Dr Zeus w LightSabers vs Twin Musical Tesla Coils

Dr Zeus battles Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils with LightSabers at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon sponsored by DC Cox (Resonance Research Corp) in Baraboo WI.

The LightSabers are actually standard fluorescent lights, which can be fully illuminated by the energy from the Tesla Coils, without wires.

Dr Zeus is standing on an insulating plastic sheet, which forces the energy to emerge as sparks from his feet to get to earth ground.

The music that you hear is coming from the sparks generated by the Tesla coils, not speakers. The Tesla coils are 7 feet tall, 18 feet apart, and can put out over 12 foot sparks. A laptop computer sends midi commands to the coils via fiber optic link. These coils were constructed by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson.

Sooooooo geeky.  But soooooo cool.

Ran across this on hype machine, a great blog mp3 agregator/player site.

cyberinsekt: Koby Israelite – I Used to be Cool.

Fun! Listen!

[edit - mp3 link already busted :( - go to http://tzadik.com/volume.php?VolumeID=282 ]

Thirlwell’s Manorexia show at the Stone last week was a blast.  Next up for that group: The Brainwaves Festival 2008 in Boston Next month.  With Matmos, Stars of the Lid, and a ton of other bands I probably should have heard of on the bill, good times are surely in store.

Special shout out to Matt Marks’ blog for public recognition of this site’s new existence. His post was the first time I saw “Junktronica” used to describe Doggo & Sons. That’s a keeper.

I’m playing at The Stone this week with JG Thirlwell’s group, unforgettably named Manorexia. I’ve meet JG a few times at Bang on a Can events and other NYC concerts.  He’s a very cool guy who has been all over the map in terms of styles and musical circles.

Manorexia – Thursday, Sept 25 at The Stone, NYC – $10 – 8pm and 10pm sets.

Check out some vids:

Here is one of the Manorexia pieces that we will be playing at the stone. David Cossin plays percussion here. (from foetus.org)

|more…|