LP – staalplaat

The history of the mechanical music machines of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is well known also among the audience of non-specialists and its success is mostly due to the originality and quality of instruments, as the orchestrion, cylinder organs, music boxes, automatons, roll organs and melodic pianos, as well as various types of pianos. Maybe currently the fact that there is still someone who focuses on the “music machines”, and also “autonomous”, is not so known, but there are Bosch & Simons to turn on the lights on this suggestive music research field, with their entire background of shows, concerts and theatre productions, together with their propensity to the technology and the study of resonances due to mechanical vibrations. Their main interest is not the amplification of an only frequency, but the creation of a complex system where several frequencies influence each other to produce some unstable balances, favoring the mechanism where every minimal change might start up unpredictable processes. In the duo installments, the mechanical parts, mostly electronic engines, are mainly run by a computer, although what was programmed only partially determines the final result. Then, the power of the sounds prevails on everything, catching our attention, even if in the exhibitions of their projects the “sculptural” component of the actions is also clear for all to see, the relationship with the spaces and how the objects are used in this game of random effects. The range of the materials Bosch & Simons uses is very broad and continuously changes for each project they are involved in, with the recovery of the specific suggestions of the places and cultures they are experiencing at that moment. For example, in “The Krachtgever”, there are several wooden boxes joined together by metal springs, both horizontally and vertically, with a computer controlling oscillating motors attached to the boxes. The “physical” driving frequencies of this apparatus are so closely related, that the movements and sounds created by the installation can change almost imperceptibly from order to chaos and vice versa. “Cantan un Huevo” is an hallucinatory saraband of jugs, bottles, and other pieces of glass on constant movement, strained by some swinging motors always computer controlled. The last track, Was der Wind zum Klingen Bringt”, comes from one of the first duo installations, dating back to the end of the eighties, a project that perhaps was not so sophisticated according to the elements on play, but acoustically powerful as well. Bosch & Simons tend to underline that “in creative processes, which are not linear at all, there are special moments in which certain sudden changes lead to giant steps towards solutions”, clearly meaning for the solutions some particular and significant plots who are part of the same processes.

 

Bosch & Simons – Three Music Machines