Sam Battle Unveils 1,000-Oscillator Megadrone
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Sam Battle (aka Look Mum No Computer) has unveiled the Megadrone, a modular synthesizer linking 1,000 oscillators that takes up an entire side of his Ramsgate museum, "This Museum is (Not) Obsolete"
- Battle will represent the UK at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, having won the slot after a 12-hour BBC writing session in which he insisted on composing on his Kosmo synth — a "mini" Megadrone that arrives in six flight cases
- The BBC team told Battle the morning after the writing session that his submission "completely threw" their existing plan, catching them off-guard; Battle says he and the writers spent the second half of the session convinced the song would never be picked
- The UK Eurovision entry features a German-counting chorus ("Eins, zwei, drei") that Battle attributes to a recent tour of Germany, and is described as sitting "between angsty new wave and 80s Europop"
- Look Mum No Computer has built a YouTube audience of over 700,000 subscribers by turning obsolete technology — Sega Megadrives, Henry vacuum cleaners, Furbys — into working musical instruments
- The Megadrone requires hours to tune all 1,000 oscillators, and on a first demo only 100 fired before producing what Battle described as an "ethereal drone" that "roars out like a plane taking off to heaven"
- Battle is already sketching his next build: a pipe organ assembled from eight or more air raid sirens, intended to be mounted on the roof of his museum
Why it matters: A self-taught tinkerer who built a 700,000-subscriber YouTube channel from junked electronics — and who keeps his 1,000-oscillator Eurovision instrument in a hands-on public museum in Ramsgate — has been handed the UK's 70th Eurovision entry. The route (a cold email to the BBC, a 12-hour writing session) and the instrument's sheer scale mark a deliberate departure from the polished, label-driven acts Eurovision usually rewards.
