Metal Machine Musik

[metalmachinemusik]

Day 4

I got some rest and am back to my subjectively charming self.

First I would like to offer my congratulations to Du Yun, as it was announced today that she had won the Pulitzer Prize in music for her piece Angel’s Bones. Such a lovely surprise, for such a brilliant star in modern classical music. I first became aware of her in 2010 during Third Practice, the electroacoustic festival held at the University of Richmond and hosted by eighth blackbird. Her piece for solo cello, San, completely captivated me, and I’ve followed her career since. I saw her at MATA last year, and I was too nervous to talk to her, afraid that I would spill my fan-girlness on her nice dress.

Side note: 4 of the past 8 Pulitzer Prize for Music winners have been women. In the preceding (nearly) 70 years, there were 3 female winners TOTAL. I’m now feeling a combination of Hell Yes with About Goddamn Time.

Today I started on the second bowl. This time I used the narrower end of the rubber mallet to make a perimeter within the bowl to signify where the lip will be, with the hopes that this disc would not become Pringle #2.

Instead it became Tostada #1.

This photo was taken at a strategic angle so that you can’t see the mild stirrings of a Pringle yearning to break free. I also turned it upside down so that you can’t see the janky, slightly up-curved edges. I know, I’m practically Wee Gee.

Actually, it looks a bit like the moon.

I work the Tostada through the English wheel for a while, until it gets a uniform curve to it and is stretched a bit.

Here’s what the Tostada looks like when compared to the Bowl Formerly Known As Pringle.

Again, the English wheel doesn’t create that sharp of a curve, but I’m hoping that the planishing hammer will give me a hand with that. I learned my lesson from the first bowl, and instead of manually pulling at the metal sharply downward whilst in the planishing hammer, I’m going to be more chill and let the machine do a lot of the work for me, gently moving and manipulating the bowl. This whole process took about an hour.

When I cut out the circles, I intentionally made the second one smaller. I did this because I had the intention of putting a decorative bead around the edge of the top (larger) one to hide the uneven edges, which would slightly fold the outer edge downward, and a smaller bottom bowl would nestle in there. As I started working with the grinder more, I got better with maintaining a consistent grind, and when I placed the two bowls the way I’m planning to weld them, I wasn’t happy with the overall effect.

So I started over. On the second bowl, that is. I am still saving it for a later project, where I make a slightly smaller waterphone.

Luckily I still have half a sheet of steel.

Measure, and then back into the straight shear...

And, of course, the southern gothic Miss Havisham herself, Beverly Shear.

Ems and I have been texting an exquisite corpse character study of Beverly Shear. Ems mentioned her ‘eagle eye,’ which, I was quick to point out, was obviously glass. She went the route of there literally being a picture of an eagle for the pupil of her glass eye, whereas I went the more macabre route of it literally being the eye of an eagle, that she had stolen from a taxidermied eagle. This eagle had stolen her pet chicken (’Poor Clucky. That damn eagle done plucked her up from out the yard’), and Beverly had tried to save her, tripped, and fell on a stick. And that’s how she lost the eye. Beverly then broke into the town hall during church one Sunday, saw the eagle, and muttered under her breath, ‘Pa always said an eye for an eye.’

Note to Ems: I’m sure no one else will think this is funny. At least we have each other.

Second note to Ems: She can be a character in the Colonel Sanders biopic! She drives by a KFC, gets triggered (’Poor Clucky, may she rest in peace!’), and burns it to the ground. We can take some artistic liberties with the script.

Anyway. I have another disc now. 20 minutes, from measuring to finish.

[metalmachinemusik]

Day 3-ish

I find it interesting over the course of writing the blog, how two different voices are emerging: The voice of the process and the voice of the reflection. The process is simple, straight-forward, matter-of-fact. ‘I use this tool to perform this function.’ Whereas the music portion takes on a much more philosophical discourse. And there’s room for that discussion, created in the wake of distance and leisure. The process, the task at hand, does not have space for such philosophy; it is mere cause & effect.

The past couple of days have been somewhat slow, waterphone-wise, and I didn’t get much work in on Friday and Saturday. Friday afternoon John and I drove to Philly to see Xiu Xiu. 6 hours each way, but I see Jamie so rarely that to get a hug and in-person conversation with him is worth some travel. John, Jamie, Shayna, and I were able to get a quick dinner together, and the show was spectacular: lively, soft, intense. Fantastic swagger. Interesting and unexpected song selection (so wonderful to finally hear my favorite Shwee song, ‘Don Diasco,’ live and ‘I Luv Abortion’ alone was worth the drive).  The most fun I’ve had at a show in recent memory. Toward the end of the set, Jamie said, ‘This next song is dedicated to Sadie Powers,’ and they played a cover of ZZ Top’s ‘Sharp Dressed Man.’

Well played, sir.

John and I drove back that night, with the aid of chocolate-covered espresso beans (thanks for the tip, Greta!) and the Lost Highway soundtrack. We got in at 5:30 am, I passed out for a few hours, and then went into work at 3 pm.

My brain was a bit mush, and with throwing my sleep schedule off like that, I’m grateful I didn’t get a full-blown migraine/HM episode.

Of course, I worked on the steel bowl some more. But I didn’t want to push myself physically. (My leg wasn’t working right, and I had to drag it quite a bit. HM is stupid. PSA: Please avoid developing a genetic seizure disorder if you can help it.)

You can see that the lip is still not consistent and isn’t flush with the table. This required a small bit of hammering with the rawhide mallet, though again, I didn’t physically push myself, and when I started to get tired, I moved on to the planishing hammer.

Having mobility issues forces one to come to accept slowness as a state of being. The impulse, at least for me, is to give into the excitement of a new idea or project, and want to accomplish it as quickly as possible so that I can partake of whatever it is I’ve created. The curved bit on the bottom of the planishing hammer isn’t as steep as I’d like it to be, and it’s the only one I have access to, so before I kind of manhandled the steel to try and get it to curve more. The uneven lip is a result of uneven pressure being applied downwardly (*cough* by me manually *cough*), and so to remedy it requires time and patience. As in literally just standing there and holding the piece and letting the machine do the bulk of the work.

It’s not sexy, but at least I had Suicide.

Jonathan from Shearwater said he finds Suicide unsettling, in that it sounds like ‘pure self loathing.’ I don’t agree. Sure, the beats are hard and fast, the droning synths have an eeriness to them, and Alan Vega was quite the provocateur with his yelpings and screams. But there’s nothing to indicate self hatred in the lyrics. ‘Ghostrider’ is about Vega’s favorite comic book. While the lyrical content is unflinching and sometimes violent, the music to me seems to be a direct response to living in urban poverty in America. Work all day for scraps and still can’t get by, share a sandwich for a meal. ‘America, America is killing its youth,’ Vega croons in ‘Rocket USA.’ That’s not self loathing; those are just the socioeconomic cards you’ve been dealt, and it is reasonable to externalize that frustration and hopelessnes in a caustic way, in realizing that one has been born into a society that twists people into deformed ghostly shells of themselves in order to survive.

This is ‘Sussudio.’

Great, great song.

After about an hour of slowly moving the bowl around in the planishing hammer,  I had developed a zen-like calm. And the curve is more uniform, thus giving it more uniform pitch and harmonics, with a clearly-defined lip.

I also ground the edges to make them not-ugly.

(Note Beverly Shear looming in the background, her eagle eye always watchful.)

Onto the welding jacket.

Angelfire is a line of welding apparel that is designed specifically for the female frame. Not that I’m into that, as heteronormative as you can get with welding gear, but what it means for me is that they create things that are small enough to fit my Lilliputian torso.

This color has no place in my life, except for maybe as chocolate ice cream.

Luckily, there are stores, and they sell dye. Dyeing fabric a solid color is a great way to not do a lot but feel that you’ve accomplished something. And you can pretend you’re on Project Runway. ‘I’ve never done this before.’ ‘I hope it doesn’t turn out terrible.’ ‘I’ve wasted the afternoon dyeing fabric. I haven’t even started on my dress.’ ‘[unconvinced tone] I kinda like it.’

What do you mean, I have to stir this non-stop for 30-60 minutes?

Suddenly this has become less ‘make it work!’ and more Charlie Bucket’s mom.

Keep stirring!

Ah! Much better...though still kind of brown. *Sigh*

[metalmachinemusik]

Day 2

I’m beginning to see why waterphones are so expensive. I’ve spent about $100 on materials, and I can reasonably expect to get two waterphones out of them. But as for the labor...dear lord...

Today I got to utilize the English Wheel and the planishing hammer, two torture devices that Foucault touched upon in Discipline and Punish. At the moment my back and shoulders are pretty sore (my arms seem to have been mercifully spared), so who knows, perhaps the pain is doing its part to cleanse my soul or something.

So we left off with two discs:

For this part of the process, I’ve chosen to listen to Kate Tempest’s Let Them Eat Chaos. Not just for the frustration and sense of urgency within the lyrics (which would lend themselves quite well to the physicality of the task at hand), but the beats are down tempo and hard enough to get me into a decent rhythm. ‘Ketamine For Breakfast’ and ‘Grubby’ are solid tracks for this endeavor. Side note: I’m taking the bus to see her perform in DC next week, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be on the short list of Performance of the Year. It’s a tall order, as The Necks last month gave the best performance I’ve seen since Neubauten 2 years ago, but I have faith.

There’s a giant sandbag under the disc I’ve chosen to work with, as it will absorb some of the shock and will allow for me to shape the metal. I’m not a huge fan of the mallet -- which is used to help stretch the metal before being placed in the English wheel, as well as shape it -- as it’s made of rubber, so there’s some give, and there’s not enough weight in the head to give a petite weakling like me enough power to make a significant dent (heh) in 16 gauge steel, which is a great deal thicker and more substantial than the aluminum I’ve hammered before.

I ended up with a giant metal Pringle.

Note: This is not the desired result.

Fuck it. I’m tired of hammering, so I throw it on the English wheel to let a machine do some of the work for me. Or so I thought.

There’s a misconception in our modern connotations that ‘machine’ means ‘will do all the work for you.’ In fact, it means ‘maybe some help? idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯‘

Here’s the English wheel with my Pringle inside:

The machine has two rollers, one on top of the metal and one below. The one on the bottom is convex, so as one rolls the sheet over it, it will begin to bowl. There are different bottom rollers that have different pitches to create certain bowl shapes. The roller on the top adds pressure, which allows the metal to be stretched so that it maintains its diameter whilst creating more surface area that will allow it to bowl. One tightens the rollers with a foot-powered pirate ship wheel:

Moving the metal sheet around to create a bowl is completely done by hand. I'd hoped that the more uniform pressure from the machine will help to turn my Pringle into a more desired bowl-shape.

Recommended listening: Kate Tempest - ‘Lionmouth Door Knocker,’ ‘Pictures on a Screen,’ ‘Tunnel Vision.’

I end up with a smooth, shiny Pringle.

I had a suspicion that I would have to hammer the underside of the Pringle to flatten it out and then start, not quite from scratch, but with a more flattened piece than was current. So I took 10-minute break and drank some water.

As I rested, I started chatting with Mark, who’s one of my favorite people at the shop. He used to drive tractor trailers and now trains other people for their certifications and also runs a program for at-risk youth.

Mark is not a small man. He was dressed in his typical uniform of brown sweatpants and a dirty, slightly different-shade-of-brown t-shirt, which matches his arms covered in $30 tattoos. He usually tops the look off with a large, heavy leather vest covered in massive motorcycle club patches and kinky hair that looks like it belongs to a homeless super villain and a goatee to match.

‘I can’t believe you let him leave the house with his hair lookin like that,’ I once joked with his wife.

‘Oh, don’t worry, hon, I’m cuttin it tonight,’ she replied with a smirk.

I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember Mark’s wife’s name, except that it starts with ‘Juh’ and ends in ‘uh.’ She’s what you’d get if one managed to combine Eartha Kitt with Oprah and that personhood could somehow be contained within a five-foot firecracker.

Mark revealed to me that whenever she sees a jogger, even in the sub-freezing coldness that haunts your bones of a Pittsburgh winter, she’ll still roll down her window and shout, ‘YOU’RE STILL GON DIE!’ and cackle as she speeds away.

My hero.

The other day I came into the shop to see that Mark had parked his chopper inside by the milling machine, and I have suspicions it was because he hadn’t been able to find a parking spot out front.

He asked me what I’m working on. ‘A waterphone,’ I reply.

‘That’s badass,’ he said.

“I have no idea what I’m doing.’

‘That’s still badass,’ he said. ‘You’re in there hittin metal. S’awesome. You know what I’m bout to do? I’m bout to use the embroidery machine to make some lace.’

We chat for a couple more minutes, and then it’s back to work. This time I listen to Jenny Hval’s Viscera, her first album under her own name. I think Hval is one of the most relevant artists today. Her work is intense and moving, and like Tempest, her work focuses on what it means to inhabit a corporeal form during this time of economic, political, and social uncertainty, what is the cost of existence on the mind and body. However, whereas Tempest is a Mike Leigh-style Kitchen Sink meets Al-Jazeera, Hval is performing an autopsy, cutting into the flesh with a scalpel, pulling back the skin to reveal an interconnected network of cogs labeled things like Capitalism, The Body, Power, Connection, Silence, Desire. She stares for a moment and whispers, ‘Fascinating,’ her tone betraying a tinge of boredom at her utter lack of surprise. (’Tant pis. Wait, what’s under here?’)

Using a rawhide hammer that I have for leather working -- which will shape the metal without stretching it -- I was able to quickly flatten the Pringle, run it back through the English wheel, and then I tried my hand at the planishing hammer.

The planishing hammer is another tool that is difficult to describe, so here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW9SAro11cE

I took my own video, but I can’t figure out how to load it directly onto Tumblr, and with the amount of time it would take to load it onto Youtube and then link it...It’s pretty much the same thing.

Basically it’s a mechanical hammer that hits several hundred times per minute. Like the English wheel, there’s a curved bit on the underside that will help create a bowl shape. It’s really fucking loud, so much so that when I’m using it and not listening to music (wait, what?), I use earplugs and industrial over-ear protection. It brings the volume level down to about 80 db.

I also took slo-mo video of it in action, and it sounds remarkably similar to the real-time.

The sound of the planishing hammer (with over-ear protection) works as a fantastic complement to Hval’s music.

Here’s what I ended up with:

SO much better than Pringle of Metal.

For comparison, here’s a side-by-side of today’s work and the untouched disc:

And the body of the condemned with her trophy:

A couple of notes:

1. Yes, you read that correctly. All that work for ONE bowl. That is 50% of bowls.

2. The first bowl isn’t even finished. I would like for there to be a steeper curve, which will require at least 2 more hours of work.

3. This took me 2.5 hours. I’m still learning the equipment and figuring out the process, and I am not a physically strong human.

4. The bowl in its current form has a lovely tone, and I brought it into the studio for a Triptychs recording session, where John and I used it to make sounds with mallets and vibrators. We have a very nose-to-tail operation when it comes to sound creation.

Aside: My welding jacket arrived today. It looked black on the web site.

It is not black.

[metalmachinemusik]

Day 1

I picked up a sheet of 24″x24″ 16 gauge stainless steel sheet metal from Home Depot.

I prefer Home Depot for its lack of customer service, because it means that I’m not being mansplained to, and it’s on the way to the workshop.

I’m using 16 gauge stainless steel for a couple of reasons:

1. I wanted a thin metal so that I could get my feet wet with manual tools, and 16 gauge is the maximum thickness many of these tools will accept.

2. The tube I found is 16 gauge stainless. (More on that later.)

3. I am not confident enough with my TIG welding to not guarantee that I won’t immediately turn a thinner-gauged metal into a molten ball of sadness.

I also stopped by Rite Aid to get some alcohol to clean the metal.

Can we please take a second to figure out what the hell is going on here?

Like what...what even? Am I supposed to drink it? Will it make my wound minty fresh? Will positive association with the scent sooth a pain that cannot be healed?

These questions are best left to the philosophers.

I cleaned the sheet with rubbing alcohol and a rag. Using a compass, I drew 2 circles on the sheet. Luckily, both circles only take up half the sheet, which means that I have enough material to possibly make 2 waterphones. I chose this size for the circle because it’s the maximum diameter I can get with the compass available to me. Side note: One circle is slightly smaller. More on that later.

I also drew a smaller circle within each of the larger circles to mark off where the lip will be when I mold them into bowls.

Using a straight shear, I cut the entire sheet in half, then in half again.

Straight shear:

Yes, that insanely long thing is the lever. I probably could have made my life easier if I had used the hydraulic shear, but I haven’t learned how to use it yet, and I’ve been impatient to get this project started.

Ta da!

These edges are extremely sharp. I wear work gloves for 1. protection 2. grip, and 3. mild OCD, otherwise I would be washing my hands every five minutes. I used metal files to file down the edges a bit, but a shard still managed to stab me through my glove.

This was bound to happen sooner or later.

The shop has many first aid kits on the premises. This would have been a perfect time to find out the mystery of the wintergreen rubbing alcohol, but unfortunately I had purchased the practical OG 91%, and I must say that it did a fantastic job of cleaning this wound.

It’s like it never happened!

Next up was the Beverly shear, which cuts metal on a curve. I rather like this piece of equipment because it sounds like a character from a Flannery O’Connor short story. Beverly Shear. Her cold gaze could make bold men cower, before cutting them down. She’d have none of that.

After cutting out the metal boobs, I mean circles...

...I ground down the sharp edges with a grinder. Even though grinding metal looks fantastic with sparks flying, I didn’t get any photos because I was working alone, and it’s quite dangerous to be distracted whilst sanding. Something could easily get caught (I removed my gloves), and you could be dragged into the machine, and I’m not trying lose fingers/hands, like, ever. (It would put a serious damper on my ironing game.)

All this took me close to 90 minutes, most of which was measuring and prep.

Tomorrow I will channel the anxiety and existential dread that comes with existing in an imperialist country during a time of advanced capitalism into hitting metal with hammers.

Listening: The amazing Richmond band Manzara (https://manzara.bandcamp.com). Michael Harl has one of my favorite voices ever. Think Clinic’s Ade Blackburn meets early PiL John Lydon. The tone of his 74(?) Silvertone makes me weak in the knees. This seguewayed into listening to another of Harl’s bands, Canary Oh Canary (https://canaryohcanary.bandcamp.com/), which was my favorite Richmond band when they were still together (shakes fist at cruel fate). Wonderful patience in their compositions and transcendent live performances. The payoff in ‘Catholic’ after the slow build (starting at 2:30) is brutal. Toward the end of Canary’s flight, they sounded like the fully-realized synthesis of Swans-meets-Fugazi-meets-Suicide, and while I may never fully recover from their breakup, I’m grateful to have witnessed such a truly great band.

I leave you with a photo of the Beverly shear.

Miz Beverly Shear. You best be mindin your own when she comes round.

[metalmachinemusik]

Intro

Hi! Thanks for dropping by, and welcome to my musical instrument fabrication blog.

A little bit about me: My name is Sadie Powers, and I live in Pittsburgh. I’m a life-long musician and artisan, and I currently compose and perform as a member of the ambient electroacoustic duo Triptychs (http://www.soundcloud.com/triptychs) and play bass in the indie rock band Shearwater (Google).

I have experience restoring wood antiques and porcelain and working with leather, but building instruments is something I haven’t yet done but have always wanted to (unless you count that pizza box which I managed to tune and play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ when I was 12).

I’ve recently started working with metal and am now attempting to make my first instrument, a waterphone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foSJstDFDfg), which I’m hoping to use in future Triptychs compositions. ‘Why a waterphone?’ you ask. Because my band mate John said, ‘I’ve always wanted a waterphone,’ and I said, ‘I think I can make that happen.’

This blog is to serve as documentation for the process and the failures, at the request of the wonderful Emily Lee. I’m personally a huge fan of failure during the creative process, as it often leads to new discoveries. While I’ve projected the process of waterphone fabrication many times and have probably built close to 20 waterphones in my head, there are a couple of points where I come to a fork, and we’ll have to see what happens when we get there.

To quote Calvin and Hobbes, ‘Let’s go exploring!’

Current listening: Cocteau Twins, ‘Heaven Or Las Vegas’