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Review of 'The Bellow Switch' in The Wire magazine, Aug 2009: Daniel Padden's work - in both Volcano The Bear and The One Ensemble - has always operated in an imaginary realm, creating folk music from places that never really existed. So it makes sense that this CD finds him working with Sarah Kenchington, an artist and musician who specialises in making and playing unique mechanical instruments that look and sound like lost artefacts from a magical realist history of music.
The Hurdalion Gurdalion is a pedal-powered machine that agitates banjo and double-bass strings. The Horns utilise pedals, tractor inner tubes and balloons to blow a euphonium and tenor horn. The Forkwriter is a percussion instrument made by a typewriter and forks, amplified by a drum. The Bell Tower is a 3-tiered pyramid of wine glasses that, when small balls are fed into the top, has the potential to create an infinite number of tinkling, spontaneous melodies. The Flutterbox is a large, kalimba-like musical box with a spinning drum that creates rhythmic loops - simple, repetitive figures that form the backbone to the music collected here. There are obvious echoes of Harry Partch's singular creations and Moondog's custom-built percussion, but Kenchington's inventions have a very English eccentricity, more reminiscent of Heath Robinson's implausibly rickety contraptions.
Padden's role in all of this was primarily to record Kenchington playing the instruments and then edit the results into patchwork compositions - often with a twinkling sense of mischief. On 'Unbagging The Wish Spoon', absurdly wheezing horns rudely interrupt a regimented clockwork tick-tock; on 'The Mine Shaft', sawed string drones and overtones interlock with cyclical metallic clunks like an automaton jam band. It's prevented from sounding too coldly mechanised by the addition of a few subtle touches - Kenchington providing a tickle of banjo here, a parp of trumpet there - and its surprising how much of Padden's personality comes through with the addition of his mysterious, deceptively winsome vocals to tracks like 'Tapered Things'. Another tantalising postcard from Padden's distinctive parallel universe."