Fol Chen’s cover of Sufjan Stevens “I Walk” got honorable mention on NPR All Things Considered’s end of the year list for best cover songs.

LA’s Fol Chen have teamed with legendary minimalist interface designers Monome and the Echo Park art space Machine Project to create the Tetrafol, this wooden, pyramid-shaped device that plays/manipulates sound based on how it’s moved, as demonstrated in the video above. What’s just as crazy, if not even more so, is that the song below, “Back on Kent,” was composed on this buttonless space thing. And it’s really good! They only made 100 Tetrafols and they cost a hundred bucks, but if you buy one it comes pre-loaded with the stems from “Back on Kent” and some other Fol Chen songs/sounds, plus the software is open source so you can jack in and upload your own stuff and jiggle it around like it’s god’s Yak Bak.

Download: Fol Chen, “Back on Kent”

Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2011/12/07/fol-chen-invent-an-instrument/#ixzz1fsRx4G2r

The Tetrafol Is a Crazy, Motion-Sensitive Musical Pyramid From Fol Chen

Los Angeles musical group Fol Chen has created a strange new instrument that lets listeners re-create the band’s unique sound.

The device, called a Tetrafol, is a wooden tetrahedron that can manipulate sound. Its guts sense orientation and motion and use those movements to modify the playback of sounds. Each device comes loaded with mini-compositions created by Fol Chen, but users of the Tetrafol can also upload their own sounds to manipulate.

“We spend so much time making Fol Chen’s music on a computer, so it’s quite liberating to have an object that can manipulate sound — especially pitch and speed — through movement,” said band member Julian Wass in an e-mail to Wired.com. Wass and bandmate Samuel Bing created the Tetrafol with help from instrument maker Monome and Machine Project.

Monome, which also created one of DJ Deadmau5’s favorite gadgets, designed the Tetrafol to be battery-powered and easily connected to headphones or external speakers. Its circuitry and firmware are open source and each unit is assembled by hand. Machine Project is selling a limited run of 100 of the devices for $110 each. Grab one here.

“First and foremost, we wanted to create an object that people could use to make their own music, so it had to be something that we ourselves would find fun and useful in the studio,” Bing said. “At the same time, we wanted to make a cool-looking toy that non-musicians could play with just for the pleasure of making weird sounds.”

Want a taste of what the Tetrafol can do? Check out Fol Chen’s track “So Good,” made with sounds that come preloaded on the device, below.