Yuri Landman started as a comic book artist and made his debut in the comics field in 1997 with 'Je Mag Alles Met Me Doen' (in Dutch). In the follow-up, released in 1998, 'Het Verdiende Loon', Landman described his negative experiences on a daily job.[4] For the second title he received the 1998 Breda Prize,[5] an award for rising new comic artists in the Netherlands. Since then he has published no other comic books. Soon after the release he took over a local comic book store and started his graphic design studio inside the shop besides the sales of comics.
Together with Cees van Appeldoorn, he formed the lo-fi band Zoppo playing bass and prepared guitar in 1997.[6][7] After 2 albums and several 7" singles, Landman left the band in 2000. Landman then formed the noise band Avec Aisance (aka Avec-A) with drummer/producer Valentijn Höllander and released a CD, Vivre dans l'aisance in 2004. After quitting Avec-A in 2006, he focused mainly on instrument building. His comic shop closed in 2001 and he was the graphic designer for Oog & Blik from 2001 till 2010, until the instrument business became his full-time activity.
Landman is musically untrained and cannot play chords. Unsatisfied about the limitations of prepared guitars Landman began creating and building several experimental string instruments, including electric zithers, electric Cymbalum, and electric Koto. Many of the designs are focused on string resonance, microtonality and an overtoning spectra based on the no wave aesthetics of Glenn Branca and the microtonal consonant theory developed by Harry Partch.[8]
four early prototypes
In the period between 2000 and 2005, Landman created nine prototype instruments. In 2006 he changed his musical focus and stopped to perform and start building for other bands. The Moodswinger was the first instrument Landman made for the band Liars.[6][9] After the Moodswinger, he started making more instruments for other bands as well.
From November 2006 to January 2007 Landman finished two copies of The Moonlander, a biheaded electric 18-string drone guitar, one for Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and one for himself.[6][9][10]
Besides his output as an inventor and noise musician, he starts to focus on music education, and participatory art. At first Landman started giving musicological lectures at venues, festivals and music related educational institutes. Landman published the essay3rd Bridge Helix - From Experimental Punk to Ancient Chinese Music & the Universal Physical Laws of Consonance in which he clarifies the relation between this prepared guitar technique and the consonant values present in non-Western scales, especially the musical scale used on the Ancient Chinese musical instrument the guqin.[9][14] He published an extensive 8 chapter guide on how to prepare a guitar, that was later transformed to the book Nice Noise.
His lectures and presentations with his instruments prompted a request in 2009 for a practical building workshop. This gave rise to his Home Swinger project, which allowed people to participate in DIY workshops where they could build their own copy of his newly created instrument the Home Swinger. Often this was followed by a rehearsal and ensemble performance, with multiple copies of the Home Swinger, drums, basses, and guitars, in the style of the Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca compositions. Events took place throughout all European countries and the US. The Home Swinger was selected as one of the instruments for the second Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, in February 2010. Along with the Moodswinger, this instrument is included in the permanent collection of the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Soon after the start of the Home Swinger workshops his job as a teacher/artistbecame a full-time activity with an ongoing tour schedule throughout the whole year. He developed a wide of range of workshops with different kinds of instruments, and created this way thousands of DIY kalimbas, triochords, plates with crossed strings, and mallet guitars.
Due to the ongoing tour schedule with the DIY-instrument projects, he discontinued the production of his high-end products for bands, although he makes exceptions such as developing a 42-stringed instrument for Peter James Taylor; nine instruments for Belgian composer Serge Verstockt; instruments for befriended acts such as Lau Nau, Tomoko Sauvage, Hifi Club, Remko Scha, Ritornel, Katharine Klement, Killed by 9V Batteries and Ex-Easter Island Head; and an instrument for the SONS Museum in 2011.[citation needed] Because of his touring with the workshops he connects more to the experimental music scene, performing with acts such as Jad Fair, Rhys Chatham, Wu Fei, Noël Akchoté, Action Beat, Dustin Wong (ex Ponytail), Camera,and others.[citation needed]
In 2012, he published an album featuring Jad Fair and the French noise artist Philippe Petit. He also started a two piece band called Bismuth with multi-instrumentalist Arnold van de Velde. In the same year he started his Strat Eraser Project and built a series of instruments for direct sale, along with the workshop exclusive models. In November he gave a TEDx talk. Around this time, he began to depart from building stringed instruments. Inspired by the percussive works of Lou Harrison, John Cage, and the Belgian sound artist George Smits, and the sounds of Indonesian Gamelan instruments, he created a collection of metal percussion instruments and amplified them with guitar pickups. These instruments are used on the recordings of Bismuth and in his live performances. Also, he built a set of motor instruments and invented an instrument made from PET bottles.
The March 2013 edition of Premier Guitar featured a cover story written by Landman about a guitar modification he did on request of the magazine. Later that year the documentary Alles, Tot Dit was published. In April 2014 Bismuth released their debut album. This album was published in a limited deluxe edition as well with a special designed instrument called 'Svikt' mounted to the album cover. In the same year he starts his solo performances and collaborates with the Dutch noise rock act Those Foreign Kids, functioning as his backing band on his European solo tours. Occasionally Landman performs together with Dutch sound artist Wessel Westerveld, who has built a collection of replicas of Luigi RussolosIntonarumori. Stichting De Stilte created a dance production with Landman playing live during the dance performances.
Since 2015, he has built a series of kinetic objects made with motors and pendulums that together operate as a sound installation. He exhibits this project in addition to his on stage performances. 2016 Premier Guitar approached him for the second time for a guitar building request, which resulted in an experimental guitar built for Thurston Moore. Similar to the first project the building process was published as an article in Premier Guitar and he did a 20-minute YouTube interview with Thurston when he handed over the guitar.[15] In the same year he developed a DIY daxophone workshop. In May/June 2017 he was artist-in-residence for one month at iii in The Hague where he developed the motorized sound installationHelicopters.[16] For Lee Ranaldos Lost Ideas Festival in Menen, Belgium he developed a harmonic guitar based on a predecessor, invented by Branca in the early 80s, Ranaldo played in Glenn Brancas orchestra. At the invitation of Harman Kardon he built a 24 string drone sonometer for J.Views during a documentary shoot in the spring of 2018.[17] In October 2018 he published an 8-page musicological essay in Soundest #1 in which he states that the configuration of the musical keyboard is mathematically based, rather than a cultural evolutionairy phenomenon. He shows the pattern in several non-Western scales such as the Indian 22 shruti system, the 19-tone scales on the Iranian tar and the Turkish saz, an out-of-place Copticartifact and his own tuning system applied on the Moodswinger. This explanation of the origin of the keyboard is in conflict with the Western consensus story that the pattern on the keyboard evolved culturally from originally seven white keys, adding one black key, followed by more into the twelve-tone Halberstadt Keyboard from 1361. In December that same year Musical Instrument Museum put on a large overview exhibition of his invented instruments. In 2019 he build a follow up series of rhythmic helicopters as a part of Nora Mulder's '7090 Abstraction Parc' that was exhibited at Gaudeamus Music Week, Open NDSM and several other Dutch festivals.
During the Corona crisis his educational work and live performance stopped and he made a graphic novel after a hiatus of 20 years.[18] In December 2020 he started prepublishing this book in six languages as a daily soap on his Instagram. It was published in a Dutch as well as an English edition in Spring 2021. In Feb '22 he pre-published 90 pages of his next graphic novel 'Dissident in '20-'21' in which he explains Mattias Desmet's mass formation theory.[19]
Musical Theoretical Diagrams
The Moodswinger led to a research on harmonics theory. He published a clarifying 3rd bridge diagram related to this instrument in 2012 (and a more elaborate version of this diagram in 2017).[20] In 2018 he published another microtonal diagram that compares the otonal and utonal scales with the harmonic series and 12TET and also how Partch' tonality diamond is related to the harmonic series when put in a triangular array.[21]
Education
Landman co-wrote Nice Noise (about prepared guitar techniques and guitar modification) with Bart Hopkin.[22] This book was released in 2012 by Experimental Musical Instruments and came along with 60 sound fragments made with a wide range of guitar preparations.
He is a regular guest teacher and lecturer at several academies and universities in Europe.
In 2020 Bloomsbury Publishing published the book ‘’Sound Art’’ by Holger Schulze and Sanne van Krogt. Landman wrote the chapter Pickups and Strings in this academic publication.
Instruments
In the period 2000-2005 Landman created 9 prototype instruments.
The black 4-string movable 3rd bridge zither.
The red capozither, shown on the cover of Vivre dans l'aisance.
Robocop, a 6 string heavily adjusted guitar with 2 additional bridges and 3 outputs.
The 12 string overtone zither, the first prototype of Aaron Hemphill's Moodswinger.
The blonde 3 string stereo-guitar, 1 bass string tuned B, and 2 thin B tuned guitar strings.
The green 7 string trio-guitar, 1 bass string, DAD tuned guitar string and 3 G♯-strings.
The Electric Spring
The electric cymbalum, 72 strings, 12 pickups, one for each tone.
The blue 4 string supertremolo-guitar, with no fretboard, but an adjustable pitch control for the left hand.
Schoolhouse - Soft Focus, 2014, cassette tape on Tombed Visions #11 w/ PJ Taylor, Harry Taylor (Action Beat) & Ben Duvall (Ex-Easter Island Head)
Bismuth - I Said No Doctors! (2017, Dymaxion Groove) (Compilation album w/ several artists)
Documentary
Alles, Tot Dit, 20 min, 2013
Related Research Articles
Lee Mark Ranaldo is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known as a co-founder of the rock band Sonic Youth. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Ranaldo at number 33 on its "Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list. In May 2012, Spin published a staff-selected top 100 guitarist list, ranking Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore together at number 1.
The fingerboard is an important component of most stringed instruments. It is a thin, long strip of material, usually wood, that is laminated to the front of the neck of an instrument. The strings run over the fingerboard, between the nut and bridge. To play the instrument, a musician presses strings down to the fingerboard to change the vibrating length, changing the pitch. This is called stopping the strings. Depending on the instrument and the style of music, the musician may pluck, strum or bow one or more strings with the hand that is not fretting the notes. On some instruments, notes can be sounded by the fretting hand alone, such as with hammer ons, an electric guitar technique.
An electric violin is a violin equipped with an electronic output of its sound. The term most properly refers to an instrument intentionally made to be electrified with built-in pickups, usually with a solid body. It can also refer to a violin fitted with an electric pickup of some type, although "amplified violin" or "electro-acoustic violin" are more accurate then.
A prepared guitar is a guitar that has had its timbre altered by placing various objects on or between the instrument's strings, including other extended techniques. This practice is sometimes called tabletop guitar, because many prepared guitarists do not hold the instrument in the usual manner, but instead place the guitar on a table to manipulate it.
The Gravikord is a 24 string electric double bridge-harp invented by Robert Grawi in 1984, which is closely related to both the West African kora and the mbira. It was designed to employ a separated double tonal array structure making it possible to easily play cross-rhythms in a polyrhythmic musical style in a modern electro-acoustic instrument. The Gravi-kora is a similar instrument, also developed by Grawi, which is tuned identically to a traditional 21 string kora.
The long-string instrument is a musical instrument in which the string is of such a length that the fundamental transverse wave is below what a person can hear as a tone (±20 Hz). If the tension and the length result in sounds with such a frequency, the tone becomes a beating frequency that ranges from a short reverb to longer echo sounds. Besides the beating frequency, the string also gives higher pitched natural overtones. Since the length is that long, this has an effect on the attack tone. The attack tone shoots through the string in a longitudinal wave and generates the typical science-fiction laser-gun sound as heard in Star Wars. The sound is also similar to that occurring in upper electricity cables for trains.
The harp guitar is a guitar-based stringed instrument generally defined as a "guitar, in any of its accepted forms, with any number of additional unstopped strings that can accommodate individual plucking." The word "harp" is used in reference to its harp-like unstopped open strings. A harp guitar must have at least one unfretted string lying off the main fretboard, typically played as an open string.
Jad Fair is an American singer, guitarist, graphic artist, and founding member of lo-fi alternative rock group Half Japanese.
An experimental musical instrument is a musical instrument that modifies or extends an existing instrument or class of instruments, or defines or creates a new class of instrument. Some are created through simple modifications, such as cracked drum cymbals or metal objects inserted between piano strings in a prepared piano. Some experimental instruments are created from household items like a homemade mute for brass instruments such as bathtub plugs. Other experimental instruments are created from electronic spare parts, or by mixing acoustic instruments with electric components.
The Moodswinger is a twelve-string electric zither with an additional third bridge designed by Yuri Landman. The rod which functions as the third bridge divides the strings into two sections to cause an overtone multiphonic sound. One of the copies of the instrument is part of the collection of the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Luyas are a Canadian indie rock band formed in 2006 from Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Bradford Reed is an American multi-instrumentalist, experimental luthier, and member of the avant-garde band King Missile III. In the 1980s he invented the pencilina, a custom made string instrument.
The 3rd bridge is an extended playing technique used on the electric guitar and other string instruments that allows a musician to produce distinctive timbres and overtones that are unavailable on a conventional string instrument with two bridges. The timbre created with this technique is close to that of gamelan instruments like the bonang and similar Indonesian types of pitched gongs.
A third bridge can be devised by inserting a rigid preparation object between the strings and the body or neck of the instrument, effectively dividing the string into distinct vibrating segments.
The Springtime is an experimental electric guitar with seven strings and three outputs. The instrument was created in 2008 by Dutch luthier Yuri Landman for guitar player Laura-Mary Carter of Blood Red Shoes.
State-X New Forms is an independent festival for independent music culture such as avant garde music, noise rock, indie rock, IDM, held in The Hague, Netherlands since 2004. The festival is a fusion of the two festivals State-X and New Forms both of which were held for 6 years. The first edition of the sold out State-X festival was organised by The Hague Pop Centre, (HPC), and took place in the year 2001 at The Korzo Theatre in The Hague. State-X was founded by Rob Vondracek and Michiel Breedveld and New Forms was organised by Paard van Troje and founded by Henk Koolen.
Dutch rock is a form of rock music produced in the Netherlands, primarily in the English language as well as in Dutch.
Intonarumori are experimental musical instruments invented and built by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori built in total, with different names.
A Home Swinger is a musical instrument created by Yuri Landman. The instrument has 12 strings, an electronic pickup and a movable rod to alter the pitch of the instrument.
Experimental luthiers are luthiers who take part in alternative stringed instrument manufacturing or create original string instruments altogether.
Bart Hopkin is a builder of experimental musical instruments and a writer and publisher on the subject. Hopkin runs the website windworld.com, which provides resources regarding unusual instruments.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
