New York label Dymaxion Groove is releasing a compilation this month celebrating music performed on experimental instruments. I Said No Doctors! features Silver Apples, Gastr Del Sol’s David Grubbs of Gastr Del Sol, Oval, Jad Fair, and many others eliciting spectacular sounds using atypical tools. Today we’re premiering Dan Deacon’s contribution to the comp, a shimmering and hyperactive piano work called “Opal Toad Segment.” The track was generated by “MIDI-triggered pin-point notes from an acoustic grand piano,” and it sounds absolutely wild, somehow serene and aggressive all at once. Listen below.

Label head Tom Tolleson explains the genesis of the comp:

I was experimenting with one of my guitars by moving the saddle closer to the neck and and putting a pickup in the tremolo cavity. It changed the tuning of the instrument but not in a way that was predictable or expected. I started looking into moveable bridge guitars to get an idea of what was happening and found this guy Yuri Landman who owns Hypercustom Guitars and makes a lot of instruments for Ichirou Agata, Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo, Micah Levi and other people. He and I talked on Skype about his instruments and I bought a moveable bridge guitar called the Caterpillar Drum Guitar and weird little electric kalimba called a Whopper (which you can hear on my track, Kosciuszko). I like Yuri’s instruments because the tuning can be very exact in some ways but also have pretty open-ended aspects to them. Instead of alternate tuning a traditional instrument, it’s better to just create something that’s out-of-tune or only in tune with itself by the way its made. I mentioned making a compilation record of artists making these kinds of instruments to Yuri and the project kind of started with that conversation.

Tracklist:

01. Silver Apples “The Mist”
02. Dan Deacon “Opal Toad Segment”
03. Tom Tolleson “Kosciuszko”
04. Jason Willett “And I Mean It”
05. Bismuth “Cola Kid”
06. Senyawa “Anak Kijang”
07. David Grubbs – “Awkward Silences I Have Known”
08. GOTHgsb – “The Interconvertible Three”
09. String Noise – “Parallel Noise Construction”
10. Jad Fair – “Big Boots”
11. Oval – “ISND”
12. Neil Feather “Ride Of The Popcorn Valkyries”
13. Slumberland – “Hunting Hunting”
14. Peter B – “Deer Biphenyl”

I Said No Doctors! is out 1/18 on Dymaxion Groove. Pre-order it here.