Mika Vainio / Pita / Charlemange Palestine

This disc answers the question "what happens when you place three experimenters in front of strange new instruments?" In 1997 Holland's Staalplaat label set up a Masterclass festival that invited artists to workshop and perform on inventor Christof Schlage's unusual MIDI-controlled musical machines like the Rustler. This device's arrangement of wind-blown tubes were made to sing/growl on track one of this disc by Panasonic's Mika Vainio. Pita's Peter Rehberg (founder of Austria's Mego label) next arranged the Crescent's bell tree into sections of on/off ringing and stick-like percussive sounds. And American minimalist Charlemange Palestine left his piano to wind up the whirring harmonics of the Siren. For an encore Vainio and Rehberg dueted on a closely miced typewriter, beginning at a slow and feedback-filled keystroke rate that wouldn't score them temp jobs. Soon, however, a Powerbook and the LiSA sound manipulating programme took over to produce sound information at a teletype rate, recalling the din of Paul Pandhuysen's pieces for matrix computer printers, Engines In Power And Love.