Weirdness Inc: Milk Your MIDI with El Lechero

Well, that's a really weird piece of news forwarded to me by one colleague: El Lechero. Well, for those who know nada sobre el espa?ol, "el lechero" means the milkman or the milker... and no, I won't tell you about cows and other cattle but restrain myself to the MIDI domain... even if playing El Lechero looks rather like an accordion-enforced milking session.

El Lechero is one of the weirdest midi controllers I have ever had the chance to see; the felt controller that felt really nice was cool, the continuum controller was pretty damn awesome as well, the Monome totally rocked...but El Lechero is by all means topping everything else.

First of all, it's all about wood, some metal and some plastic, all shaped like nothing you've been accustomed to seeing in the world of controllers: at a superficial and distant glance, it may look like a bandoneon or some other similar musical instrument, as it sports some 8 keys and could really fool your sight.

Nevertheless, El Lechero, has a weird dynamics as its components slide and twist and the two rotary joints allow it to change shape in a multitude of ways. These movements are generating impulses by means of pressure- and magnetic field-triggered signals that are then transmitted to a computer. Needless to say, El Lechero was completely hand-built and its creator, August Black intended to make an approach as natural as possible to the actual feeling and movements of a real instrument... and by gods, it looks like he made it!

El Lechero manages to create and send signals with a 10-bit resolution, messages which are then sent to a computer via an USB cable and is virtually interactive with pretty much any audio or video synthesis software. There is no telling whether El Lechero would find some larger-scale applications except for avant-garde artists, but as far as controllers are concerned, I must take my hat off to August Black and his wondrous contraption.

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