DIY Synth Builder Sam Battle Turns Furbies and Hoovers Into Wild Instruments

Somewhere in Ramsgate, behind a towering wall of salvaged parts and tools, Sam Battle is probably rewiring something that has no business making music. The English musician and electronics obsessive, known online as LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER, has spent the better part of a decade proving that the most compelling synthesizers aren't bought new from a dealer — they're built from whatever's lying around, including children's toys and household vacuums.

MusicRadar's Jim Ottewill revisited a 2023 feature walking through seven of Battle's most extraordinary DIY creations, a lineup that includes a Furby organ, a flamethrowing Henry hoover, and a 1,000-oscillator Megadrone. The builds range from the gleefully absurd to the genuinely impressive, but they share a common thread: Battle's conviction that older, simpler machines have something modern gear has lost.

"As technology progresses, it doesn't necessarily improve," Battle told MusicRadar. "It just has more features and functions which make it more cumbersome and tricky to use. I like older machines as they have less — they are built for purpose. You turn on an eighties computer and it does what it was built to do. You turn on a modern computer and it's just full of unnecessary rubbish."

That philosophy has been central to his output since he launched his YouTube channel in 2016 to document his builds. The channel has since accumulated over 63 million views as of January 2024. His 2018 Furby synthesiser, created by wiring the toy directly into a modular synthesizer, became one of his most-watched projects and a kind of calling card for the approach: raid the charity shop, find something broken or forgotten, make it produce voltage-controlled noise.

The Ramsgate operation has grown considerably since those early videos. In August 2021, Battle opened This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, a permanent exhibition space in Kent housing his personal builds alongside donated historical pieces, with an explicit emphasis on hands-on interaction. Visitors can get their hands on modified tape delays and modular oscillators rather than simply looking through glass. In 2022, Battle added a longer-term restoration project to the museum's program: a 1914 church organ, the dismantling and rebuilding of which he has been documenting on his channel.

Beyond the spectacle, Battle runs a legitimate hardware business. He designs and sells modular synthesizer components, including the #1222 Performance VCO, which places him firmly in the ecosystem he mines for raw material. Spitfire Audio recognised the same appeal, packaging some of his "Obsolete Machines" recordings into a free LABS plugin that brings his battered vintage sources into the sample library world.

In May 2022, Battle expanded into collaborative territory, joining fellow electronic artists Cuckoo and Hainbach to form a supergroup called Uncompressed. His solo recording career stretches back to 2019, when he released his first single "Groundhog Day" and toured Germany, Switzerland and the UK.

The MusicRadar revisit underscores how durably strange his catalogue of builds remains. A flamethrowing Henry hoover used as a musical instrument isn't something that dates easily. Neither, for that matter, is the underlying argument: that the most interesting sounds still come from machines the rest of the world threw away.