In preparation for the “Night of the museums”, a yearly event when many European museums stay open on a specific Saturday evening until the early hours of dawn, I spent last Friday afternoon at the Musée d'Ethnologie de Neuchâtel with friends Bill, Thomas & Jacques preparing a make your own "La Sonorie" instrument workshop that was to take place the following day.
For this event the different museums rival in offering entertainment of all kinds, in our case we where sharing a space with a “make your own electronic instrument” workshop organized by the diy makaway group from Zurich.
Three instruments were to be proposed: Bongoboites, Pailleasax (see picture) & Tonatems; which you regular readers already are familiar with I’m sure. And since each instrument was to be made from scratch in accordance to the participant’s fancy, we had a lot of raw materials to carry and set up in an convenient way: boxes filled with different sizes of plastic tubing, cans, coat hangers, broom & bamboo sticks, curtain rods, styrofoam, liquid laundry detergent jugs and other containers of various kinds. Not to mention all the tools and hardware needed for the operation.
For the workshop we hung as much stuff from ropes place along the walls and had a table per instrument plus one for the smaller ingredients. The plan was that we would rotate between the three tables and since there were four of us, each would take turns filming bits and pieces to have some documentation for future projects.
All seemed ready for the next day…