Sam Battle is a retro audio tech obsessive. Our writer gets a tour of his museum just as he unleashes his prized exhibit: a 1,000-oscillators-strong Megadrone!
‘I didn’t really plan to do Eurovision at all,” muses Sam Battle as he takes me round his museum, pushing a shock of ever-so-slightly mad scientist hair from his youthful face and coaxing drones out of abstract metal boxes as we go. “I was chatting to Johnny, my friend who works here, and we were saying wouldn’t it be funny to do it. So, we sent an email to the BBC asking, ‘Is there any way we can get on it?’ and they said, ‘Well this guy might be interesting …’”
Known to his fans as Look Mum No Computer, Battle has built a cult following with his wild fusions of music and esoteric technology. The persona started life as a side project when he was lead singer with the indie could-have-beens Zibra in the mid 00s. When the band split up in 2016, Battle threw himself into the world of Look Mum No Computer, filling his YouTube with videos of him rejigging everyday technology into weird and wonderful new shapes, whether that be by turning Sega Megadrives into working synths, or Henry vacuum cleaners into flame-throwers. In this world, nothing was thrown away, and any amount of lead could be transmuted into the gold of a song.
