Flaskedrengene: Beer Bottle Music

As most of us know (and have done), blowing over a bottle can make a very musical note. It's a pretty neat phenomenon, and I tend to take advantage of it whenever I have a bottle in my hands (...sometimes to the chagrin of my peers).

I've seen some youtube videos of people performing small pieces on pre-tuned bottles, but most of them are essentially stop-motion compilations, and usually with a limited range of harmony and complexity.

Enter Flaskedrengene, known in English as The Bottle Band. These guys actually perform this stuff live, in harmony. Unfortunately I know nothing about them except that they are street musicians from Denmark (the info on them in English is next to none, but if anyone else finds more info, please do share!). They even performed on "Denmark's Got Talent" last year. Something about the innocence of bottle blowing and the sheer oddity of it makes it highly enjoyable and a pleasure to watch. I'm also impressed that they can keep carrying bottles with water in them for several songs in a row... that's gotta be cumbersome and tiring.



The DK Talent show segment is here. Check out the creative use of thumbs around 2:14.



For those geeks out there, if you want to know more about the physics behind this phenomenon, go and check out this description.

As a bonus, I present to you Michel Lauzière and his use of beer bottles:

Mister Disc: The Portable Vinyl Player

Back in 1983, Audio-Technica created a portable vinyl player, a walkman for records if you will. Except you couldn't really use it in a moving vehicle, let alone walk with it. Basically any vibrations would disrupt/stop the audio. You would also want to avoid playing it in the sun, because the records would start to warp. And finally, even if the player is portable... the records are still bulky to carry around. So lots of limitations for sure, but it was still a pretty neat concept: It ran on batteries with a battery life of up to 12 hours (as well as an adapter). It played both 33.5 RPM records and 45's, and you could plug in 2 earphones directly into it.

Audio Technica released two very similar versions of this neat piece of hardware, the AT-727 sold as the "Sound Burger" and the AT-770 sold as Mr.Disc.

Pretty damn cool I think, and it's one of those things that audiophiles and geeks would probably want to get their hands on these days. Except most of us won't, because as of today, it was selling for $450 US on ebay! I have heard about people finding them for under $20 at second hand shops, so let us know if you end up finding one that way.

To see a bigger version of the pictures, click on the image and it will open up in a new window.





The Instruction Manual:


Here's a video of it in action:



The Sound Burger on the other hand, came in several different colours:







What do you guys think? I'll be posting a couple of other entries on other portable vinyl players, since this seems to be one of the most popular pages on the blog.

Drums Made of Ice

This is part of an ad for the Icehotel Jukkasjärvi in Sweden. It's pretty self-explanatory, but make sure you watch until the end when he trashes it all to pieces. The second video is a short "making of" video.

...It is taking me lots of self-restraint to not describe it as "cool"...