This is a great profile of Eric Singer, of LEMUR, and his robotic and strange musical instruments. Machines that make music, who would have thought you’d find those here?

(via Synthtopia)

Here is a more in-depth video about Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion Tour. In it, you can see more of the variety of instruments LEMUR has constructed for Metheny, and you can see the awesome processing that allows him to play a xylophone with his guitar, live. (Yeah, whoa.)

It’s all really interesting stuff, and exciting for me personally to see this potential resurgence of explicitly “mechanical” music.

Back when I was looking up more about orchestrions, I stumbled across a written teaser for Pat Metheny’s upcoming Orchestrion Tour. Reminiscing about the automatic instruments he saw as a child, he wanted to create a “modern” orchestrion and take it on tour with him. Well, there is a video now, and with the folks from LEMUR, he’s got a prototype. It appears to play run-of-the-mill smooth jazz, which is disappointing for some commenters over at Create Digital Music, but I am definitely impressed by the abilities of these contraptions at making something actually sound somewhat “smooth” (even if that wouldn’t be my genre of choice either). That said, I agree with the commenter over there who wants these robots to do more than play smooth jazz; maybe after some live action, Metheny will let them take advantage of their robot capabilities more thoroughly.

Are we about to enter some crazy world where I actually want Pat Metheny tickets?

(via Create Digital Music)