An online infomercial that’s been making the rounds of gadget freaks, music nerds, and connoisseurs of schadenfreude opens with a short bald man standing in front of an odd tabletop device—three silvery columns attached to a horizontal base in a sort of W shape. To the accompaniment of a canned rhythm track, he starts waving his hands in the spaces between the columns, breaking beams of laser light to trigger sampled drum fills and ersatz DJ scratching. The misplaced enthusiasm in his performance is painful to watch, but he can’t touch the embarrassing moves of the dude in sunglasses who turns up later to “play” what’s supposed to be a kick-ass guitar-rock song on the same machine.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The range of sounds available to musicians has exploded in the past century, thanks to innovations like amplification, sampling, and analog and digital synthesis, but in that time the instruments themselves haven’t changed all that much. You play an electric guitar with basically the same techniques you use on an acoustic guitar, even if there are a few extra knobs and switches. Even sequencers and drum machines can be thought of as modern descendants of music boxes and player pianos. Only the theremin and the turntable have introduced substantially new ways to physically play music.
The Reactable’s interface is a glowing tabletop on which players place translucent plastic pucks, each of which controls some aspect of the tones and pulses the machine can create: volume, waveform, pitch, tempo. The table reacts by means of a camera and projector inside, drawing animated circles around the pucks and connecting them with lines; players can move or rotate the objects or use iPhone-style gestures to manipulate the animations. Playing the Reactable doesn’t look anything like playing a keyboard—it looks more like six-year-olds messing with blocks. Its inventors wanted it to be possible for someone with no musical training to learn to play it without assistance, but it’s also a potentially powerful professional instrument, wedding complex sound manipulation to a simple visual language.
I got a glimpse of what that might look like at the Boredoms show three weeks ago. To open their set, front man Eye took the stage alone with two wired-up translucent orbs in his hands, glowing a warm yellow. I’ve been unable to find anyone who knows how those orbs work—nobody at the band’s U.S. label, Thrill Jockey, could help—but as he wove them back and forth across his body, brought them together, and moved them apart, they produced a series of tones that sounded like he was somehow playing electricity itself. It was transfixingly weird and totally thrilling—he looked like some kind of pagan techno-shaman delivering a world-changing message to his tribe. It felt like I was finally in the future.v
