Other Minds is pleased to present Ratchet Attach It by the Bay Area composer, impresario, and Chief-Other-Mind Charles Amirkhanian. The work includes a rollicking miasma of drum cadences, fractured player piano rolls of manipulated Rachmaninoff, Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” and Armenian folk music, along with interludes for multiple ratchets and cowbells, tastefully crafted into an 11-movement suite sure to delight the most jaded new music ears.
Commissioned by Errollyn Wallen, the UK’s Royal Composer, for the 2021 Spitalfields Festival in London, Ratchet Attach It continues—and crowns—Amirkhanian’s career-long fascination with the noisiest of percussion instruments: the ratchet. “The sound up close of a concert orchestral ratchet can be hair-raising,” Amirkhanian writes in his composer’s notes. “Also, full of bird-chirping-like overtones. I learned this early on by accident while sitting in the enclosed cab of my Volkswagen Bug and turning the handle of this ear-splitting instrument.”
Over the course of its 27-minute duration, Amirkhanian dresses up—and dresses down—the ratchet to explore how percussive noise acts in support of, and in opposition to, the keyboard music. “The act of playing this mechanical instrument somehow relates,” says Amirkhanian, “to the mechanism of the player piano, with its constant rotating of the paper roll on which music has been encoded.” Besides percussive support from Dominic Murcott and the Trinity Laban Percussion Ensemble of London, the work also features pianolist Rex Lawson subverting piano rolls from his vast collection by performing them in unconventional ways, which then are further manipulated by Amirkhanian in the recording studio.
There’s a cartoonish quality to the latest work by Bay Area composer Charles Amirkhanian, in the best sense of the word. At times these energetic short pieces evoke Carl Stalling’s work for Looney Tunes, though Amirkhanian’s music is less about twists and turns than forward motion. His main focus is on the ratchet, a grinding, rattling instrument that evokes sound effects as much as it does music. There’s also a lot of march-style percussion—executed deftly by the Trinity Laban Percussion Ensemble of London—as well as player-piano segments that sound like a machine trying to catch up with itself. The upshot is a fun, sprightly record, like a relic of the ebullient past dragged into the breakneck present. Marc Masters, The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, January 2026
1. I – The U.S. Army Postal Unit at Blandford, Dorset, 1944, 03:04
2. II – In Praise of the Venerable Piano Roll, 02:27
3. III – Ticklish Licorice, 01:04
4. IV – Chatteratchet, 03:22
5. V – Hopper Popper, 03:24
6. VI – Exculpatorium, 01:05
7. VII – To the Riled Wrecks, 01:57
8. VIII – Dominictrix, 01:30
9. IX – Bum of the Flightlebee, 01:08
10. X – Pedestrian, 03:15
11. XI – Tyrannus Rex, 04:24
Total time: 26:45
