Hey, DJ – draw me a beat!

File under “kinda cool intersection of music and technology”, and tag with “more lo-fi than it initially appears”: Wired UK flags up Swedish DJ and producer Daniel Skoglund, who has developed a way of creating weird beats and noises by drawing lines with a graphite pencil.

… he draws his rhythms onto paper, which is mounted on a turntable and then read by a needle. […] Graphite conducts electricity, so changes in the conductivity of the graphite will generate different sounds — bloops, blips and whistles.

As a result, Skoglund can draw lines that a rotating arm passes over, controlling the BPM of the music by changing the speed at which the arm rotates. When he performs live, he uses three heads, but the motion of each head over the graphite wears it away after a while, resulting in a performance that changes over time. No word on what happens he’s not paying attention and the needle collides with the pencil.

You wanna hear the results? Of course you do!