Surrender to the mechanical marvels of the world’s most intricate music box

Since 2014, the experimental Swedish band Wintergatan has gained a robust online following by chronicling their efforts to assemble mindbogglingly intricate music boxes powered entirely by hand. In this video, Wintergatan’s Martin Molin unveils the band’s most ambitious creation yet: a series of gears, ratchets and pistons, centred around a marble-deploying conveyer belt that they’ve dubbed ‘Marble Machine X’. Like the Strandbeest sculpture project and popular Primitive Technology YouTube series, Wintergatan’s project delights in what can be achieved with human hands, and without the aid of AI, CGI, Auto-Tune or any other kind of digital enhancement. As with most handcrafted creations, there’s also charm in some of the machine’s slight imperfections, for example an airborne marble only barely missing its mark from time to time. Oh – and it doesn’t hurt that the machine’s haunting melodies are pretty great, too.

Via Open Culture