Friday night, a bunch of the Lair went out to see the Seattle Symphony and Chorale do Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, and 1) holy crow, what a marathon for the performers, I mean damn, and 2) that worked surprisingly well as an art form. Also, the soloists were great.

I know that soundtrack better than I realised, too – I kept picking up small differences in performance, mostly breathing points with winds. There’s a bit towards the end with tin whistle that I don’t know how you do without a breath, and my suspicion now is “you don’t, you do it in post.”

Of course, as soon as we got to Boromir at the Council of Elrond, the entire room exploded in laughter, as was inevitable. DAMN YOU INTERNETS

I also picked up this monster in the gift shop:

And posted on Twitter, “YAY! I’ve found a whole way to be annoying!” and then played bits from Lord of the Rings all the way home. But after playing around with it a while – really, it’s not so much an annoyatron. It’s more a harmonica with a keyboard. That maybe could still be super annoying, but it will, nonetheless, be musical.

Sadly, it’s not chromatic – it’s C-major only – but it’s more flexible than you’d expect, and you can get a bit of vibrato out of it. I have no idea what if anything I’ll ever do with it, but it’s a legit addition to the noisemaker collection.

George (the cat), though, really hates it. So I guess it’s still an annoyatron for some of us. Poor kitty. 😀