinetic sculpture (of, say, tiny hammers banging a snare drum) that he thinks will sound a certain way, and modifying his musical arrangement to fit what his work can physically produce. By using salvaged and forgotten bits and pieces to develop his works, he’s bringing dead machinery back to life. It’s an endless feedback loop of mechanical development that’s inherently organic in its evolution.“I’m trying to make computer music with acoustic noises, which is actually impossible,” he said. “As it turns out, by the time I’ve finished I’ve created something completely different.”Thorn was one of the winners of Motherboard’s Sound Builders contest, and in 2010 we visited him at his English manor to take in the full scope of his lunatic works. The highlight was a new instrument Thorn built that was too complex for us to comprehend, but we do know that its sweet sounds completely clashed with its terrifying appearance. Yes, frightening and pleasing. That is surely how one would best describe the entirety of Thorn’s self-made temple to DIY sound machinery.
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