Brooks Hubbert clutches the neck of a prickly, circular instrument that somewhat resembles an upside-down jellyfish, its tendrils represented by stiff bronze rods of various lengths.
This is a waterphone, and its distinctive music is felt as much as heard – in the hair at the back of the neck and in the gut. It’s the sound of a lurching elevator or a renegade fairground ride about to spin off its axis.
Invented and patented in 1969, the waterphone has captivated, confused, and generally creeped out audiences via film scores, orchestral works, and more than one experimental San Francisco concert over the past 45 years.
Hubbert is now carrying on Waters’ legacy, building waterphones in his backyard workshop using the same painstaking process Waters devised. Each waterphone starts with a stainless steel pan, shaped like two pie tins welded at the brim, which acts as a resonator. Out of this base just a series of bronze tonal rods and a long, thick neck with an opening at the top, where the water is poured in. Fill the pan with water, and the rods vibrate and trill with woozy harmonies when tapped with a mallet or stroked with a bow.
Just don’t turn it upside down, or the water will fall out. It fits into so many different applications because it has such a wide range of tones. There are all kinds of playing techniques that have yet to even be discovered.
Waters’ path to invention began in grad school in the mid-1960s at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, where he first played an instrument he described as a Tibetan water drum – a round bronze tub, filled with water, that rocked when struck. Later, dabbling in the local hippie scene, he heard the music of a kalimba in a Haight-Ashbury parade.
Waters and Charlton, both drawn to experimental music, formed the Gravity Adjusters Expansion Band in 1969 and began showcasing Waters’ sonic inventions around the Bay Area. Other percussionists took notice. When drummer Shelly Manne flew up from Los Angeles and asked to buy a waterphone, Charlton knew his bandmate was onto something big. Waters soon drove a vanload of his instruments to L.A. and sold them all in one week.
Think of those skin-bristling scenes where a protagonist wanders into a dark house alone – the audio accompaniment is often a waterphone, which Hubbert discovered while browsing music news on the Web in the late 1990s.