Workshops und Konzert
22_November_2025
11-18h
Alte Feuerwache Köln

with Yuri Landman

The Home Swinger is a 12 string electric string instrument.

Yuri Landman presents a Do-It-Yourself workshop whereby participants will leave with a finished Home Swinger instrument as well as a strong understanding of its structure and workings. The difficult soldering part will be taken care of by Yuri. Participants require no special skills and the difficulty of the process has been compared to building a piece of IKEA furniture!

In advance of the workshop Yuri will prepare the component parts of the instrument for the participant to use in construction. 
These include: 4 pieces of ready shaped wood in the required sizes and predrilled with holes, easy to employ machine heads for the strings, one pickup (good quality, equal to Fender), an on/off switch, a jack output, a few screws, bolts and nuts and some metal for the bridges, as well as two sets of strings.

Interested?
Schedule: 11am-6pm (with break)
Participation Fee is 150 EUR/person which includes all material!
Please register at info@ensemble-handwerk.eu

Yuri Landman (*1973) is a musician and an inventor of musical instruments. Based on prepared guitar techniques, he built his first instrument in 2001 to solve the inaccuracy of instant preparations. He has build experimental for acts such as Sonic Youth, dEUS, Melt-Banana, Rhys Chatham, Ex-Easter Island Head, Half Japanese, Kaki King and others. 
Besides performing and inventing instruments, his main co-activity is giving instrument building courses and lectures. Since 2009 he has given over 200 DIY-instrument building workshops in Europe and the US at music festivals, music academies, art academies, concert venues and art spaces. In 2012 Yuri Landman and Bart Hopkin published Nice Noise, a book about string preparations and extended techniques for guitar. In the same year he started his band Bismuth with Arnold van de Velde as well as doing solo performances. In 2017 he was commisioned by the sound art org iii to develop the motorized sound art installation Helicopters.Institutes such as MIM (Phoenix), Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, WORM, Extrapool, Radiona, Matrix, Sonoscopia own collections of his instruments. Articles about his work have appeared in Pitchfork, The Guardian, CNN, Libération, El País, Frankfurter Algemeine, and many others.

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The Home Swinger is a 12 string ‘third bridge’-zither. The ‘third bridge’ technique is a famous sound effect developed by Glenn Branca and adopted and popularised by Sonic Youth (the effect is to a smaller degree present in a Jaguar and a Jazzmaster, the plucking behind the bridge kind of atmospherical sounds).
Artists who own a Home Swinger are Micachu, The Luyas, These Are Powers, David Holmes, A Place To Bury Strangers, Ice, Sea, Dead People, The Go!-Team, Action Beat, Jay Malhotra (Kate Nash), We vs. Death, Zoppo, Thread Pulls, Signe Tollefsen, Susies Haarlok, Kapitan Korsakov, At No Bikini Beach, Jad Fair, DAAU, Ex-Easter Island Head, Foot Village and Wu Fei.

Gefördert vom Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft sowie der Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.