10 Homemade Musical Instruments That Rocked The World

Close-up of Bo Diddley's Gretsch Guitar 

"From Bo Diddley to Björk, musicians have often created their own homemade musical instruments. Such bespoke pieces of equipment may sometimes be bizarre, but they’ve helped artists realize the sounds in their head when nothing else on earth could. Here we present 10 of the most iconic and interesting homemade musical instruments of all time. Let us know in the comments if there are any other favorites you like. ... The Cigar-Box Guitar: When The Beatles arrived in the United States, in 1964, John Lennon was asked, 'What are you most looking forward to seeing here in America, John?' He replied instantly, 'Bo Diddley!' Diddley, who had hits for Chess Records in the 50s, fashioned homemade guitars from cigar boxes (something sharecroppers had done to make a cheap instrument), an old blues tradition that gave his signature instrument its distinctive rectangular shape. ..."

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Over Man: On Nietzsche and our crisis of masculinity


"Like many others, I first read Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenage boy. In the fall of 2001, at the age of fifteen, I learned that I was to have brain surgery, and I needed reading material for the recovery period. In preparation for a month or so spent largely in bed, I browsed the Barnes & Noble philosophy shelves and selected Plato’s Symposium and Republic and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These texts were my first foray into philosophy. Post-surgery, when I could do little but read, Plato and Nietzsche competed for my affection. Nietzsche won. Plenty of authors had been presented to me as radical or revolutionary voices, but only with Nietzsche did the act of reading itself feel thrillingly subversive. ..."
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A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s


"Audio cassette tapes first appeared on the market in the early nineteen-sixties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dominate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by having made it possible not just to listen to their albums of choice on the go, but also to collect and trade their own custom-assembled listening experiences. By the eighties, blank tapes had become a household necessity on the order of batteries or toilet paper for such consumers — and just as with those frequently replenished products, everyone seemed to have their favorite brand. ... Somewhat improbably, in this age where even home CD-burning has been displaced by near-instantaneous streaming and downloading of digital music, the cassette tape has made something of a comeback. The near-mythological allure of the mixtape has only grown in recent years, during which artists both minor and major have put out cassette releases — and in some cases, cassette-only releases.  ..."


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Guillaume de Machaut: Remede de Fortune - Blue Heron (2022)


"From Cicero to Shakespeare to the television game show Wheel of Fortune, the figure of Lady Fortuna—the ancient Roman goddess of luck and chance—has been an enduring literary and cultural symbol for over two millennia. In Guillaume de Machaut’s (1300-1377) long-form narrative poem, Le remède de fortune (The Remedy for Fortune), the Lady personifies capricious love, a force which, like luck, subjects those in its orbit to the mercy of unseen forces. Machaut’s dit, including its seven lyric poems set to music, is now a collaborative project between two of America’s leading historically informed ensembles, Blue Heron and Les Délices. The partnership has resulted in a captivating new album, Remede de Fortune, released on the Blue Heron label. ..."




Ci commence Remede de Fortune’ (Illustration from Machaut MS C, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France)
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When Art Evolves, We Evolve: The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront


"Cisco Bradley's The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) chronicles a vital and now-vanished facet of American musical and cultural history in New York City from the mid-1980s to 2015. The book investigates how, amid hypercommercialism and mutating audio technologies, bold musicians, expert and amateur alike, impelled by a big-hearted DIY ethos, made new, imaginative music as public, independent, and free as possible by exploiting urban niches and cultural interstices, using dive bars, loft spaces, garages, warehouses, restaurants, and cafés as musical laboratories for experiments in sound, installation, and performance. A densely layered, kaleidoscopic musicological treatise, Williamsburg draws on hundreds of interviews, articles, essays, and recordings to describe the historical impact of a daunting array of musicians, ensembles, musical genres, stylistic innovations, and movements, and the Northern Brooklyn locales that fostered them. It was a singular era propelled by a relentless quest for the new and different—and by musicians’ struggles to survive the vicissitudes of the marketplace. ..."



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The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas - Lukas De Clerck


"... Lukas de Clerck explores a niche of archaeological research in music; the aulos is a historical Greek instrument that Lukas analyzed and reinterpreted by a luthier in modern times—navigating this impression as an artwork or living sculptural object, as there is an absence of historical partitions or written information about how to recreate technique on the instrument. Lukas de Clerck has interpreted information from the rare archaeological resources and visual art of the classical period to recreate both playing technique and possible sound timbres with the instrument. With his contemporary approach to drone, post-minimalist music, and contemporary folk, we find a deeply satisfying and compelling, even playful set of songs, timbral exercises and compositions. ..."





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Literary World: New York publishing in the late-aughts


"... Late at night, staring out at the rooftop skyline of the magazine offices at 666 Broadway—Lewis Lapham's magazine— I felt like I could catch a glimmer of the romantic previous world, the world of cluttered bookshelves and small offices and sincere, tweedy editor-intellectuals—Malcolm Cowley's world, Horace Greeley's world. It was in the process of disappearing as I arrived, but a little bit of it was still there. What did I want exactly? To become a real writer, a real literary person. I wanted to get out of the inbred, low-expectations punk-zine world and transition into the high-stakes, high-expectations world of capital-M Magazines and real books. I made literary zines, zines that people liked—strangers wrote me endless handwritten letters, spilling their guts. But it wasn't enough. I wanted more. ..."

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The filmmakers Steve Buscemi considers his favourite to work with


"Perhaps it’s the physical specificity of Steve Buscemi that has led him to acquiring such unique roles in the world of cinema and television. However, despite the striking look of the New York City-born actor, he certainly wouldn’t have achieved his undoubted success were it not for his actual prowess and talent as a performer. A handful of early roles in Parting Glances and Mystery Train well Buscemi well on his way, but it was his effort in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs that announced him as a serious talent. Before long, Buscemi was highly sought after and began delivering some of the most memorable character turns in contemporary cinema. ..."

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How the Weimar Republic’s Hyperinflation Transformed Gender Relations in Germany

Otto Dix, Metropolis (1928). 

"One of the social dividends of post-war inflation in Weimar Germany was greater independence for women. It’s no coincidence that the locus for this was on the dance floor. The dance-hall clientele now included a type of customer who had never been seen before: unaccompanied women. Most of these were young shorthand typists and secretaries who visited the clubs alone or with girlfriends. To the puzzled observer from more conservative circles, or indeed from the provinces, this type of behavior was unheard of, and seemed dangerously close to prostitution. Many girls came from the provinces to Berlin, eager to breathe the balmy air of freedom. ..."




Georg Scholz, War Veterans' Association (1922)
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A House That Memorializes a Vanished New York

A Lawrence Weiner text painting across the facade of what was once the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks’s Manhattan townhouse. 
 
"In October 1976, the artists Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian Buczak met at a SoHo loft party. Hendricks, then 45, was associated with the Fluxus movement, a loose affiliation of 1960s conceptual artists, including Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Yoko Ono, who rejected traditional practices like abstract painting in favor of elaborate performances. Five years earlier, he’d co-starred in a notable one: In the summer of 1971, Hendricks and his wife of 10 years, the artist Nye Ffarrabas (then Bici Forbes), who were both gay, staged a piece called 'Flux Divorce,' which involved taking a chain saw to their marriage bed and dividing the entryway to their home with barbed wire. ..." 

NY Times

Phillip Ward, the executor of the actor and writer Quentin Crisp’s estate, now resides in what was once Hendricks’s children’s room.
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BSA Images Of The Week: 09.01.24

Joe Iurato and Logan Hicks. Detail. Wooden Walls Project. Asbury Park, NJ.

"In the past two decades, Asbury Park, New Jersey, has undergone a dramatic transformation, evolving from a struggling, economically challenged city into a pleasantly eclectic one. This shift, driven by gentrification, has attracted a wealthier demographic, including professionals and artists from nearby New York City, drawn by affordable housing, a revitalized waterfront, and the promise of a burgeoning cultural scene. For many, it has become a trendy, artistic destination. The Wooden Walls Project, launched in 2015, has been central to its evolution, thanks to Jenn Hampton and Porkchop of Parlor Gallery. A slew of artists—officially and unofficially curated— have regaled Asbury Park with many large-scale murals and street art installations. ..."
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Solastalgia - Altus (2024)


"Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher, coined the term 'solastalgia,' which he defines as 'the homesickness we feel while still at home.' It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change—the agony and desire we experience when we realize the world around us is changing. Solastalgia ventures deep within Altus' emotive, cinematic work intermixed with ambient and modern classical motifs, akin to City of Ashes (2009) and Hidden Realms and Vacant Spaces (2022). ..."


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Intifada: On Being an Arabic Literature Professor in a Time of Genocide


"This is a line of poetry by the Arab poet al-Harith ibn Hilliza, composed more than 1400 years ago. This is the tradition to which Palestine and Palestinian literature belong. Life, never easy for the noble and the just, is not worth living without dignity, he tells us. The line has been ringing in my ears for the past ten months. How difficult and treacherous our paths are, always, within this country and its institutions. We who strive to study Arabic literature with integrity. We who refuse to distort ourselves into the roles assigned to us by the racist tokenizing system of American academia. We who are perpetual guests in our fields of expertise, native informants, colorful faces to revamp the image of the colonial enterprise. We, the ceaselessly other, the continuously suspect. ..."





The First Intifada in the Gaza Strip, 1987. 
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A Scientist’s Quest to Decode Vermeer’s True Colours


"When Frederik Vanmeert stands in front of a Johannes Vermeer painting, the temptation to go close is irresistible. In Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, where he works as a heritage scientist, it’s not hard to satisfy this craving for intimacy; patrons are free to get personal with the art. Viewers of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch can approach within a metre of the canvas, while the museum’s four Vermeers, hanging nearby, offer an even more intimate experience. Viewers may, if the moment moves them, lean in within centimetres, though the security guard posted nearby will likely wag a disapproving finger. Still, even millimetres are an interminable chasm for Vanmeert. He’s seen Vermeer’s work in finer detail than most—at the microscopic level, down to the crystal latticework of the pigments that structure the language of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter’s artistic vision. ..."
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Lêkê


"Lêkê are a type of plastic sandals popular in Ivory Coast, including as footwear for amateur soccer games. Lêkê are considered the national shoes of Ivory Coast, worn by people of all ages, including school children and adults. Amateur soccer players wear lêkê for their practicality on sandy pitches and dusty surfaces, citing their lightness, better fit, and comfort. The popularity of lêkê in Ivory Coast extends beyond sports, being worn at parties and other social events. While luxury brands like Gucci and Prada have created their own versions of jelly shoes, lêkê remain popular in Ivory Coast for both stylistic and practical reasons. ... In Ivory Coast, lêkê are not only worn for soccer but also represent a cultural symbol, with specific colors associated with national pride. Sales of Ivorian flag-colored lêkê sandals increased during the Africa Cup of Nations, but they saw a decline after the national team faced losses. 




Young players wearing lêkê in Abidjan, where worn soles and scars from the sandals’ metallic clasps are a point of pride.
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120 Years of New York’s Subterranean Literary Muse

"Within a day of its opening on Oct. 27, 1904, the New York City subway was already inspiring lyricism: The Times marveled at its 'olive-green woodwork, the unfamiliar air, the darkness alongside, and the sudden shooting into beautiful white stations like nothing that the elevated ever had.' That’s just one day. Give novelists 120 years of packed daily commutes, late night rides home from bars and restaurants, early morning trips to the beach, and now the subway isn’t just buried in the bedrock of Manhattan, it’s burrowed deep within New York novels of the last twelve decades, a source of wonder, despair, quotidian boredom. Join us as we ride alongside fictional characters plucked from the works of Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, Lee Child, James Baldwin and so many more. ..."


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How George Orwell Paved Noam Chomsky’s Path to Anarchism


"Unlike the many members of the left who captivated him as a young man — such as Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, and Bertrand Russell — Noam Chomsky himself did not come to left-libertarian or anarchist thinking as a result of his disillusionment with liberal thought. He quite literally started there. At a tender age, he had begun his search for information on contemporary left-libertarian movements, and did not abandon it. Among those figures he was drawn to, George Orwell is especially fascinating, both because of the impact that he had on a broad spectrum of society and the numerous contacts and acquaintances he had in the libertarian left. Chomsky refers to Orwell frequently in his political writings, and when one reads Orwell’s works, the reasons for his attraction to someone interested in the Spanish Civil War from an anarchist perspective become clear. ..."


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In Quebec’s Casse-Croûtes, Fast Food for a Short but Sweet Summer

The daytime line outside La Mollière.

"When newcomers to Canada, the Italian couple had discovered along Quebec’s country roads the joys of the casse-croûtes, the food shacks that lie dormant in the frozen landscape during winter and then burst to life during the all-too-short warm months. And so on a recent afternoon, the couple, Marta Grasso and Andrea La Monaca, sat side by side at a picnic table at one of these shacks, La Mollière, a lobster roll before him and a shrimp roll for her. A large blue sky spread out behind the casse-croûte, built on a promontory over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. ... La Mollière stirs back to life in May. The owners spend the next five months in a trailer behind the casse-croûte, no days off. ..."


A "guédille," or lobster roll, from La Mollière.
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Field Days (The Amanda Loops) - Fred Frith


"14 pieces originally written for dance and other practical situations, here reassigned and reconstructed for choreographer Amanda Miller and the Nederland Dans Theater.These are loop-based, textural, mood pieces, and invocations of spaces and landscapes, with some fine steel guitar playing. Mostly this is Fred multi-instrumenting, with pianist Daan Vanderwalle, percussionist Willie Wynant, the Arte Sax quartet and Lotte Anker, the Arditti Quartet, Kiku Day, occasional shakuhachi, and violinist/nykelharpist Karla Kihlstedt. Hit from the show: Desert Sundown. ..."


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Urban Narratives: Sebas Velasco Connects in Brixton With “A Lasting Place”


"In the dynamic urban landscape of London, Sebas Velasco has left his mark with a mural titled A Lasting Place at 12 Cobbett Street, Brixton. Born in Burgos, Spain, Velasco is renowned for his hyper-realistic style that captures the essence of urban environments. This mural, inspired by British musician Loyle Carner’s track 'A Lasting Place' from the album Hugo, depicts a young Brixton resident standing against the iconic train line. The cool, muted hues of London night are punctuated by the station’s warm glow, creating a dialogue between the individual and the city’s pulse. Velasco’s approach is deeply rooted in his environment. He involves a process of immersion in local culture, photographing the people and places that inspire his creativity. This mural, his first in London, blends his experiences in Brixton with spontaneous encounters that shape his work. ..."


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On Immigration, Harris and Democrats Walk a Delicate — and Harder — Line


"When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week at her party’s convention in Chicago, she sought to strike a delicate balance on the issue of immigration, promising to approach enforcement and security at the nation’s southern border as the prosecutor she once was, without abandoning the country’s values. ... It was the kind of equilibrium on the issue that Democrats had striven for all week — a leveling between calls for more officers and judges at the country’s southern border and a system that treats people humanely, between promises to uphold the law and rebukes of the fear-mongering over 'the other' that has permeated the national immigration debate. But the overall message on immigration from the Democratic Party in the past week, as it has been since Ms. Harris announced her candidacy last month, has been decidedly more hard-line than it has been in decades. ..."

The U.S.-Mexico border in June, as seen from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
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Ray's Pizza

Greenwich Village

"Ray's Pizza, and its many variations such as 'Ray's Original Pizza', 'Famous Ray's Pizza' and 'World-Famous Original Ray's Pizza', are the names of dozens of pizzerias in the New York City area that are generally completely independent (a few have multiple locations) but may have similar menus, signs, and logos. Ralph Cuomo opened the first Ray's Pizza, at 27 Prince Street in Little Italy, in 1959, named after his nickname 'Raffie'. In the 1960s he briefly owned a second Ray's Pizza, but sold it to Rosolino Mangano in 1964.  ... The confusion of various Ray's Pizzas is featured in a gag in the 1997 episode of The Simpsons 'The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson'. ...  In the episode 'The Maid' in the final season of Seinfeld, Kramer gets lost and calls Jerry for help. He tries to use a Ray's Pizza to describe where he is, but there is confusion over which one he might be seeing. ..."

End Nears for a Pizza Landmark
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In search of Monet’s wild landscapes: a glorious art adventure in central France

The ruins of Crozant castle, the loop of the Creuse and junction with the Sedelle.

"... Behind the wire fencing lining the platform lay a handful of industrial buildings alongside nondescript looking farmland. I had arrived in La Creuse – one of the departments the French call la France profonde – deepest, darkest France – and apparently the country’s least-visited region, north of Limoges and 65 miles south-east of Poitiers. Within minutes, however, things started to look up: I found myself driving through rolling hills and strikingly green valleys, with overhanging hedgerows separating fields and pastures where the rust-coloured Limousin cattle were grazing in the sun. I was on a quest to find the landscape that had inspired the painter Claude Monet, a landscape which, unlike his Rouen, Paris and London, which he painted many times, remains relatively unknown. ..."


Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines, 1889.
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Love More, Judge Less: How Budots Music Informs Understandings of Intersectionality

DJ Ericnem, performing at a Christmas »handugan« or gift exchange, in the town of San Francisco, Agusan del Sur, Philippines. 

"Manila Community Radio volunteers Sai Versailles and Sean Bautista explore artistic influence, individual agency, and community by immersing themselves in the world of budots, a Filipino grassroots dance music genre. We follow them as they undertake a trip to the Bisaya-speaking region in the Philippines to visit and interview one of budots' pioneers, DJ Love, and share their excitement as they prepare for a Boiler Room showcase that also features budots sonics. They ponder questions of mediating local subcultures and genres and transplanting them to middle-class, urban audiences. »Budots is the hardship of Filipinos. It’s one scratch, one peck. It’s the noises you hear in your surroundings,« says DJ Love. »It reflects the state of a person’s life.« ..."


Sherwin Calumpang Tuna, also known as DJ Love, sitting under a table and smoking a cigarette. November 2005. 

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How ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ became a full-circle moment for Stanley Kubrick


"He was hardly one for sentimentality or emotional attachment, but a regular collaborator of Stanley Kubrick at least appreciated how the final film of his career became a full-circle moment for the legendary director. Never one to do things by halves, even by his standards, Eyes Wide Shut evolved into a mammoth undertaking. Kubrick’s precision and meticulousness had been hallmarks for decades, but the lengths he went to to realise his vision for the existential psychodrama pushed his creative partners to the limit. Tom Cruise did at least view it as one of the most important and inspiring productions he’ll ever be lucky to be a part of, but it was taxing nonetheless. Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman dedicated years of their lives to the project for the sole purpose of working with Kubrick, and for better or worse, it’s an experience they’ll remember forever. ..."
  




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Scientists Seeking Life on Mars Heard a Signal That Hinted at the Future

In 1924, a radio receiver built for the battlefields of World War I tested the idea that humans were not alone in the solar system, heralding a century of searches for extraterrestrial life.

"At sunset on a late summer weekend in 1924, crowds flocked to curbside telescopes to behold the advanced alien civilization they believed to be present on the surface of Mars. 'See the wonders of Mars!' an uptown sidewalk astronomer shouted in New York City on Saturday, Aug. 23. 'Now is your chance to view the snowcaps and the great canals that are causing so much talk among the scientists. You’ll never have such a chance again in your lifetime. 'During that weekend, Earth and Mars were separated by just 34 million miles, closer than at any other point in a century. Although this orbital alignment, called an opposition, occurs every 26 months, this one was particularly captivating to audiences across continents and inspired some of the first large-scale efforts to detect alien life. ..."


The radio photo message from the continuous transmission machine.
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Why Guardiola, Maresca and Salah love chess: Space, patterns and ‘controlling the centre’


"What do Pep Guardiola and Enzo Maresca have in common? Coaches wedded to a certain style of football? Midfielders who became managers? Worked together at Manchester City? Bald? All of these things are true, but that’s not the answer we have on the card. The answer we’re looking for? Chess. Both men, who meet at Stamford Bridge this afternoon, are keen proponents of the idea that football can learn plenty from chess, and they as coaches can take valuable lessons from it too. After leaving Barcelona in 2012, Guardiola took a sabbatical and travelled to New York, where he met with Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster. He has also studied the methods of the world’s top-ranked chess player, Magnus Carlsen. ..."

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One Way Street - Walter Benjamin (1928)


"How do unifying acts of collection and recollection – our creation of a memory, our recreation of a dream, the construction of our selves – relate to the activity of writing? This is one of the questions Walter Benjamin poses in One Way Street, his semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional work of philosophy. Because One Way Street is such a sprawling, knotty piece of writing, this article aims to focus on the opening section, in which many of Benjamin’s themes and motifs are first established. It begins by focusing on the relationship between conviction and fact, before moving on to consider Benjamin’s approach to psychoanalysis, the act of writing, childhood, memory, and religion. ..."



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