Built by Swedish musician Martin Molin, the Wintergartan Marble Machine is a music-maker unlike any we’ve ever seen. The completely handmade music system powers a bass, kick drum, vibraphone, and other instruments: And they’re all played with the motion of 2,000 marbles. Comprised of beautifully carved wooden parts, tracks, pulleys and funnels, the machine is as much a massive instrument as it is a work of art. Marble machines like this one are their own artistic genre that often fly under the radar, but Molin’s version is impossible to ignore. “The marbles, you know, they behave like water, ” Molin said in an interview with Wired. “The nature of water is that it just breaks through everything. After 100,000 years it can make a hole in stone. The marbles act like that, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing to try to tame them. They are just flooding every wall I’m putting up.” See this incredible machine and what it can do in the video below.
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