Scott Douglas Gordon is a musician and experimental instrument maker that releases under his own name and as Loop Haunts and is one half of Oto Hiax along with Mark Clifford of Seefeel.
Scott has roots in bass music and IDM-influenced broken beats, but when listening to his recent album Metals on Diagonal records and checking out the videos on his Instagram account, it becomes very apparent that he also has a deep interest in sculptural music , building his own custom experimental instruments as a part of his musical and artistic practice.
Intrigued by Scott’s music and instruments, Stromkult's René Margraff reached out to him to find out more about his approach to music-making and instrument design.
What is your background and how did you first get into making your own instruments?
I started studying [visual] art in 2003, and then by 2006, that became specifically focused on audio-visual installations. At that time, I worked more on video pieces, making abstract practical FX with objects, using simple green-screens or splicing video together, keeping rhythm, texture and movement in mind. I was very inspired by the shape-shifting textural video work out there already, so I found that sense of texture and rhythm — shifting and manipulating objects or sounds — always very inspiring. I also loved how foley artists would build objects for certain sounds.
Eventually, after playing with sound design ideas within my music and wanting to create installation artwork, I began exploring that avenue more, and ideas started to develop for one reason or another. For example, the “Spinning Plates” instrument [see below] started as a much larger design initially intended to be a gallery or public space installation piece, but it later got condensed into a smaller home studio instrument.
What instruments have you created so far and can you say a little about them?
Reso-bridge sympathetic reverberator
A transducer-based metal bridge device positioned between a piano's strings and its harp. Its main purpose is to allow for a piano to be used like a reverb, but it will also create all sorts of vibrations that effect the sound, depending on what you send in, how the strings are tuned, and where the additional plates are positioned under the strings. At the moment, this design is stuck in its mk1 phase, just because taking it forward would require a lot of refinery and further work, but I do have a lot of fun with the version I have, and I will do a mk2 at some point.
Headstock feedback system
This is an idea that connects the headstock of a guitar to a plate reverb, creating a sort of feedback/sustain system where the vibrations of the plate travel back through the guitar neck and into the pickup. It acts a bit like an E-bow, but you can mold the sound by physically moving the guitar headstock around the plate and the fretboard note.
It becomes really interesting when you drive the plates bolted on the transducers really hard, the plate will vibrate heavily and quickly against the headstock, creating a stuttering/chopped distortion sound. The pickup on the guitar gets fed all the chaos from the hundreds of little impacts and the string vibration. It is really raw and unpredictable, but using a large freely swinging plate gives me more control of the amount of pressure between the headstock and the metal. The mk2 version uses a slimmer, more bendy sheet of steel. You can find a video of the mk1 version from 2017 here and a video of the mk2 here.
Spinning Plate instrument
A large MIDI idiophone design with four spinning motorized vertical steel bars. It has individual stereo mics that pick up the panning/doppler effect of each bar, making these nice and deep metallic modulating tones.
RADIAL INSTRUMENT electro-acoustic rhythm & texture sequencer
A five-voice sequencer based on individual motors that are mounted inside tubes, with plastic fins that reach out to the inside of the tubes, forming the motor’s shaft like a radius. The tubes have various textured internal surfaces and the fins drag and click around in a clock-like motion that depends on the input signal. Typically, they are controlled by an old function generator, so if I send it a square wave for example, the motors will rotate back and forth in larger and smaller sweeps that relate to the frequency of the function.
Do you also get inspired by existing devices from other makers?
Yeah, a lot! It’s really inspiring to see how quickly and how much technology is changing and what people are coming up with. I also love the broad accessibility of information now, it’s really turbo-charging everything. I think in the age-old tradition of technology advancing and art responding in turn, we are once again in a free-for-all phase. It’s inspiring and fascinating, but can also be a bit of a distraction at times — you have to be careful not to get too sidetracked with that side of it, as cool as it is. But yeah, on the whole, it is a great time to make things.
Do you also use Eurorack stuff?
I find Eurorack brilliant for a lot of reasons, but primarily because of the customization aspect. I’m really into the fact that you can dream up a situation like "I want something that does this …”, and then with a bit of digging, you can probably actually make it happen. On the flipside of that, I also love how you can just totally invert that approach and randomly jam with the very same system, plugging anything anywhere, and the system will deliver in a totally different way. It’s mad and brilliant. Even the old Eurocard style test equipment type modules have a total charm to me. Any large, sci-fi looking, piece of analogue gear always has such a good vibe to me, they are a great way to strip away options, it’s like going camping or something — all that stuff is ace.
I find it very fascinating that you create your own instrument devices for your music.
I enjoy that process a lot! They usually stem from ideas that I keep in sketchbooks, and they often don’t actually begin as instruments or sound devices, but end up there for whatever reason. And then, things evolve out of other ideas all the time, I have personally found that it is really creatively healthy to just try things and see what happens — using sounds or interacting with something that you don't immediately recognize is a refreshing experience.
Do you have demo videos of your RADIAL INSTRUMENT "rhythm & texture sequencer" beyond this one hosted on Instagram?
I would like to, but I don’t have any proper demo videos right now, unfortunately. There are a few videos on Instagram, but mainly just clips from sessions and jams of me trying out ideas. I wish I was more productive on the video front. Eventually, I’ll get a webpage built properly but at the moment, I am spending most of my time just on the projects themselves and I’ll grab a quick video here and there if I can.
Where did the idea for the RADIAL INSTRUMENT come from and how long did it take you to make it work well as an instrument?
If I remember correctly, for the RADIAL, I was just plucking at the ridges on a hot water bottle because it had an interesting texture. Then later, I did the same thing with a lenticular postcard and a plectrum. The ribbed surface was a bit like a pulse generator, with speed and pitch corresponding. I was having a chat with my friend Stephan Richter, and I think it was about then that I thought that it would be cool to make something that made use of those surfaces in a more controlled way. Stephan thought it was cool, so that encouraged me, and then it was probably a couple years on-and-off to properly flesh something out.
Certain aspects took time to do well, like the spacing and materials of the parts and the way certain materials interact with the motors. The components dictate the tone and can introduce randomness into the timing of whatever sequence the five tubes are producing. So for example, changing the length of the fins so they are longer than the radius of the tube will make them bend and whip around in an exponential way, so they will make a kind of click, then a “zzzziiiiiip” sound, rather than a regular “tik-tik-tik”.
So yeah, there were many things like that along the way that ate a pile of time and the whole thing took a couple of years to feel like it was working well enough to enjoy using it — I should probably try to record something now!
What is the story behind the Spinning Plates Instrument (SPI) and how did you get the idea for it?
I think the idea for the SPI initially came from collecting certain records, specifically Harry Bertoia’s Sonambient series when I came across Bertoia and began chasing this elusive series of LPs he made. Also the Baschet Brothers, Harry Partch — all these beautiful custom weird instruments were a big inspiration for me.
I would often go to scrapyards, where you can buy metal by the kilo and don’t have to pay for the manufacturing side. After picking up some metal bars around 2017/18, I found this beautiful deep resonance after I mic'd them up. I then wanted to further modulate that sound, based on the idea that I would build a big, free-standing installation piece that would project large modulating tones into a space. That eventually became condensed down to a studio instrument, but I have had some nice recordings from it — another long build, haha!
What is the relationship between recording and working on the instruments for you?
For me, as soon as I feel like there’s a chance the idea could work, I just keep going back to it over time, even if it takes years. I always like to record as soon as I can to bookmark any progress. I set up the little HIAX records cassette label for exactly that reason. I make early recordings of the prototype builds or ideas, and then go back to them again and rebuild or try improving them.
What are some of the things you struggle with when creating your instruments and are there any technical skills you have had to develop in the process?
I struggle all the time — being very limited technically and having lots of "ideas" is tricky! Also, building instruments often costs a lot, even when using junk or salvaging parts, and it is hard to translate that back into money — but I do think it all becomes worth it when eventually, something positive happens and you have these weird new creative tools.
Overall, I think I have had to develop my knowledge of electronics the most in the process. In the beginning, I really didn’t know much at all, but I now have a surface knowledge of certain key things, or at least enough info to start an idea and then figure out the rest on the go.
What kind of off-the-shelf products did you use on your new album Metals?
Diver boards, DC motors, relays, power supplies, a patch bay multi cable I chopped the ends of, CLS timber, stuff like that. Lots of hardware like bearings and couplings, parts from mini motorbikes, and an old mixing desk chassis. I think the MIDI is via an Arduino ... I haven’t opened it up in years, but there is a drawer full of broken Arduinos in my studio so that would make sense. The RADIAL INSTRUMENT is actually made from a bitcoin mining chassis, a metal shelf from a shed and some fancy iroko wood skirting boards!
What instruments from other makers do you find yourself frequently returning to?
I have been playing with a modified DX7 a lot, it has the “Supermax” chip and I use the Dexed software to make patches for it — a godsend for the DX7 and the other less-than-fun-to-program DX range from that era!
What are three old and three new things that you are currently enjoying?
Three new things: the Roli Seaboard, the Atome mic by Another, the Physical Audio Modus plugin.
Three old things: the Doepfer A-119 External Input and envelope follower module, the Marconi Dual AF oscillator, the Monacor AR50 Transducer.
You can find out more about Scott’s work via his Linktree.