If you caught The Orb on tour recently, you might have noticed a band member moving in front of a box-and-aerial arrangement to produce daft, badly tuned radio noises. What he was playing was a crude version of the theremin, source of the otherworldly voice from a hundred '50s and '60s sci-fi soundtracks (notably Star Trek, The Forbidden Planet,and The Day the Earth Stood Still) and currently one of the hottest pieces of retro musical gear around. Terrorvision has one, Portishead bought one (but faked the sound on the opening track of Dummy) and now, with the arrival of the Longwave's Pocket Theremin, you can have one, too.
Leon Theremin's original design, invented in the 1920s when he worked as a radio operator in Russia, was as big as a desk and featured two antennae. Leon had discovered that the frequency of a particular circuit could be altered depending on the capacitance of the air between his hand and a vertical antenna. The second horizontal antenna employed similar principles to affect amplitude, or volume.
Longwave Instruments' US$125 box, by comparison, has one antenna to control pitch, a small built-in speaker, an on-off switch, volume control, a single audio output, pitch-trim control for setting the output range, and little else. There's no volume antenna: you'll have to make do with a volume pedal instead - the sort guitarists use - but at least you can carry the Pocket Theremin in your coat.
It's almost impossible to play anything other than an unpredictable, eerie wail. However, if you run an audio cable from it into a studio effects box such as a reverb or a delay line, you can create your own convincing B-movie atmospherics. It's just begging to be sampled and used in a music track.
Pocket Theremin: US$125. Longwave Instruments US: +1 (408) 374 6439, email fringex@aol.com
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