ANARCHESTRA
Bliss
Music Design
As seen in Bliss Santa Fe Magazine, Summer 2005, Issue # 3, all about DESIGN
harp CHORDOPHONE
MUSICIAN ALEX FERRIS has designed and constructed an entire orchestra out of steel.
He cut it. Bent it. Welded it. Drilled it. Wired it. Bolted it together. He even made his own amplification pickups for the instruments out of steel bobbins wound with magnet wire. ANARCHESTRA is a 70 piece ensemble and still growing, part acoustic, part plugged in and amplified. Alex designed string tuning screws by drilling holes in long bolts. Everything is made to last. Most of the instruments are tunable for traditional music, but many produce sounds as if they were from another planet—a friendly planet, a dream planet where Tom Waits and John Cage and Harry Partch might collaborate on a soundtrack to the next Hollywood sci-fi masterpiece. The ANARCHESTRA instruments are as radical to look at as they are to play. Everything has a futuristic subterranean industrial look, like it was art-directed for the set of blade runner. When it comes to aesthetic and functional design, this is the real thing. PURE GENIUS is what ANARCHESTRA feels like—inspired, poetic, radical, interactive and beautifully mortal in its potential to outlive all of us and end up as rust.
This interview with alex ferris and ANARCHESTRA is a BLISS world premiere exclusive
BLISS: Talk a little about your expectations of music – what it is, what it does, and how it should work.
ALEX FERRIS: My favorite definition of music is Thelonious Monk’s: “Music is sound, what happens to sound”. What it does is completely subjective for each maker, each hearer. Some music re-affirms expectations, some music disturbs them: the same music may have either effect on different people – or on the same person at different times. So, it works simply by existing, by being made somehow. My personal preference is for music made by humans (and birds) as opposed to music made by machines. I distinguish between a tool and a machine by defining a machine as a device which can work by itself and a tool as one that cannot.
When I hear drum machines and synthesizers the images that come to mind are of patients in intensive care units attached by tubes to devises that regulate their heartbeats, force oxygen into their lungs, add nutrients to their blood and “manage” their pain. To me these represent the most joyless aspects of modern living, analogous to the way our habitats have evolved into sprawls of pavement constructed with the goal of making life better for our cars than for our children.
I’ve always preferred live music made by a group of people to tracked music. In the truest sense, a recording is no more music than a photograph of a person is a person. Still, there are many photographs (mostly of absent or deceased people and animals) I find myself treasuring. A recording of music is similar to that. Essentially, it is a photograph of a deceased moment in time.
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