Many people are finding romance online these days, and Laura Barrett is no different. What makes her ordinary love story extraordinary, however, is that she wasn't even looking for love, yet she found it in the form of a wooden box and metal tines: the kalimba.Barrett, a pianist, was searching online for an instrument that was a little handier than the ivories, "something portable, potentially a pocket synthesizer or a roll-up piano...something digital that allowed me to write music on the fly," she says. But instead of a modern gadget she stumbled across the primitive kalimba, a thumb piano modeled after an African percussion instrument.
Barrett is a member of several groups, including Hidden Cameras, but it is her solo work that makes her stand out. While her instrument of choice is not terribly rare (the thumb piano has been somewhat of a novelty in the West since the 1960s), her ability to use it as a conveyor of pop melody is exceptionally rare. Most musicians have fun breaking out the kalimba once in awhile, but no one really seems to know how to sustain music-making with it. Barrett sees this problem as a matter of perception. "It's not being treated as an instrument in its own right," she notes. "And obviously if you don't treat it like an instrument, then you're not going to develop melodies on it."
A feature I wrote for Venus Zine. Read the full article here.
