Vive el baBoom !

He's a 6 foot high metal monkey music machine with a mohawk of flaming organ pipes, custom built for the mighty Arcadia Spectacular at Glastonbury.

By turning a crank at the end of his tail, a music-box type mechanism rotates in his chest. The barrel is programmed with a sequence of 'bone skulls', the pattern of which corresponds to a musical score. As these skulls pass a 'reading' device, the appropriate valve is activated allowing propane gas to flow into a steel organ pipe, where it is ignited, thus sounding a note. He also has a banana-shaped 'keyboard' for free-style playing, which went down very well with the lovely early morning crowds on Worthy Farm. What a gig !

~ Glastonbury Festival 2010  ~

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Big Up to Pip, Bertie & the Arcadia massive. Spectacular !

~ Belladrum Festival 2010 ~

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Greetings to Innis the Inventor,  baBoom is indeed talking to us !

~ Birmingham Six Summer Saturdays 2011 ~

- Construction -

Pristine in his new suit of Mild Steel. Not quite so immaculate now though !

Here's a couple of Elke's workings for the Day of the Dead style 'Nichos' (a shadow box diorama) which is the barrel-housing in baBoom's chest.

For a complete inside view of the monkey-making process check out Elke's blog site at:  http://elcashew.wordpress.com/ ... it's an engaging diversion for the overwrought or mildly curious.

~ Animation ~

This is a quick and dirty stop-frame animation we made to give a flavour of how he looks and sounds. We tried a straight video recording but it didn't really convey his quirky nature that well, so we went for the stop-frame style. The pipe tones over the beat are the actual sound of the flaming pipes. In 'real life' they have a much wilder and elemental presence which just does not record or playback well - he's definitely a live-device !