Album Notes

21 Ways of Looking at Things is the newer of two audio CDs featuring instruments Bart Hopkin has designed and built. The other CD, Instrumentarium Hopkinis (also available here at CD Baby), is more familiarly musical in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, grooves. This one is more textural, soundscape-ish, atmospheric. It contains 21 pieces featuring dozens of instruments of diverse types ranging from unusual to scarcely imaginable, including gurgle flutes, plosives, flex short strings, steady-on-stainless, mild steel, string-on-tine, trillium harp, stroked zither, formant changer, and many more. Those names won't mean much to you if you haven't yet heard the instruments, so let me just say that they music is fresh and surprising and flavorful throughout, with moods ranging from sweet to obnoxious.

More about Bart: He’s a maker of acoustic musical instruments and a student of musical instruments worldwide. Since 1985 he has been the director of Experimental Musical Instruments, an organization devoted to all manner of interesting and unusual musical instruments, and in that connection he’s written several books on instrument making. He has also produced several CDs featuring the work ofmany and various creative instrument makers, including the very successful collection Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones.