For our SoundClips series, listener Graig Markel demonstrates the late, great musical instrument called the "optigan." Happier memories now, this one that humans can do wonderful things as well as ...

This week's show features documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher (Room 237) presenting an excerpt of an unreleased early film, called The Collectors. The excerpt centers on Pea Hicks, a collector of an ...

We unearth a pseudo-sampler from the 1970's, made by Mattel, which yields the type of low-fi idiosyncratic sound that many musicians seek out. By Roland Denning. Rather more obscure than the Mellotron ...

The Optigan and Orchestron were a pair of electronic organs built by Mattel in the 1970s which used swappable optical discs to store instrument information. The discs can still be found today, but the ...

[Olli] sent in his writeup of a musical instrument he made called the Black Deck. [Olli]’s instrument was inspired [Jimi Tenor]’s photophone – a transparent disk attached to a fan and photocell. A ...

“The Optigan was a kind of home organ made by the Optigan Corporation, a subsidiary of Mattel, in the early '70s,” says Pea Hicks of the obscure instrument around which his band Optiganally Yours ...