Welcome to the web home of the Mammoth Beat Organ – a modular, mechanical music contraption by Sam Underwood and Graham Dunning. Designed as a two-player, semi-autonomous musical instrument, it plays unusual, sometimes erratic compositions drawing on drone music, minimalist repetition and fairground organ techniques.
In Action
Behold the Mammoth Beat Organ…in action!
How Do They Make It?! Music
Behind The Scenes
Live at Supersonic Festival
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About
The Mammoth Beat Organ is a mechanical, modular music contraption by Sam Underwood and Graham Dunning.
We have designed and developed this machine together over the past five months, following initial discussions in 2017. We will be looking to tour with it in 2019.
This project has been funded by Arts Council England, with further support from Lintstock, Supersonic Festival and Horniman Museum.
This has taken us to the first stage in the development of this machine and its modules. If this project excites you and you would like to support the future development of it, please consider donating:
Blog
Behind the scenes: making the Mammoth Beat Organ
As well as our How Do They Make It?! Music video demonstrating the capabilities of the Mammoth Beat Organ, we put together this Behind the scenes video, showing the development of our musical machine. Enjoy.
What’s it for?
It’s not uncommon to be asked why you have created this new thing. What’s it for? In this case, we are open to exploring that over time but here is what we have designed it for, or have discussed as possible settings for it: It’s for live performance – we hope to tour with it …
Supersonic shenanigans
We had a very busy Supersonic Festival. Firstly, Sam hosted a maker event at Centrala in Digbeth as part of the festival. This was for musical instrument makers and included the first public demo of the Connected Devices (now Mammoth Beat Organ) modules. The following day, we played our first ever live show with Connected …