Not to sound too anachronistic, but things ain't like they used to be. Peruse even the most mainstream quarterly from the turn of the century and you'll find inches of advertisements for the latest smash musical inventions, ranging from the mechanical variety to the quirky Euphonikas, Bandoneons, and other singular belches of genius. Paradoxically, despite the lexical lip-service paid to multi-culturalism, we have little to show for it. In comparison to the supposedly ideologically liberated, "post-modern" 20th century, where anything is thinkable but little new is ever realized, the ideological homogeneity of 19th century America was much more open to capitalist diversity. This was all before the Fordist revolution: through shear productive force, Ford realized he could satisfy the status conscious public's desire for luxury and technology through one cloned product. His legacy is a capitalist blast-furnace needing constant feeding, melting everything down into a "consumer monoculture" (The Baffler No. 4). It can consume even the most radical ideas and grind them down into easily digestible, wash and wear trends. Bleached of all of their ontological impact, they need only suggest diversity through radical posturing without all of the tedious theorizing.

Such funneling of consumer creativity into the socially acceptable but all too narrow channels of "commodified dissent" is strikingly apparent in the paltry selection of musical instruments in your average music store (millions of Fender owners can't be wrong). The few non-Western instruments collect dust in these shrines to the capitalist muse, fading novelties of by-gone fads, disconnected from tradition and reduced to icons of exotica. Most musicians interested in expanding current musical lexicons have to rely on finding new voicing for an old instruments. Out of desperation, many musicians have turned craftsmen and built their own intruments.

Inventiveness takes a variety of forms depending on the author's intent. Even Edison was stubbornly myopic about the potential of his Phonograph. Determined to sell it as a note taking dictaphone to American businesses, Edison took the mimetic faculty of the phonograph too literally. He was unwilling to consider the awesome impact such technological magic could have on the public. Its ability to capture time in tin-foil, supplanting the Western world's ontological investment in the veracity of the printed word, has become history. Like Edison, many musicians invent unique instruments, but fit them into an established musical form. Take cigar-box guitars, wash-tub basses, musical saws, and Adrian Rollini's introduction of novel brainstorms into jazz, like his goofus and hot fountain pen.

If re-inventing instruments to fit them into musical tradition is one side of home-made tunes, then on the other side are musiians who revamp pre-existing models to realize unique musical goals. Harry Partch's chromatic monoliths extend European, African, and Asian instruments into an array of microtones (like his Adapted Viola, Diamond Marimba, koto, and Gourd Tree). Without such a system to organize the playing of new instruments, inventors either rely on "natural" order or just explore the instrument's sound potential. Ellen Fullman, Gordon Monahan, Alvin Lucier, and others have used ultra-long strings to explore fundamental tones and overtones. Other such musicians fall under the catch-all designation "experimental," their inventions ranging from the logical simplicity of Ben Goldberg's "halfnet" (a clarinet without the middle section), Zeena Parkin's and Elodie Lauten's amplified harps to Fred Lonberg-Holm's travicello, Hans Reichel's Daxophone, and Yoshi Wada's deviant bagpipes made from plumbing fixtures. Cage's prepared piano pieces entailed only minor innovations, but they transformed the piano from a melodic to a percussive instrument.

Cage and Fluxus art-fux opened up a new but age old side of music. Musical space mixed with performance space, making it "increasingly difficult to separate the creative act from the activity of making music" (Salzman). This performance-praxis brought new spatial possibilities into music, adding much more than quirky sounds to music performance. Non-musical music events resulted, such as Fluxus music consisting solely of making a fire and Miguel Franconi's extension of piano playing by wrapping the piano in paper. Cutting music performance from its conventional moorings, new instruments stressed the importance of changing function over form. A good example is Peter Van Riper's Acoustic Metal Music made on suspended aluminum baseball bats, which is less concerned with creating an untraditional sound-logic than dramatically changing the function of common objects (like Anthony Braxton's comp 9 for a pile of coal and 4 amplified shovels). Slightly changing existing instruments' sound is not as dramatic a musical invention as the same degree of change in function. Change in function requires an ontological shift, questioning what qualifies as a musical instrument. Using sawed-off baseball bats is the same sort of inventiveness as using a washboard for percussion. The only difference is their intent: the washboard player adapted a new instrument to transmit the conventionalized language of the blues, while the experimental musician creates media to transmit individuated, unconventional (initially incomprehensible) messages.

Technology opens up even more types of invention, such as John Oswald's, our own Ed Special's, and innumerable others' magnetic tape manipulations, Christian Marclay's vinyl cut ups, Bob Ostertag's CD manipulation and Nicholas Collins' trombone-propelled CD player. Small-scale, low-tech digital manipulation has paired electronic experimenters with a new electronic generation, Theremin acolytes all. Pre digital analog synthesizer technology is a unique combination of a science and sound. Early synthesizers were bizarre waveform generators made of circuit boards and resistors. Their mad cap creators took the advances in electronics and gave them an artistic portal. Electronic music has a long history of innovation. From Raymond Scott's Electronium and the early Dada machines to Theremin's and Moogs innovations all the way up to the Aphex Twin's strange hand soldered circuitry, electronic music has always pushed the envelope. A former electronic engineering student, Richard James set out to electronically reinvent the incredibly organic sound of the Aboriginal Digeridoo by building his own sound synthesis devices. In the machine fetish genre of techno, James takes the existing givens and rewires and permutes them. By creating unique instruments James lives up to the potentials of his imagination by expanding the possiblites of his instruments. His incessant drive to expand the boundries of manufactured, pre set machines is an example of successful personal expression by reimagining his instruments. So go to it! ...build your own and throw your wrench in the Fordist machinery!!