Eat your heart out, Roland V-Accordion. Meet the Commodordion, an 8-bit chip instrument with bellows made of floppies and gaffer tape – and a surprisingly deep feature set.
The Commodore 64 keyboards act as manuals. The bellows function at least kinetically – and as a trigger for the music. And you get bonus features like loop recording and simultaneous rhythm machine operation, making this arguably more related to one-man-band history as to its superficial appearance as a free reed instrument. (Hey, ask a musicologist for analysis, this is what you get.)
It’s not just the construction of this instrument, though – there’s a dazzling amount of virtuosity. Scott Joplin would be proud – and it’s further evidence of the (genuine) timelessness of the composer’s work.
Plus it’s all edited together in the style of 1973’s The Sting. Meta meta.
It’s all the work of lft of Lund, Sweden – lftkryo on YouTube – who has been busy with genius projects like this. They’re documented in greater detail on their open-Web website, under the given name Linus Åkesson.
https://linusakesson.net/index.php
There’s a Theremin, too – and a lot of science.
Bach with drive noise and SID…
And magnets, springs, and a C64.
Honestly, is there a better way to learn physics and electronics? I doubt it. Going to give the edge to Joplin over Bach, though, in the C64 re-orchestration.
Now the fact that CDM has gone this many years without a gaffer-tape tag is a rare oversight on my part. Corrected.