Acoustic Laptops for Post-Apolcalypic Breakcore Performance
Posted by Michael_Byrne on Tuesday, May 10, 2011
I came across these at some point in the past week floating around the web and thought the concept was nice enough to share. “Acoustic laptops” here is a play on the idea of a laptop that is used for music being reduced simply to a box of sound. If you were to explain to a child what a laptop musical performance was, you might say just that. This is my box of sounds. I will play with them.
These are made by Tore Honoré Bøe, or Origami Boe#, who also performs with them. They are not sequencers or sound manipulators/processors, but collections of small sound devices meant to be contact mic’d. Box of sounds. You might argue that all of the various processes of laptop production still reduce to those three words. And acoustic because, well, they would make sounds even unmic’d, just very small ones.
Boe explains:
At the end of the nineties I did a lot of concerts and recordings using more and more tiny and fragile objects in my search for microsounds. Eggshells, rice, needles, silver cutlery, my passport, hair. The acoustic laptops appeared as a practical solution on how to easily recreate my previous chaotic table-top set-ups for later practice and recording, but quickly involved into their own beings.
And further:
In varying degrees — depending on the tastes of the single acoustic laptop maker, the acoustic laptop can also become a ritualised object. Several people have added items of sentimental value (I have used the teeth of my children, a stone from Auschwitz, my own hair), or have put a lot of effort into the visual identity of their acoustic laptop. Some have even used boxes of significance.
Since the box is amplifying sounds that usually go unheard (but still exist at all times), perhaps it can also work as a collector of personal thoughts, emotions, secrets, stories and sentiments.
Perhaps this still doesn’t make sense. Here’s a recent video of an acoustic laptop in action. At the link above, there’s several .zip files worth more.
Origami Boe 010F – Gode Ord Dør Sist Session from origami republika on Vimeo.
Connected:
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Remembering Fairlight, The DIY Musical Computer That Defined 80’s Pop Music
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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About the author
Michael covers physics, climate science, the future of music, and assorted things fallen through cracks at Motherboard. A native of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon, he currently resides in Baltimore...
