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I built Number 3 in April 2008 as a more travel-friendly version of Number 1, which I built for Paulina Velazquez-Solis in San José, Costa Rica a few months prior. Similar to Number 2, a jewelry box was used for its casing, with the top of the box covering the contact points while in transit to preserve not only the instrument, but also the additional contents of my luggage. The textured artwork on the box is decoupaged newsprint, painted with varnish as a sealant. The purple tint on the top is derived from photographs of flowers from gardening magazines donated by my mother, who, among many other things, is a master gardener. Arguably, Number 3 is also the first of my instruments that standardized the usage of three oscillators and two filters as the basis of my designs – initially owing to space concerns of the mediums I was building in, though also as a way of setting a degree of technological limitations in which to work with. While I’m still a huge advocate of audio software programming in both performance and application, I find that I’m often overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite possibilities that they offer via a blank slate with which to program within. In the case of these instruments, I feel that I can circumvent this issue by building something that is more complex and unpredictable than its consumer equivalent but also works within the confines of the interface, allowing the development of innovative approaches to performance without subsequent modifications or additional code.

I played a couple shows with this box throughout 2008, first in Albany, NY, on a concert sponsored by the Albany Sonic Arts Collective, and later at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, Ca. in duo with Charity Chan before turning Number 3 over to it’s current operator, Ayako Kataoka. Featured is a performance of the Philadelphia-based band Lunch with Beardo (also refugees from NY’s Hudson River Valley), featuring Matt Luczak playing Number 3 as part of his setup.