I encourage those who have enjoyed the efforts of Wintergatan to also check out the bandleader’s previous effort: Detektivbyrån. It’s a rare glimpse into Swedish street music and really captures a beautiful Göteborg vibe. It’s a nice Scandinavian minimalist approach to music that I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of.
For further Nordic minimalism I also recommend the band Múm from Iceland, specifically the album Finally We Are No One. This album features the beautifully calming lyricist Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, who was a former wife of David Portner, who some in America might know as Avery Tare of the band Animal Collective. She is featured on their 2005 album “Feels” singing and playing a deliberately off-key piano with some really interesting and very flower-child-in-the-fields melodies such as on the track “Did You See The Words”.
For more related music, check out Anders Flanderz. He is a brother of Martin Molin (in Wintergatan, building the Marble Machines) and was a member of Detektivbyrån. There are many videos of him busking as a one man band on YouTube.
Hey, got to say say that I am a big fan of your music as well.
Seen you live outside Volvo and at big festivals. Random Friday eat all are excellent for unwinding and reflecting as the darkness comes.
I feel there’s something particularly Scandinavian to the style of you and Carbon Based Lifeforms as well, but in a very different way to Wintergatan’s urban vibes of course... Makes me think of misty fern forests, the barren broken-up landscapes in the north and something mysterious in the twilight.
Have not heard about the others you mentioned though, will definitely check out!
In my opinion Kria's best work is on Pullhair Rubeye, the album she did together with Dave. Unfortunately they chose to release the album completely reversed, so you'll have to find a fixed version on YouTube.
I heartily recommend the YouTube series for the Marble Machine X. It's a wonderful journey, and anyone who has had a dream it idea, started building, needed skills, tools, redesigns, etc will empathise. Marten's is incredibly talented, and has formed a great team too.
the logic required to make the redstone timing on a machine that large precise enough to control a falling block is insane, to get 99%+ of the blocks like in the video makes this look so much easier than it is.
For those not aware, unlike CPU design where a wire is a wire, in MC, pulses can travel for only 15 blocks before needing a repeater, which necessarily adds a delay.
I'm not sure whether any are used here but there are actually ways to build zero-tick repeaters - they're just larger multi block configurations instead of being a single item.
I downloaded the world to check -- the system does use zero-tick repeaters (dust cut type, I think) for a pause functionality, but for the channels, it actually reads slightly faster than the music plays to compensate for delays as the data gets further out.
That's the marble machine X, the marble machine was the first iteration and was built and performed in a video a few years ago. It was unreliable and couldn't be disassembled to perform with outside of a studio hence the new project.
The 14 left-right powered rail tracks are the music channels. Each vertical slice is a tick of music, and they are grouped into 9, the max length of a powered rail signal. The presence of an observer block underneath the rail indicates a note.
The whole machine appears to be 128 x 14 bits. It has a serial read interface.
In more detail:
From the bottom of the image to the top you see:
- A row of redstone blocks, pistons, and redstone wire.
- A row of repeaters facing north
- A row of repeaters facing west
- An observer facing north
- 14 east-west powered rail/observer wires, sending signals to the east.
- In a layer underneath the east-west observer-rail wires, alternating columns of rails and redstone wire facing north-south. (Not visible in the picture)
- (A mirror image of the bottom)
The west facing repeaters control the current read location. The machine sends a signal until they all turn on, then waits until they all turn off, then turns them on again, etc. When one of the repeaters toggles between on and off, the north-facing observer above it sends a pulse. The pulse travels upwards in the north-south rail (in the invisible lower layer), and then if an observer is present, the signal is sent east along the east-west line for the channel.
The bottom two rows form a pause mechanism. The redstone block, piston, redstone wire row is an instant repeater line. When the north-facing repeaters are turned on, they will lock the west-facing repeaters in whatever state they are in. Using instant wire ensures the pause will happen immediately.
The whole system is mirrored at the top since the north-south rails in the lower layer can only send a signal up to 9 blocks. With read signals coming from both sides, this design could support up to 18 channels.
One last detail -- one column of music is read every 2 redstone ticks, so most of the repeaters are set to a 2 tick delay. However, the signal for a channel must be repeated using an observer every 9 blocks (adding a 1 tick delay), so the first repeater in each 9 block section is set to 1 tick. This compensates for the delay.
EDIT: I originally stated that there were 14 channels, but I overlooked that it's double-layered, and that there's a similar quad-layered system on the other side. There are 50 channels in total.
Thank you, that was a fantastically detailed explanation! I didn’t realise that there was a world download in the video description, thanks for pointing that out!
Minecraft's in-game mechanics for building are surprisingly intuitive and easy to use. Coupled with flying in creative and unlimited inventory, making even relatively complex redstone contraptions isn't too difficult, though it can get a bit tricky with blocks that need a certain orientation, but also need to go in constrained places.
The built in commands technically let you copy and paste, but they're cumbersome to use. Most creators (myself included) that do larger builds will use some kind of utility to copy/paste easily, and perform basic operations like rotations. It's been a while since I did a large build, but the gold standard for a while was a mod called WorldEdit, which let you do all of these things in-game with a lightly modded server, and an otherwise vanilla client. There are a handful of similar tools too, one of the cooler ones I've seen recently is this crazy thing SethBling built using command blocks and a vanilla datapack, no mods required:
I believe so, yes. You can use creative mode, and create a ‘superflat’-type world (see https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Superflat). And in Creative mode, you can give yourself an unlimited number of pretty much anything.
But indeed, it was probably put together by hand. The creator might have sketched out or planned things in advance, but it would likely have been built by hand.
The nice thing is, the design seemed pretty modular: A column of gravel, note blocks with a tripwire, and the different launchers to recycle the gravel. Test it with one column, then duplicate. I expect the hardest part would’ve been building the ‘ROM’ containing the song.
Of course, you can also get Minecraft, download the world (link is in the video), and explore! Or you can find a third-party map editor/viewer. But that’s the best part, it’s all there to see!
There is an item called a structure block that consists of a 2d array of block types and their relative positions. Once you've defined a structure block in-game you can place copies of it into the world. That can really help with some of these larger projects to have some boilerplate.
Additionally, there are some really interesting ways to build minecraft content with various programming languages. I'm aware of a Python[1] Library, a mod that provides in-game Lua scripting[2], and even a Clojure library used with Overtone/Supercollider[3] - be sure to check out that video for some incredible live-coded music with generated visuals.
There's a crazy VR Steampunk mash-up of a build-your-own synth and marble machine that I'd love to see people do something elaborate with: https://store.steampowered.com/app/673970/MuX/
For further Nordic minimalism I also recommend the band Múm from Iceland, specifically the album Finally We Are No One. This album features the beautifully calming lyricist Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, who was a former wife of David Portner, who some in America might know as Avery Tare of the band Animal Collective. She is featured on their 2005 album “Feels” singing and playing a deliberately off-key piano with some really interesting and very flower-child-in-the-fields melodies such as on the track “Did You See The Words”.