Look Mum, Still No Computer: Six years on with Sam Battle

Stop feeding the algorithm

Ask Sam to name his favourite project from the past six years and he doesn’t need long. “Probably the next project I’m doing.” He builds something, finishes it, mostly forgets it, and moves on. “I’m just getting on with it. I’m cracking on.”

That has always been part of the appeal. There isn’t much reverence for the finished object. A machine exists because Sam wanted to find out whether he could make it exist, and once that question is answered another is usually waiting in the sidelines. What has changed is his relationship with the machine behind the machines: YouTube. At some point he realised that dreaming up projects because they might perform well online was making the whole thing worse.

“I kept on feeling like chasing YouTube numbers by making things that were entertain like specifically made for views and stuff just would really not very fun or creative,” he says. “So, I decided to just build the things that I was most excited about really and they’re still, you know, like it’s still helping and working enough.”

Now the test is simpler. Does the idea lodge in his head? Does he catch himself thinking he really wants to make it? If so, one day it flicks like a switch and work begins. It leaves him earning a living from ideas that probably shouldn’t exist, which he knows is a rare position to be in. It is still work, and his description of doing it day after day is characteristically odd. “It’s a bit like you’re always squeezing the melon.”

The melon, at least, has become more reliable. Six years ago, equipment failure was practically part of the show; Sam once told TNT about a sequencer dying at the start of a gig in Germany and having to invent a whole new set on the spot. Now he designs proper printed circuit boards instead of building everything on strip-board, so a unit can take a drop from the top of a pile in the back of a transit van and survive. The same Behringer digital mixer has been in his rig for eight years, since the start, its onboard compressors and gates meaning he can haul the setup onto a stage and be ready in about ten minutes rather than sound-checking for ages.

Not that it has all gone sensible. The touring rig has fallen over more than once. It has ratchet straps now.

 Then he approached Eurovision the way he approaches building an enormous synthesiser: as another project. “I just gave it my all for a couple of months.”

There was one significant difference. Sam usually controls almost everything, and Eurovision has committees. Suddenly there were producers, designers, choreographers and broadcasters, far more people between an idea and its execution than he was used to. He had to learn “when to throw your toys out the pram in the creative process”. Some things he happily gave up. Hair, styling, choreography, fine, it’s Eurovision.

The pink boiler suit was the hill he was prepared to die on. “I really wanted to wear a pink boiler suit and that was actually something that they really didn’t want.” There were suggestions he might look a bit more fashionable, a bit more couture. Sam was unmoved. “I’m not a fashion couture kind of guy. Where’s a boiler suit? I’m going to Eurovision, so I want a pink one.” The irony is that anyone watching at home could reasonably have assumed a stylist had forced the eccentric synth bloke into a pink boiler suit. In reality the eccentric synth bloke had fought Eurovision for the right to wear it.

The museum of things nobody wanted anymore

Then there is the museum. This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, which Sam launched in Ramsgate in 2020, is less a shrine to expensive vintage synthesisers than a home for the things that fell between the gaps. “The fancy ones are just all over,” Sam says. You can go to proper places and play those. He is interested in the other stuff: DIY synthesisers from the 1970s and 80s, magazine-project builds like the Digisound, old computers, telephone systems, an ICL One Per Desk. Things that were once ordinary, became worthless, and survived long enough to turn fascinating again.

The Furby organ is there, the mega drone that first made his name, now suffering after years of its motors being driven harder than the toy’s designers can have intended. “It’s not the most hardy of machines,” he says. “It’s the Furby motors. Like you’re overdriving the motors and they’re just like they’re all dying.” There is a church organ, a computer museum, a telephone exchange, and enough unfamiliar switches to keep anyone with poor impulse control busy for an afternoon.

Sam himself tends not to be there during opening hours anymore. He tried it, and the constant conversations wore him out and started eating into everything else he needed to do. Friends run the open hours now, and he slips in afterwards to repair and maintain things.

So what next?

This is where questions get difficult. What comes after the current project? “I haven’t got a clue.” He is locked onto whatever sits in front of him. “Beyond tomorrow is a merely a concept.”

There are clues, though. He wants to finish a couple of builds he lost interest in during Eurovision, get back into music, and build an air-raid siren synth inspired by a set of musical sirens installed on top of a Yamaha building. His version, naturally, is destined for the roof of the museum. “It’ll be really loud and it’s going to go on the roof of the museum and it’ll annoy everybody probably.”

Six years ago, asked where all this was heading, Sam didn’t really know then either. What he did know was why he was doing it. He wanted to be able to look back and say, “yeah, fuck yeah! I really pushed it.” Since then he has built a museum, become a father, taken a homemade synth to Eurovision, fought for the right to do it in a pink boiler suit, and is now trying to perfect a water-cooled flame-throwing organ that tows behind a lawnmower. The ambition can safely be marked as ongoing.