Record­ed music his­to­ry is filled with instru­ments that appeared for a brief time, then were nev­er heard from again—relegated to the dust­bin of too-quirky, heavy, awk­ward, tonal­ly-unpleas­ant, or impos­si­ble-to-tune-and-main­tain. Then there are instruments—once they assumed their basic shape and form—that have per­sist­ed large­ly unchanged for cen­turies. The Mel­lotron falls into nei­ther of these cat­e­gories. But it may in time tran­scend them both in a strange way.

“Of all of the strange instru­ments that’ve worked the edges of pop­u­lar music,” writes Gareth Bran­wyn at Boing Boing, “the Mel­lotron is prob­a­bly the odd­est. Basi­cal­ly an upright organ cab­i­net filled the tape heads and record­ed tape strips that you trig­ger through the key­board, the Mel­lotron is like some crazy one-off con­trap­tion that caught on and actu­al­ly got man­u­fac­tured.”

First made in Eng­land in 1963, it appeared in var­i­ous mod­els through­out the sev­en­ties and eight­ies. It has reap­peared in the nineties and 2000s in improved and upgrad­ed ver­sions, all lead­ing up to what Sound on Sound called “the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed Mel­lotron ever,” the 2007 M4000. In the video above Alli­son Stout from Bell Tone Synth Works, a music shop in Philadel­phia, PA, demon­strates a much ear­li­er, far less advanced M400 from 1976.

Not only did the Mel­lotron beat the odds of remain­ing an unwork­able pro­to­type; the pro­to-sam­pler became a psy­che­del­ic sig­na­ture: from “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” to the Moody Blues and David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty.” It pop­u­lat­ed ear­ly prog rock, thanks to Yes’s Rick Wake­man, who played on Bowie’s space rock clas­sic in 1969, and to Ian McDon­ald, who fell for the instru­ment that same year as a found­ing mem­ber of King Crim­son. (See enthu­si­as­tic YouTu­ber “Doc­tor Mix” play Mel­lotron parts from well-known songs above.)

The instrument’s slight­ly cheesy, Lawrence-Welk-orches­tra-like sounds some­how fit per­fect­ly with the loose, spa­cious instru­men­ta­tion of prog and psych rock; its sound will live as long as the music of The Bea­t­les, Bowie, and every­one else who put a micro­phone in front of a Mel­lotron. Yet in most of its iter­a­tions, the Mel­lotron has lacked the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a melod­ic instru­ment that sur­vives the test of time. It is finicky and prone to fre­quent break­downs. It is lim­it­ed in its tonal range to a series of tape record­ings of a lim­it­ed num­ber of instru­ments.

In the case of the Mel­lotron M400 at the top, those instru­ments are vio­lin, flute, and cel­lo. Do the sounds com­ing from the Mel­lotron in any way improve upon or even approx­i­mate the qual­i­ties of their orig­i­nals? Of course not. Why would musi­cians choose to record with a Mel­lotron at a time when ana­logue syn­the­siz­ers were becom­ing afford­able, portable, and capa­ble of an expres­sive range of tones? The answer is sim­ple. Noth­ing else makes the weird, warm, war­bly, whirring, and entire­ly oth­er­world­ly sound of a Mel­lotron, and noth­ing ever will.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing the Mel­lotron: A Groovy 1965 Demon­stra­tion of the “Musi­cal Com­put­er” Used by The Bea­t­les, Moody Blues & Oth­er Psy­che­del­ic Pop Artists

Rick Wake­man Tells the Sto­ry of the Mel­lotron, the Odd­ball Pro­to-Syn­the­siz­er Pio­neered by the Bea­t­les

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

We here at Open Cul­ture love to see how well known and well loved songs pop up all over the globe in new and inter­est­ing forms. These cov­ers could be played on very un-rock instru­ments, or on ones we’ve nev­er heard of. We’ve seen schoolkids sing songs that their grand­par­ents loved, and we’ve heard senior cit­i­zens singing death met­al. Music unites us in trou­bling times, and we need more of it.

The above video from Play­ing for Change imag­ines a world where peo­ple from all four cor­ners of the earth play and sing a song togeth­er, and makes it real through the pow­er of tech­nol­o­gy and inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty.

It start­ed in 2005 when Mark John­son heard street musi­cian Roger Rid­ley singing Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” in San­ta Mon­i­ca. Struck by Ridley’s emo­tive voice, he returned with record­ing equip­ment and began a process of bring­ing the world to join in. John­son record­ed Grand­pa Elliott in New Orleans shar­ing a verse, Wash­board Chaz pro­vid­ing wash­board rhythm, then Clarence Bekker in Ams­ter­dam tak­ing a verse, the Twin Eagle Drum Group pro­vid­ing a Native Amer­i­can rhythm, and so on. By the end of the video, John­son had racked up fre­quent fli­er miles and stitched togeth­er a cohe­sive track.

Years lat­er, the Play­ing for Change non-prof­it has accu­mu­lat­ed an impres­sive back cat­a­log of cov­er songs and has helped fund 15 music pro­grams world­wide.

One take­away is this: the world agrees on Bob Mar­ley. Whether he’s being polit­i­cal or spir­i­tu­al, every­body seems to get it. Here’s “War” fea­tur­ing Bono. Also see “Redemp­tion Song” here:

Oth­er stars have done guest spots to bring aware­ness to the project. Bun­ny Wail­er, Manu Chao and Bush­man singing “Soul Rebel”:

Most recent­ly, they record­ed “The Weight” with Rob­bie Robert­son and Ringo Starr:

And we always enjoy this ver­sion of the Dead­’s “Rip­ple.”

The videos are heart­warm­ing, but the music stands by itself with­out the glo­be­trot­ting. For those who need a good vibe injec­tion to start 2020, start here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Music Is Tru­ly a Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage: New Research Shows That Music World­wide Has Impor­tant Com­mon­al­i­ties

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Radio­head remained rel­e­vant longer than any of their peers not only because they adapt­ed to tech­no­log­i­cal change but because they’ve just as often been a force behind it, whether musi­cal­ly or oth­er­wise. Yet when it comes to their release strate­gies, we might call them increas­ing­ly conservative–they have embraced one of the old­est tra­di­tion­al fea­tures of the inter­net: the abil­i­ty to give away free con­tent to huge num­bers of peo­ple all at once, and to archive that con­tent in freely acces­si­ble repos­i­to­ries.

At least since In Rain­bows, Radio­head has seen the inter­net as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to give away their work or sell it at a low-cost slid­ing scale, often with prof­its ben­e­fit­ting char­i­ties. Last year, when hack­ers stole demos from 1997’s OK Com­put­er, Radio­head coun­tered by releas­ing 18 hours of the mate­r­i­al free to stream or buy for a lim­it­ed time, with all pro­ceeds going to cli­mate action. Then they released every sin­gle stu­dio album, includ­ing dozens of rar­i­ties, live ses­sions, and more, on YouTube, mak­ing every­thing free to stream for any­one with the band­width.

Now, con­cerned with the integri­ty of Radio­head col­lec­tions online, they’ve gone full Inter­net Archive and start­ed a “pub­lic library” (com­plete with a print­able library card). And for any fan of the band—from the most casu­al to the most ter­mi­nal­ly dedicated—it’s an expe­ri­ence. “The band has brought near­ly the entire­ty of their cat­a­log to one place,” writes Rob Arcand at Spin, “which doesn’t con­tain ads and doesn’t use algo­rithms or obtru­sive design ges­tures that could encour­age myopic lis­ten­ing.” Dive in and you nev­er know what you’ll find.

I stum­bled upon OK Com­put­er’s “Para­noid Android” and was remind­ed of how inex­plic­a­bly weird the video is; crossed paths with 1992’s Drill, the band’s sur­pris­ing pow­er-pop-punk first EP (hear “Think­ing About You” at the top); found a recent live per­for­mance of Thom Yorke, Jon­ny Green­wood, and a drum machine—the two demon­strat­ing with elec­tric gui­tars and voice why even the band’s most abstract and fore­bod­ing songs still have at their heart the del­i­cate melodies that made up the entire­ty of their aching­ly earnest sec­ond album, The Bends.

Oth­er rar­i­ties include the King of Limbs remix EP TKOL RMX 8 (“not to be con­fused with their King of Limbs remix album TKOL RMX 1234567”) and a 2005 track titled “I Want None of This” made for war relief com­pi­la­tion Help!: A Day in the Life. The “stress” here in this archive “is on ‘Pub­lic,’” notes Daniel Kreps at Rolling Stone. “The library is free to enter and audio and video files are acces­si­ble even to those with­out pre­mi­um stream­ing ser­vices.” Each mem­ber of the band served as a “librar­i­an” for the first week of the archive’s exis­tence, curat­ing their favorite selec­tions of mate­r­i­al for post­ing on social media from Jan­u­ary 20th to the 24th.

Check out the Radio­head Pub­lic Library here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radio­head Puts Every Offi­cial Album on YouTube, Mak­ing Them All Free to Stream

The 10 Most Depress­ing Radio­head Songs Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence: Hear the Songs That Ranked High­est in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

An old musician’s joke goes “there are three kinds of drum­mers in the world—those who can count and those who can’t.” But per­haps there is an even more glob­al divide. Per­haps there are three kinds of peo­ple in the world—those who can drum and those who can’t. Per­haps, as the pro­mo­tion­al video above from GE sug­gests, drum­mers have fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent brains than the rest of us. Today we high­light the sci­en­tif­ic research into drum­mers’ brains, an expand­ing area of neu­ro­science and psy­chol­o­gy that dis­proves a host of dumb drum­mer jokes.

“Drum­mers,” writes Jor­dan Tay­lor Sloan at Mic, “can actu­al­ly be smarter than their less rhyth­mi­cal­ly-focused band­mates.” This accord­ing to the find­ings of a Swedish study (Karolin­s­ka Insti­tutet in Stock­holm) which shows “a link between intel­li­gence, good tim­ing and the part of the brain used for prob­lem-solv­ing.” As Gary Cle­land puts it in The Tele­graph, drum­mers “might actu­al­ly be nat­ur­al intel­lec­tu­als.”

Neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Eagle­man, a renais­sance researcher The New York­er calls “a man obsessed with time,” found this out in an exper­i­ment he con­duct­ed with var­i­ous pro­fes­sion­al drum­mers at Bri­an Eno’s stu­dio. It was Eno who the­o­rized that drum­mers have a unique men­tal make­up, and it turns out “Eno was right: drum­mers do have dif­fer­ent brains from the rest.” Eagle­man’s test showed “a huge sta­tis­ti­cal dif­fer­ence between the drum­mers’ tim­ing and that of test sub­jects.” Says Eagle­man, “Now we know that there is some­thing anatom­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent about them.” Their abil­i­ty to keep time gives them an intu­itive under­stand­ing of the rhyth­mic pat­terns they per­ceive all around them.

That dif­fer­ence can be annoying—like the pain of hav­ing per­fect pitch in a per­pet­u­al­ly off-key world. But drum­ming ulti­mate­ly has ther­a­peu­tic val­ue, pro­vid­ing the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal ben­e­fits col­lec­tive­ly known as “drum­mer’s high,” an endor­phin rush that can only be stim­u­lat­ed by play­ing music, not sim­ply lis­ten­ing to it. In addi­tion to increas­ing peo­ple’s pain thresh­olds, Oxford psy­chol­o­gists found, the endor­phin-filled act of drum­ming increas­es pos­i­tive emo­tions and leads peo­ple to work togeth­er in a more coop­er­a­tive fash­ion.

Clash drum­mer Top­per Head­on dis­cuss­es the ther­a­peu­tic aspect of drum­ming in a short BBC inter­view above. He also calls drum­ming a “primeval” and dis­tinct­ly, uni­ver­sal­ly human activ­i­ty. For­mer Grate­ful Dead drum­mer Mick­ey Hart and neu­ro­sci­en­tist Adam Gaz­za­ley have high hopes for the sci­ence of rhythm. Hart, who has pow­ered a light show with his brain­waves in con­certs with his own band, dis­cuss­es the “pow­er” of rhythm to move crowds and bring Alzheimer’s patients back into the present moment.

Whether we can train our­selves to think and feel like drum­mers may be debat­able. But as for whether drum­mers real­ly do think in ways non-drum­mers can’t, con­sid­er the neu­ro­science of Stew­art Copeland’s polyrhyth­mic beats, and the work of Ter­ry Bozzio (below) play­ing the largest drumk­it you’ve ever seen.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play­ing an Instru­ment Is a Great Work­out For Your Brain: New Ani­ma­tion Explains Why

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

The Neu­ro­science of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instru­ments Are Fun­da­men­tal to Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

“Through­out their career, Rush have been proud­ly anti-con­formist and anti-author­i­tar­i­an,” notes the Poly­phon­ic video on recent­ly depart­ed drum­mer and lyri­cist Neil Peart, above. “This phi­los­o­phy is clear­ly reflect­ed in many of their finest works.” Since the addi­tion of Peart in 1974 after their first, self-titled album, Rush’s phi­los­o­phy has also been unam­bigu­ous­ly Lib­er­tar­i­an.

Of course, Peart also turned Rush into the most lit­er­ary of pro­gres­sive rock bands. Steeped in fan­ta­sy, sci­ence fic­tion, and moral phi­los­o­phy, he trans­lat­ed his influ­ences into a sprawl­ing sci-fi vision all his own, and one that con­sis­tent­ly exceed­ed the sum of its parts. Yet ear­ly Rush was also very much a band that wrote earnest, epic songs about Ayn Rand’s Objec­tivism.

Peart drew heav­i­ly on her work in the first three albums he record­ed with the band, includ­ing 1975’s Fly by Night, which includ­ed the song “Anthem,” an ode to tow­er­ing cre­ative genius­es that cribs from Rand’s dystopi­an nov­el of the same name. Rush’s break­out mas­ter­work, 2112, released the fol­low­ing year, expand­ed dra­mat­i­cal­ly on the theme, as you’ll see in the Poly­phon­ic break­down of its lyrics.

The 20-minute open­ing title track tells the sto­ry of a futur­is­tic, fic­tion­al city of Megadon, a place, writes Rob Bow­man in the 40th anniver­sary edi­tion lin­er notes, “where indi­vid­u­al­ism and cre­ativ­i­ty are out­lawed with the pop­u­la­tion con­trolled by a cabal of malev­o­lent Priests who reside in the Tem­ples of Syrinx.” Based on a short sto­ry by Peart, he him­self cred­it­ed its inspi­ra­tion in the orig­i­nal lin­er notes to “the genius of Ayn Rand.”

These ref­er­ences don’t seem to make Rush fans love their career-defin­ing mid-sev­en­ties con­cept albums any less. But it has meant that a great deal of talk about Rush has for­ev­er linked Peart with this phase in his life. Asked about it in Rolling Stone almost four decades after 2112’s release, he dis­avowed a last­ing influ­ence.

Oh, no. That was 40 years ago. But it was impor­tant to me at the time in a tran­si­tion of find­ing myself and hav­ing faith that what I believed was worth­while…. On that 2112 album, again, I was in my ear­ly twen­ties. I was a kid. Now I call myself a bleed­ing heart lib­er­tar­i­an.

The change came about, he says, after he saw how lib­er­tar­i­an ideals get “twist­ed by the flaws of human­i­ty.” Peart, and Rush, how­ev­er nev­er wavered from their anti-author­i­tar­i­an cham­pi­oning of indi­vid­ual rights. And denials aside, the Ran­di­an influ­ence lin­gered, espe­cial­ly in songs like “Freewill” from 1980’s Per­ma­nent Waves:

You can choose from phan­tom fears  
And kind­ness that can kill  
I will choose a path that’s clear  
I will choose free will 

Rush’s lib­er­tar­i­an streak—both the ear­ly Objec­tivist and lat­er “bleed­ing heart” varieties—can broad­ly be called their guid­ing polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. But it should not be mis­tak­en for Peart’s sole obses­sion. His songs are full of huge themes, as well as the “thorny ques­tions” of every­day life, writes Annie Zales­ki at NPR. “Like the best song­writ­ing, Peart’s body of work was also mal­leable enough to grow with its listeners—his songs often mused about aging and the impor­tance of dream­ing.”

Some­times Rush spoke even more direct­ly to their aging fans. “The omi­nous ‘Sub­di­vi­sions’ railed against the con­formist sub­urbs that ‘have no charms to soothe the rest­less dreams of youth.’” Whether or not Rush fans them­selves have had an ear­ly Ayn Rand phase, all of them iden­ti­fy with Peart’s life­long desire to seize his own des­tiny and escape the mun­dane.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wit­ness Rush Drum­mer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by Neil Peart (RIP), John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

Free Audio: Ayn Rand’s 1938 Dystopi­an Novel­la Anthem 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.