An extensive and insightful discussion with builders of beautiful and strange electronic instruments Leon and Brian Dewan, aka Dewanatron.
We have a fondness for that “golden age” of electronic music that does not fall back on preset sounds or patterns but has to be dished up “fresh.” But we’re generally reverent about the whole long and venerable history of electronic music, starting with the first electric instrument, Elisha Gray’s Musical Telegraph from the 1870s, and the first synthesizer, Thaddeus Cahill’s ambitious Telharmonium, which he invented in the 1890s.
With the Dewanatrons, we use traditional synthesis techniques as well as new ones, but we’re particularly drawn to the fluidity of unstandardized instruments and organic situations that intertwine control and indeterminacy. We admire the creativity of electronic artists like David Tudor or Louis and Bebe Barron because it thrived on setting up sprawling situations and seeing what would happen (quite antithetical to the pursuit of ever-more-precise control or standardization of equipment). I’d say that we fit in with the homegrown aspect of their approach, that made instrument-making a part of composing music.
Full interview at Artocratic, via Erik Davis
