It all started with the discovery of the title track on Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ album. The song’s mirroring of the social and political changes of its period started Filipino artist Lirio Salvador on a path that would lead him to other musical discoveries such as ambient sounds, John Cage’s chance music, stochastic music, and most importantly, the assemblage art form. Assemblage, as Salvador would later realize, involves the integration of various found objects.
Salvador’s first original creation from the mid ‘80s was a saxophone-like wind instrument fitted with an array of button-activated electronic horns. As the bassist of punk band, he also started experimenting with stringed instruments. After heavily modifying a borrowed bass guitar, he built a two-stringed instrument that would be the first of the Sandata (weapon) instrument series. Sandata 1 was built around the steel tubings from bus handrails. From the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s, Salvador pieced together various parts from gutted guitars, bicycles, transistor radios, cutlery, toy walkie-talkies, toy keyboards, and other found metal objects to make other Sandata models. He’s used everything including the proverbial kitchen sink since some models have parts derived from household plumbing.
Together with his punk band Publiko, which later evolved into Intermedia, Salvador exhibited and performed his instruments. True to the spirit of circuit bending, the Sandatas don’t sound like traditional instruments. They produce distorted harmonics and randomly generated music. Some of the instruments use off the shelf electronics, so it’s still possible to tune the Sandatas to play regular music. Salvador has created over a hundred of these Sandatas which have been displayed in art galleries and sought after by collectors worldwide.
While the all-metal Sandatas continue to be popular, Salvador has plans to create new pieces which are made of wood, glass, stainless steel, and plastic. He currently performs with his band Elemento, an avant-garde electronic outfit.
(Sandata photo by Benedict M. Micu)
More Sandata photos at Elemento Music
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