Off the record

A growing band of musicians are looking beyond the traditional palette of instruments for new sounds, and all we can do is look on in astonishment.

Last week I watched through my fingers at the Barbican as avant-garde oddball Scott Walker unveiled his idea of a striking percussion implement: a boxer repeatedly thumping a slowly rotating pig's carcass.

For innovation without the sense of horror, tonight and tomorrow the Modified Toy Orchestra perform at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio, then in a free outdoor show at Covent Garden Market on 4 December (7pm). The five men in suits lined up behind desks owe an obvious debt to Kraftwerk's studious music-making, except their bubbly electronic pop is created using rewired playthings including a Speak & Spell, a Fisher-Price guitar and a demon-eyed Barbie with wires poking out of her beehive.

It's hard to tell how seriously Birmingham mastermind Brian Duffy takes all this. He certainly talks a good game: "I wanted to find things that were ordinarily hidden from our senses and make them available. One way of doing that is to locate hidden potential — this surplus value inside things that seem redundant. The hidden world of the toy is a metaphor."

But for a man who fiddles with dolls for a living, he makes a serious point about finding worth in discarded material. When any of us can buy a new laptop and easily reproduce any sound imaginable, music that is hand-made has greater value.

Then there's 23-year-old Felix Thorn,who takes everyday drums, xylophones and guitars, chops them up and wires them up to play a strange organic techno all by themselves. They look like an explosion in an instrument factory and they're on display from this week until 18 January, at the exhibition Felix's Machines at the Gasworks gallery in Vauxhall.

Thorn bills his contraptions as a cunning way to make experimental music more accessible. "Even somebody like my gran is willing to listen to it," he says — and you don't normally find OAPs open to drill'n'bass. It's a novelty too, of course, but a fascinating one. New instruments are born of old: "I don't really like guitars so I sawed one in half, which gave me great pleasure," he tells me.

Doing something similar are the Lost and Found Orchestra, a Brighton-based group who appear to have up-ended a skip and composed music using whatever fell out. Their exuberant show is set to be a Christmas hit when it arrives at the Festival Hall from 19 December to 11 January, featuring a folding-bed bass, Hoovers, kitchen cauldrons and a stringed wok.

These performers offer visual and sonic treats, and manage to make recycling look like a brilliant laugh. Just as long as I never have to watch anyone punching a pig again, I'm all for it.
www.myspace.com/toyorch,
www.gasworks.org.uk,
www.lostandfoundorchestra.com

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