Weird musical things, art installations, mind-bending sonic sculptures stimulating to the eye and to the ear. Sam Underwood is a performer and a maker, turning whatever he can get his hands on into unique musical creations. He’s had work featured in the hallowed pages of HackSpace magazine, the South Bank Centre in London, and the Golden Lion in Todmorden.
We spoke to him from the flooded banks of the River Severn about methods, music, and how you don’t need to be in control of every aspect of the process to call yourself a maker.
How do you describe what you do? Are you more of a musician or a sound artist?
In most respects, I’m more a musician than I am a sound artist, but in many ways, I’m neither. In many ways, I am a musical instrument designer. I do sometimes use those myself, such as the Mammoth Beat Organ, but I also do a lot of pure research on different methods of making sound and a lot of stuff in the lab like that. And then I produce instruments to commission. At the moment, for example, I’ve been commissioned to do further research into feedback clarinets, which I started to dabble with, and then somebody said, “Oh, I need you to concentrate on this project, here’s a bit of money, let me know how you get on.”
How does that work?
I’m working with a person who has a year-long funded research post themselves, and they are already working with a clarinettist doing related stuff; both of these people saw the work I was doing with the feedback clarinet, and that resulted in what you might call seed funding; it’s not a huge project yet, but it’s enough money to buy bits and do it properly, test whether there’s something of interest there, potentially give that instrument to the clarinettist to try out, those sorts of levels of development. We’ll see at that point whether there’s something good to be had out of that or not.
Is that another mechanical project?
No, it isn’t. It uses audio feedback basically. My work over the last five years has predominantly been acoustic, mechanical instruments. There are a lot of aspects to making those sorts of instruments that will veer off into other areas. The other commission that I’m working on at the moment is to build an acoustic modular synth.
I’ve been commissioned to build a musical instrument, record an album with it, and release it on a label. And the label have commissioned it entirely. It’s going to be my instrument, in the end, to own and play, so, therefore, there’s a lot of time going into building something really decent. It’s basically a modular synth format but all of the modules are acoustic sound-making or shaping devices.
There are a number of aspects to that. One is that I started out mostly building synthesisers from scratch. I got into that from a route that most people do, which is circuit bending. I did a lot of circuit bending, to the point where I could design some circuits and build some synths, and then I think really I plateaued in terms of what I was able to make with my knowledge that I thought was interesting.
I kept coming up against barriers in terms of the functionality that I wanted to have in a synth, but I had a lack of understanding of the electronics to make that happen.
I then started applying many of the principles of electronic music to acoustic instrument design. And finding that with a mechanical sequencer, for example, I can get it to do what I want it to do without worrying about some weird thing that’s going on in the electronics inside it. I can physically adapt a thing that sticks out of it to make it do something different.
I’m not really the sort of maker who can just draw something and know that it’s going to work. I tend to scribble a version of something, and go and build a rudimentary version of it one way or another. It might be that I’m using rapid prototyping, or it might be that I’m chopping up some bits of wood – put it together, test it, then realise what the problems are with it, fix it, re-work it, and keep doing that a couple of times until I’m happy with it. The Mammoth Beat Organ has gone through that process and continues to go through that process.
We [Sam and co-creator Graham Dunning] meet quite regularly to adapt the way that it works. Firstly it was a means to an end, where I could physically change something, and it would change the sound. But then I realised two things: one is that it’s immediately much more visually engaging and obvious what the performer is doing, which is something that I find more engaging when I’m at a gig – I like to see that somebody’s doing something, so that’s helpful.
And also, I soon realised that it’s a relatively lesser-exploited area. It’s much, much easier to go and buy a sampler, looper, etc. off the shelf than it is to build your own out of mechanical systems. And so fewer people do it, so it means it’s possible for me to stand out more as somebody who does that sort of thing. And then I plough hours and hours, and years and years, into understanding musical systems and acoustic systems, and things like that, to differentiate my work, and that’s how I’ve ended up where I am.
Ah, the old ‘hours of hard work’ trick! Have you always been an instrument maker?
No, I started a web design company when I left university with two friends. At that point, I was very much making electronic music. I would perform live, with a hardware setup, but it was always pushed to the fringes of what I was doing. At one point our business got big enough to have a load of full-time employees, and at that point, you’re just working your ass off running a business.
You don’t really have much free time to do anything creative, beyond what you’re doing in your business. It all got pushed to the sidelines for years. I would occasionally do gigs if I could muster enough of a set to do that.
It really got to a point where me and my colleagues, after seven or eight years, asked ourselves, ‘what are we doing this amount of work for, without a lot of creative aspects anymore’, and we downsized. We went back to just two of the directors of the company, and it was a pretty massive moment in many ways.
Emotionally it was quite taxing, but that freed up time for us to do in our spare time the things that we did prior to running the business. Since then, I got into synths, circuit bending, and building synths, and
using those in my live sets.
That was maybe 16 years ago. In the end, having downsized to just two, I left the company to do what I do now full time; that was about ten years ago – building musical instruments for myself and for other people.
It was a leap into the unknown, but it was one that I took very steadily – that tends to be my approach. Everyone knew I was leaving for about four or five years before I left, and I saved money for that four or five years so that, in the period when I didn’t have any work, I’d be able to live. It’s worked out OK, because I’ve managed to sustain it.
Nowadays it’s much more a self- sustaining thing, but it takes a while to bed in.
There seems to be a philosophical divide between those people who can jump in on Monday and say ‘this will be a success’, and the type of person who does things as gradually as possible.
I do actually provide this as a piece of advice to anyone thinking about setting up a business: when you’ve got very few constraints, just going for it is a perfectly valid approach. The idea that business people out there know what they’re doing is very overrated. I think most of them are just trying something out, seeing if it works or not, and then changing it if it doesn’t work, and carrying on if it does.
Your work all looks completely different. Every piece has a different aesthetic, different materials, a different type to everything. Is that something you do on purpose?
I think it’s something that works against me some of the time, to be honest. There’s definitely something to be said for having a house style that people can buy into. I definitely don’t have that.
It isn’t something I do deliberately... everything that I do is driven by the physical requirement of the thing. The fact that the Mammoth Beat Organ is made out of the quality ply that it is because, as a base unit, it needs to be able to run these large machine bearings that give a rigidity and a structure to the thing.
Something like the Giant Feedback Organ – it was really about what system exists out there. That often informs what I do: what’s already out there.
It means I don’t have to commission somebody to build me some pipes at the right scale. Where can I get them and are they light enough?
In the case of the Giant Feedback Organ, I knew I needed to get them on the roof of my van, and I knew they had to be available in various different sizes. If it achieves the sound goals and the system goals, I’ll go with pretty much anything visually. In many ways it would have been lovely for the Giant Feedback Organ to be built out of beautiful straight tubes from something else, but A) there wasn’t the money, and B) you just can’t do that up from nothing; you have to scale to that sort of change.
