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Chris Andersen is a musical instrument builder who is based in Klingston, Bali, Indonesia. He invents various metal musical instruments for the Bali Steel Pan company. The instruments he builds are largely intended to play gamelan adjacent music. Some of his work can be considered Experimental Gamelan. Many of his instruments are constructed by traditional musical instrument makers in the village of Manuk, using many of the techniques used to forge gamelan instruments.
Instruments
Euphone
The Euphone is based off of the Cristal Bachet and uses a similar mechanism of glass rods that are longitudinally rubbed to resonate metal bars. In this case the mechanism is simplified by having the glass rods intersect the metal bars at the center and each bar is held over a resonating chamber similar to the ones found on most bar percussion instruments (instead of using resonator cones like the Cristal Bachet. The Euphone also takes advantage of being able to alternate between stacked resonators that are close together to make for an ergonomic array of the glass rods that allow for the instrumetn to take up significantly less room then the Cristal Bachet.
Steel Drum and Hand Pan Variants
The Bali Steel Pan company offers several unique versions of steep pans and hang drums. The majority of their instruments are made to play in a pelog or slendro scale, which is a adaptation that allows them to play classical Indonesian music.
Notes
Bali Steel Pan company website 1)
Anderson's youtube 2)
2012 interview with Anderson on his musical instruments 3)
There is a company Called Anderson Musical Instruments that is operated out of Kingston, New York which also makes Euphones. 4) This company is also one that is operated by Chris Anderson and run out of his Kingston studio. There is no official website for the company as of yet so knowing all of the instruments they make is uncertain.
There is another music instrument called the Euphone made by Frédéric Bousquet which is also based off of the Cristal Bachet. This 5) 6) 7) instrument is a variant of the Cristal Bachet with more consonant timbre ideals then the Cristal Bachet. Both of these instruments take the name Euphone from the 18th century musical theorist Ernst Chladni 8) who made a early version of the mechanism of longitudinally rubbed glass rods. This instrument is not significantly different enough yet to warrant its own page on this wiki.
